Category Archives: Taxation

O Promises Usual Marxist Maneuvers

“I’m really looking forward to hearing a speech by someone who is involved in innovation, knows America’s place in the world market and has fiscal responsibility. And I hope that Obama is listening very carefully when Steve Jobs speaks tomorrow.”

That was magician Penn Jillette on the eve of Barack Obama’s first, much-anticipated State of the Union Address. Tomorrow is his sixth State of the Union address. Like those that came before, it’ll be written at an eighth-grade level, “as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test,” and showcase the man’s utter economic illiteracy.

This year, like yesteryear, Zero is treating us to a Marxist maneuver: promising to move money around, from those who make it to those who take it.

” … during Tuesday’s State of the Union address, [Obama] will call for raising the capital gains rate on top income earners and eliminating a tax break on inheritances. The revenue generated by those changes would fund new tax credits and other cost-saving measures for middle-class taxpayers, officials said.” (Business Insider)

I’m copying from a 2010 column mocking this moron for his obfuscations with respect to tax cuts vs. tax credits.

Obama’s “tax credits” are not tax cuts. Ask Wikipedia, the left-leaning online encyclopedia, according to which tax credits are “subsidies disguised as tax cuts. In other words, they are spending in the form of direct transfers from the treasury to individuals, except that they are administered by the tax authorities rather than the agencies usually responsible for welfare.”
A better definition of tax credits is social tinkering or engineering, as they target certain politically desirable constituents to the detriment of others. “Taxpayers can receive a raft of tax credits if they engage in various government-specified activities,” confirms Peter Ferrara, director of entitlement and budget policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation.

Then there is the “Stalinesque extravaganza” that ought to offend “anyone of a republican (small ‘r’) sensibility,” which is how John Derbyshire described the annual State of the Union address. “American politics frequently throws up disgusting spectacles. It throws up one most years in January: the State of the Union speech,” writes Derbyshire in “We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism,” in which John goes on to detail how “the great man” is announced, how he makes an entrance; the way “the legislators jostle to catch his eye” and receive his favor. (MORE: “Barry Soetoro Frankenstein: Spawn of the State.”)

The Civil Disobedience Ruse

Founding Fathers, Law, libertarianism, Morality, Natural Law, Regulation, Taxation

Despite polite efforts to resist, I was pulled, last week, into a most unpleasant, unscholarly, uncivilized, almost Kafkaesque exchange, in the wake of the publication of “Eric Garner: 100% Innocent under Libertarian Law.” Polite disagreement is second nature when one has been writing controversially and stridently for close on 20 years. However, one is also obliged to swat down any attempts on the part of an interlocutor to score points by sleight-of-hand—by obfuscation. Suffice it to say that ego-bound writing is a bad thing. When the mere prospect of being perceived as wrong is so devastating to a writer; when he becomes maniacal when challenged, digs in and digs up any and all justification for his position, however tangential—that writing ceases to edify.

Another shock to the system was realizing just how difficult the libertarian law is for most mortals to grasp. They say we libertarians make up only 10 percent of the politically conscious public. No wonder. Some of my smartest readers were bullied into believing that to not submit to the sovereign is to undermine some sacred trust or covenant.

So confused were these readers over “Eric Garner: 100% Innocent under Libertarian Law,” that they took off after the pied piper, muttering mad incantations about the understandable death by “civil disobedience” of Mr. Garner.

“Among other things,” wrote one such reader, “there are no real libertarian states and ‘common property’ exists. Thus, while I might have the right to urinate on my driveway, I do not have the right to urinate on (government-owned) Broadway and the cops can arrest me, etc.”

The issue with taxes is also problematic – one who ignores taxes is engaging in civil disobedience and suffers the consequences (this does not make the taxes good but it is not surprising for governments to enforce their own rules). I certainly would applaud those who resist truly immoral laws (like ordering someone to commit torture) but I am leery to suggest massive civil disobedience of petty regulations which may, in fact, just give rise to more oppressive government to “restore law and order”.

Eric Garner did not urinate on public property. Neither did he expose himself to kids. He waved his hands and walked away. Woe is me! As to the comment about “taxation”: yet another WTF moment. Possessing a few loose cigarettes is not a tax offense. Besides, since when do my readers stand up for the “civilizing” influence of the tax collector; a thief by any other name?

