Aside from how it doesn't work, the government works for us. Your dully faceless ruler cleverly ends up taking less by trying to take more in a reaffirming display of how nobody reacts positively to having their stuff taken. Passively accumulating the fortunes of others is the specialty of America's inspirational leaders. They merely want to show us how to worry less about money and focus on what's really important, like sunsets and soap bubbles.
Don't worry: those who take from you to help you will never have to stop splurging. Still, pity your neighbors who feel relief that the government won't default even if the Treasury Department discovers where its ceiling is. Thanks to the capital frittering what Americans earn, the accounting problem is about to collide with the human one.
More revenue will remain a PG-13 fantasy unless we get the economy revving, which isn't going to happen because incumbents are fixated upon getting more revenue. We definitely know whether the chicken or egg came first, and Washington wants to feed us eggshell omelets.
We shouldn't want the cash, anyway. It's apparently easy to forget that every dollar the government spends once belonged or will belong to a person, and fellow citizens should learn to be thankful for what they have instead of all this greedy sharing. A mature nation ought to gracefully say we've had enough of third parties spending astronomical funds taken from second parties. That's unless we've officially given up on the notion of being in charge of ourselves, in which case we should make sure Washington is Red Cross-certified as a babysitter.
Even those who think the wealthy are nasty bastards that ought to kindly buy stuff for the rest of us should recognize the practical consequence of their legal larceny. Deescalating the rate of take-home pay as salaries increase is not just going to lead to less working or anything. We could buy more dumb stuff if only the loathed two percent was allowed to excel. And yet Barack Obama remains opposed to the flat tax.
It's hard to negotiate over the sound of the other partisans shrieking about starving children and punched grandmas. Try making a dent in a $16.4 trillion deficit considering how any cut embodies devilishness. Those who were fine before federal programs can't live without them the moment after they're enacted. Political theorists who see the setup in Pete Townshend's Lifehouse as an inspiration are actually striving for stasis. And we end up in a teenage wasteland.
Aside from the enervating effect of replacing ingenuity with mandates, our present federal slackerdom is damaging in practical terms, too. Many destitute Americans wouldn't need assistance if the government wasn't so busy taking money for… assistance. But at least there's no escape. The self-fulfilling cycle is the contemporary version of efficiency.
Liberal policies aren't fixing our world, perhaps because liberal policies broke our world. They can't ascertain why the economy still sucks when we're spending so much. There might just be a correlation, but we better ask scientists to make sure. Let's just make sure they're not the same ones who fibbed about global warming being on the verge of consuming Mother Gaia so they could get more federal money, as I don't feel they're trustworthy.
Centralizers of authority can't be happy because that's who they are. Even worse for them, they are coping with the realization that their goals are best met by pursuing the policies of their enemies. They of all people should respect collective economics. They're sort-of half-right: individual liberty enables group prosperity, although it requires each person to work hard and retain the results. On the contrary, trickle-down taxation passes along costs to everyone else. At least people don't have the money to buy what's unavailable.
The government won't get more funding for its habit by panhandling more aggressively. Attempting to commandeer the role of making every resident's life's decisions is proof itself that Washington shouldn't be making them. You may just have noticed that your leaders have totally rogered the economy, which, whoops, leads to less money for the government to helpfully squander.
If you're acting more lethargically to avoid the IRS chomping more income, then you're just very unpatriotic. The harm brought to the economy is your fault, and not those who cleverly concluded that taking a bigger cut wouldn't affect the pie's size. The only way out is more spending, obviously. We better punish the rich more.
Anthony Bialy is a writer and “Red Eye” conservative in New York City. Follow him at http://twitter.com/AnthonyBialy. Download a free ebook of his 2012 columns at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/270599.
