Dear Reader (including those of you starting to complain about this parenthetical gimmick),
I’m writing this in the lobby of the W Hotel in Minneapolis. Like most W hotels, the lounge area looks like it should be filled with platinum-blonde floozies snorting lines of coke off the glass-top tables while stoic Russian arms dealers ignore them so they can better hear the caller on their cell phone telling them that Jack Bauer intercepted the cargo. Like most W hotels, it’s actually filled with awkward traveling businessmen trying to figure out how to get Best Buy to carry more of their toner cartridges and beleaguered housewives trying to keep their kids from climbing all over the oddly tasseled, gothic furniture. Of course, the fact that I’m writing this at 8:30 in the morning probably has something to do with the lack of floozies and Russian mobsters, but you get the point.
Taxes, Taxes, Taxes
So I wrote this piece on taxes and tyranny for USA Today this week. In the course of researching the column, I went back and looked at newspaper coverage of the income-tax debates in the late 19th century and again around the time of the 13th amendment’s passage. It was a really interesting exercise for a bunch of reasons, even if I didn’t end up using that stuff. For starters, it was neat to discover that the Washington Post considered the income tax an “odious measure” in 1894. I was also intriguing to discover that, at least according to some foes of the income tax, it was in part an attempt by the South to shake down the North. Here’s what Senator Smith (oddly, the Post doesn’t say what Smith’s first name or his state was in the article, and I don’t have time to look it up because I’m heading to a plane) said on the Senate floor in 1894:
The income tax is especially unjust, because, as openly confessed by the Southern members of Congress, and it is upon this ground that they favor it, nearly the whole burden will fall upon the Northern States, while those that were in rebellion will escape its provisions. In thus combining to unjustly tax the North the Southern Congressmen are at least consistent with their traditions and prejudices. Their allies from the North are demagogues, pure and simple, in that they affect to protect the common people by a wickedly oppressive measure directed against another class of citizens. Such hypocrisy is rarely rewarded by temporary benefit even, and in this case the disguise is too transparent to deceive any but fools, or meet the approval of any but knaves.
More interesting, however, was how one of the major arguments against the income tax at the time was its grotesque violation of privacy. You still hear criticism about the “intrusiveness” of the tax code, but that usually has an economic connotation to it, as if the only problem is the inefficient burden of compliance and not the violation itself.
The other week, I wrote in the G-File and in my column about how overblown the hysteria over the Patriot Act was. The ACLU and all of the other usual suspects insisted that “sneak-and-peak” warrants were an unholy invasion of our privacy, even though the FBI needed a FISA court warrant to conduct them. Meanwhile, every American who files an income-tax return, or at least those who itemize, must account for their travel, their purchases, their place of work, most of their habits, and so on, and nobody thinks anything of it.
I’m not going to bust out the slippery-slope or boiling-frog metaphors (though, for the record, the boil-the-frog-slowly story isn’t true). But this is really a profound point (“If you do say so yourself . . .” – The Couch). When the income tax was first introduced, it applied to only a tiny fraction of Americans. Today, the share of Americans paying income taxes is still small in percentage terms, but in absolute numbers it’s huge. I could look it up, but I have to keep typing. Take my word for it.
So, imagine that for the last 200 years we’d been paying for government some other way — a sales tax or a super-property tax or some vast Gulag Archipelago of Abu Ghraibs where we forced Leprachauns to give us their gold — and then along came a politician proposing that millions of Americans should have to open up their lives to the income tax. There would be a huge outcry. But we’ve grown acclimated to these petty intrusions.
It makes me read this passage from Mark Steyn with increasing dread:
Every time I retail the latest indignity imposed upon the “citizen” by some or other Continental apparatchik, I receive e-mails from the heartland pointing out, with much reference to the Second Amendment, that it couldn’t happen here because Americans aren’t Euro-weenies. But nor were Euro-weenies once upon a time. Hayek’s greatest insight in The Road to Serfdom is psychological: “There is one aspect of the change in moral values brought about by the advance of collectivism which at the present time provides special food for thought,” he wrote with an immigrant’s eye on the Britain of 1944. “It is that the virtues which are held less and less in esteem and which consequently become rarer are precisely those on which the British people justly prided themselves and in which they were generally agreed to excel. The virtues possessed by Anglo-Saxons in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch, were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, noninterference with one’s neighbor and tolerance of the different and queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority.”
