October 20, 2010
Social Justice and Fair Taxes
By Bruce Walker
There is no justice in social justice. The Duke
Lacrosse Team was convicted in the court of social justice even though
they were innocent and their black female accuser was guilty. Nazis
worshiped social justice. In the name of social justice, Nazis persecuted
"capitalist" Jews. The Ku Klux Klan wanted "social
justice." Although blacks were the Klan's most conspicuous victims,
bankers, Republicans, Catholics, and -- again -- Jews were high on the
list, too, and the Klan was founded to protect the weak and
defenseless...all in the name of social justice. Father Coughlin, the
notorious anti-Semite and a victim of Klan violence himself, warned about
the wickedness of the rich in his book, A Series of Lectures on Social
Justice.
Fairness is the mystic mantra of the left, and so when President Obama
responds to extending the Bush tax cuts, he conjures the spirit of
fairness. It is hard to argue against the vague, sweet whisper of
fairness. Leftists, in tax policy, read fairness only one way: those who
earn more pay more. That certainly redistributes wealth from the more
productive to the least productive members of society, but is it fair?
Fairness, like justice, must transcend democratic majorities, but the
fairness proclaimed by the left with its progressive income tax rates is
like the social justice.
The snarling face of social justice lies behind the mask of fair taxes.
Why should those who earn more pay higher taxes than the rest of us? Do
we have some moral claim upon the wealth they create? It is just the
opposite: they who produce more have a claim on the rest of us, who
consume more than we produce. The titans of industry a century ago --
Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and the rest -- turned out cheap and
high-quality products which were a principal reason for our rise as a
great nation. Their personal wealth represented a miniscule part of the
national wealth they created.
Men like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and others
lived more to create scientific and technological breakthroughs than to
earn money. Indeed, for many of these men, money was simply a tool to
allow them to do more good. The same is true today. Microsoft, FedEx, and
Wal-Mart created wealth that we consume. These creators, in the equations
of economic advantage, owe us nothing at all. We, instead, owe them much.
The left's love of social justice does not rest even on the hoary, dull
tomes of Marxism. Producers, not consumers, are the exploited in Marxist
mythology, and huge chunks of American consumers -- the ones crying for
fair taxes -- produce almost nothing.
Most great givers ask almost nothing in return. Mozart and Beethoven
received microscopic monetary returns compared to the vast cultural
wealth their compositions created. Twain and Orwell gave us incomparably
more than the meager royalties from their writings. What is real
injustice? Alexander Fleming received little for his quiet work -- the
discovery of penicillin. Upper-level bureaucrats or education
administrators earn, on the taxpayers' backs, more in a year than Fleming
acquired in his lifetime for the life-saving antibiotic.
The fair taxes demanded by the left also ignore the uncomfortable truth
that the rich receive less from government than most of us. When the rich
send children to private schools, public schools need less money from
taxpayers. Wealthy Americans who live in gated communities need less
police protection than other Americans. The rich do not need Medicaid,
public housing, or welfare. Those who produce little or nothing and who
pay almost no taxes gobble up huge amounts of taxpayer-funded services.
Our noble instinct for charity governs part of this help for the poor,
and charity is a modest, real virtue. But coerced government transfers of
wealth are not charity at all. When the serpent slithers into the
picture, then the gratitude toward charity felt by the poor morphs into
the venomous predator of social justice. Gentle requests for help, so
easily touching the hearts of most Americans, become jack-booted demands
for "my fair share" when the exploitation of the few by the
many becomes a system of prerogative and not of pity.
We should throw a huge caveat on all this dithering about economic
fairness: money, like politics, ought to be a small part of our lives.
Conservatives know that. It is the leftist misinterpretation of life
which paints us all as economic creatures and which considers all things
in life, essentially, political. The lust for money, like the lust for
political power, ought to be restrained by vastly greater values like
truth, love, art, family, and faith.
The jihad for fairness can be seen in its hideousness when we consider
that fairness of the sort envisioned by the nightmare of social justice
would require that the beautiful young woman be scarred or her beauty
loaned in rapine to unappealing (and so "disadvantaged" men).
Iron fairness demands that gifted students and gifted athletes be given
fewer opportunities than the duller brains or slower bodies of the less
blessed of us. Indeed, "fair taxes," like every other evil
incarnation of social justice, require brutal war against the creator of
our differences, our Creator. Our private, selfish notions of
"justice" thrive only in the Hell which we create by banishing
God.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/social_justice_and_fair_taxes_1.html
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