Indeed, a few of my readers took off after the rat catcher, wagging fingers at the poor sod who dared to own and dispose of some loose smokes—-committing “massive civil disobedience”—and lived to tell the tale. Scrap that. Civilization is safe. Garner did not live to tell the tale.

Some good news. The natural law has prevailed among the people:

Americans by nearly 3-1 say the white police officer responsible for the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man being arrested for selling cigarettes, should have faced charges from a Staten Island grand jury, a nationwide USA TODAY/Pew Research Center poll finds.

Who was it who counseled that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”?

UPDATED: Eric Garner, RIP: This is What Murder-By-Cop Looks Like (WRONG Decision)

Criminal Injustice, Law, Natural Law, Regulation, Taxation, The State

I will be appalled—so should you—if a grand jury decides against indicting the NYPD officers who murdered Eric Garner. A decision is nearing in the case of the New York entrepreneur who was doing nothing naturally illicit when he was tackled and placed in the chokehold that killed him.

The city medical examiner has ruled the death of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old father whose death in police custody sparked national outrage, a homicide, saying a chokehold killed him.
The medical examiner said compression of the neck and chest, along with Garner’s positioning on the ground while being restrained by police during the July 17 stop on Staten Island, caused his death.

William Norman Grigg documented and deconstructed the murder by cop of Mr. Garner, chocked to death by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, for being entrepreneurial; trading untaxed cigarettes in defiance of the state’s “slave patrol” and “Comrade” Andrew Cuomo’s “Cigarette Strike Force.” As always, Grigg gets to the nub of the issue, and beautifully so:

“Every time you see me, you want to mess with me! I’m tired of it! It stops today!”

Eric Garner, a peaceful and productive citizen, had suffered years of pointless and unnecessary harassment by the costumed predators employed by the NYPD. He told one of them to leave him alone. Such impudence by a mere Mundane cannot be tolerated, so Garner was murdered in the street in full public view.

Several plainclothes officers were prowling Garner’s Staten Island neighborhood on the afternoon of July 17 seeking to harvest revenue by catching harmless people in the act of committing petty infractions. Police Commissioner William Bratton describes this as “stamping out petty offenses as a way of heading off larger ones.” in practice, this means authorizing police to commit actual crimes in their efforts to turn harmless people into “offenders.” …

The first fatal mistake Garner made was to act as a peacemaker. The second was to assert his self-ownership in the face of someone employed by the contemporary equivalent of a slave patrol. Within minutes, five police officers attacked him, one of them slipping behind him to apply an illegal chokehold. Garner died of cardiac arrest after being swarmed and suffocated in front of numerous horrified witnesses, one of whom captured the entire event – from first confrontation to homicide – on camera. …

“Eric Garner’s exasperated proclamation ‘It stops today!’ is cognate with ‘Don’t tread on me,’ and his murder by an army of occupation immeasurably more vicious and corrupt than the Redcoats could precipitate a long-overdue rebellion against the omnivorous elite that army serves. …”

UPDATE (12/3): WRONG Decision.

Manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide: Those are the counts that ought to have been easily authorized by a jury empaneled to decide if to indict the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, who was responsible for Eric Garner’s death and oblivious to his helpless pleas for air.

Watch how the cops panic when they realize they’ve killed this poor, innocent (in natural law) man. Watch how they begin ordering observes to leave, so that no witnesses to the REAL crime remain. And observe the absence of any attempt to resuscitate Mr. Garner.

Obamacare: No-Fault Fraud

Healthcare, Law, Republicans, Taxation

Not a peep has the new class of Republican congressmen and senators uttered about the open admission of fraud made by Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare.

Proudly and bombastically Grubber touted the charade in which he partook in swindling “stupid” Americans:

… this bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes the bill dies. Okay, so it was written to do that. …. if you had a law that made explicit that healthy people would pay in and sick people would get money, it would not have passed. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever but basically that was really really critical to get this thing to pass… I wish we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this [Obamacare] law than not.

The legal elements of fraud are present:

(1) a false statement of a material fact,(2) knowledge on the part of the defendant that the statement is untrue, (3) intent on the part of the defendant to deceive the alleged victim, (4) justifiable reliance by the alleged victim on the statement, and (5) injury to the alleged victim as a result.

You’d think Republicans would pivot into repeal mode right away. Since when is a supposedly sovereign people compelled to suffer under a law they reject?