What exactly do I mean by this title? Am I saying that government agents are coming to American homes, one by one, seizing your prized possessions? Am I saying that the government is taking away people’s homes? … Of course not. Private Property represents all those life’s possessions we have earned, traded for, acquired or inherited throughout our lives.
However, take a close look at this list and tell me what you think is happening to our private property.
1. Income Taxes - all those earning a living, above the poverty line, pay federal and state income taxes. The rates generally range from 15% (a few pay 10%) to 35% depending on income level. The top rate will rise to 40%+ with the expiration of the 2003 tax cuts in 2011.
2. Payroll Taxes - another 6%+ of your income for the first 100+K of your income. Payroll Taxes are supposed to go the Social Security Fund for you personally, but actually doesn’t.
3. Medicare Taxes
4. State Disability, Workmen’s Compensation and Unemployment Insurance Taxes collected by most states.
5. Sales Taxes paid in most states.
6. Property Taxes
Have I told anything you don’t already know? Probably not or at least you haven’t looked at your gross income as your private property. However, it surely is. But none of these taxes existed 100 years ago. We accept these taxes as part of the necessary truths we need to keep on going. I am not proposing a ban on taxes as the government certainly needs funds from its citizens to provide for the defense and protection of the country and the states, to provide certain essential services to insure a free-flowing and increasingly efficient society.
However, since 1933, and now under great acceleration under the Obama Administration, the government has seized a huge new mantle of “rights” that government, not the individual, bestow on the individual; this is as if the individual doesn’t have his own set of natural rights and responsibilities without the oversight or interference by a controlling central government.
So, now we have a huge acceleration of the war on private property; in fact, I maintain that it is a direct war on the individual himself.
Consider these unfolding facts:
1. Cap and Trade - if enacted, all carbon-based products, processes, manufacturing, et al will be strictly controlled through punitive tax policy. This will trigger huge increases in the prices we all pay for everything we buy or use. Few understand what this will mean and it will only be recognized when the individual sees their utility bills double or worse, food prices skyrocket, gasoline go shooting up. Where will the money go … directly to the government.
2. Universal Health Care - this is a multi-trillion dollar program dictated by a government seeking to further tax and ultimately control your life; under this socialized form of medicine, the individual is completely obliterated in favor of government control of exactly what health care will mean to you. Choice of provider (doctor, hospital, therapist and therapy) will be taken from the individual and controlled by the government. Statistics will be used instead of personal choice to justify and prescribe, what will be done, if it will be done, when it will be done and by whom it will be done. Don’t let anyone tell you that the government will pay for it … the government never pays for it … you pay for it … just another part of your private property.
3. New Taxes Forever - whether it is smoking, alcohol, sugar, fats, preservatives, travel, gasoline, investments and capital gains, your private property is under attack … relentlessly. Even death carries a tax.
Why? … why does the government, regardless of party to a greater or lesser degree, continually grab more and more of your private property? Read “Liberty and Tyranny” by Mark Levin to get a very complete answer and insight. However, it comes down to the willful determination of a central government to control and direct the lives of the individual. Levin calls it the “statist” referring to the diminution of the individual and the absolute power of the state. You can call this the death of the individual. The government is seeking control of the banking system, insurance companies, the automobile industry, under the guise of protecting the public. It is nothing like protecting the public however. Freedom and free market capitalism is being wiped away. The very essence of our Constitution is being trashed and ignored towards this inexorable drive to control our lives in every way possible.
What made this country great is the flow of immigrants coming to a new world to gain true freedom, to build a life for themselves, by themselves with equal opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness. This country was born out of complete subservience to the individual and tight controls on the power of a central government; it was called Federalism and Reagen proposed a “new” Federalism 25 years ago to specifically reassert the principals and concepts of the US Constitution.
The statist is waging war on you and your private property. It is up to the individual, one by one, to work together to oppose this assault on our personal freedoms, rights and responsibilities.
What do you think?
Arthur Cooper
Tags: conservatism, Government, Government Programs, obama, Socialized Medicine, Universal Health Care