Two-thirds of a century on, almost every item on the list has been abandoned, from “independence and self-reliance” (40 percent of people receive state handouts) to “a healthy suspicion of power and authority” – the reflex response now to almost any passing inconvenience is to demand the government “do something,” the cost to individual liberty be damned. American exceptionalism would have to be awfully exceptional to suffer a similar expansion of government and not witness, in enough of the populace, the same descent into dependency and fatalism. As Europe demonstrates, a determined state can change the character of a people in the space of a generation or two. Look at what the Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population: That’s what happened in Britain.
Why I’m Not a Politician, Part 576,992,004
I suspect I could do better than either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama when it comes to explaining my limited sports knowledge. I did actually follow baseball and football in my youth and can plausibly name my favorite players from my favorite teams (I still remember exactly where I was when Thurman Munson died). The thing is, because I’m not a people-pleasing politician, I don’t have to fake it. Barack Obama has no such luxury.
TV Update
So I started the pilot of Caprica and was immediately underwhelmed, but I’ll finish the show and watch a couple others because readers keep asking me to. Still, starting out with a virtual-reality, holodeck-y kind of theme was not encouraging.
Meanwhile, I’m a couple episodes into season three of Breaking Bad and I love it as much as ever. There are few shows with such deliberately slow pacing that can be as captivating. Since The Wire and The Sopranos are gone, I think I have to say that Breaking Bad is the best show on television, followed closely by Minute to Win It.
I kid, I kid. In case you didn’t know, Minute to Win It is a silly but oddly compelling TV show where contestants have to complete silly challenges in less than sixty seconds. It’s hosted by Guy Fieri, who hosts like five shows on the Food Network, including one of my favorites, Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Fieri is kind of like the Glenn Beck of food shows: wild, crazy (in a good way), and compellingly watchable. But here are some things that confuse me. His last name is spelled “Fieri,” but I could swear he pronounces it “Fee-ett-ee.” Moreover, despite that Italian last name and frequent references to his Italian heritage, his profile on Chefography reveals that he grew up eating hippy food and his only European influences came from living in France. Curious.
Thanks
Thanks to everyone who showed up in Madison and Minneapolis this week. It always helps to have ringers in the audience.
Here are the details for the Tax Day Tea Party event I’m speaking at next week.
Oh, and mark your calendars now: I’ll be speaking at Knox College on May 4.
Gotta Go
If you ever read William F. Buckley’s Overdrive, you know that no pundit will ever match WFB’s crazed work ethic and schedule. But I had a pretty good mini-overdrive this week. Monday, I woke up early and started my LATcolumn. I flew to Madison, got picked up at the airport, and was driven to the Sheraton. While there, I finished my LAT column, finished off my USATcolumn (written over the weekend), wrote my speech, did a radio interview, and threw a few things up in the Corner. Then went to dinner with Wisconsin Senate candidate David Westlake, among others. I gave my speech and went to the Great Dane Pub afterwards for some beers. In the morning, I wrote this for the Enterprise Blog and dashed off a few more things for the Corner. Worked on the galleys of my 4,000-word piece for the next issue of Commentary. Got in the car and drove (was driven) for about five hours, in driving rain, to Minneapolis. Showered, ran out the door, and gave a different speech. Went out afterwards to Stub and Herb’s for drinks with NRO readers and others. In the morning, was woken up by a call for a radio-show interview I forgot I agreed to, to promote the upcoming Cincinnati gig. Then, more Corner entries, more work on galley, first attempt at writing lame G-File. Then off to the airport. Flight schedule was all messed up, so I got on the earliest flight I could to Philly. Barely made plane. Finished line edits to Commentary galley on my iPhone because the seat was too small for laptop work. In Philly, my layover was like four hours, and my wife insisted I had to get home for my daughter’s planned birthday party for our cat. While trying to figure out what to do, I bumped into the husband of my serious college girlfriend. We chatted for ten minutes. Then I grabbed a cab to the train station and got on the Acela. Took the train to DC, where the line for a cab was a hundred people deep at rush hour, so I took the Metro to National Airport and picked up my car. Drove home in time for cat birthday party. Got party hat on cat, trapped in bathroom.
Went to bed, woke up. Finished still-lame G-File. Now I just need to write my syndicated column and then pick up Lucy early from school so I can take her with me to a Heritage Foundation conference in Florida where I’m giving a speech.
See ya next week.