Give Me Liberty Or Give Him Death
(A guest post by Dr. A. James Frisbee, an Advanced Scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies, California, U.S.A.)
As a real American, I believe that we should protect liberty at any cost. We should especially protect my liberty not to be taxed, even if others (e.g. poor people) must be deprived of social services. Ongoing poverty is a fact of life, but the slightest thought of touching my liberty, in even the slightest tax increase, is morally arbitrary and wrong–a rank injustice that should never be allowed, at any cost to those who might be helped.
Justice therefore requires progressive tax cuts: in due respect for liberty, we should keep cutting taxes, until no one pays any taxes at all.
Against my innovative proposal, it will be objected that cutting all taxes will undermine
the security apparatus of the state, casting us into Hobbes’s famous state of nature, in which “the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In reply, I maintain that liberty must be respected at all costs, and that we are craven, immoral, and–worse–weak if we do less than what justice demands, simply for the sake of security. If others have to die in liberty’s name, because I happen to fight well and like a man, I say so be it. I say Let Freedom Ring.
What, after all, is the alternative? Taxes for security amount to the socialization of security risks, on pain of coercion and the point of police guns. This is nothing short of an “individual mandate,” an unpalatable and un-American “socialism,” and, what is more, a violation of every man’s natural, inalienable right to perfect freedom.
I realize that some weak-minded “conservatives” claim to support taxes for national security while at the same time resolutely rejecting taxes for social insurance schemes (such as health care). This is the height of weak-mindedness: they too easily rest their supposed “position” on subjective, wishy-washy, and at any rate wholly arbitrary distinctions. The socialization of risk is the socialization of risk, whether in security or health care.
Both security and health care are finally about life. Both involve the socialization of risk: I am asked to pay for someone else’s health and security. I for one fail to see a relevant difference, and no “conservative,” to my knowledge, has ever provided a truly *principled* basis for distinguishing the two. (Nor is the popular argument from federalism properly “principled.” It does not block advocacy of the universal adoption of socialized health care among all the states. Needless to say, that would be an abomination, leaving America no better than the European-style social democracies.) If, therefore, we shouldn’t socialize health, we shouldn’t socialize security, either. All taxation, for health or for security, violates our fundamental liberties as Americans. All taxation must therefore be stopped. Progressive tax cuts are the only forward course.
You can now see why I am deeply disheartened when weak-minded “conservatives” claim manly courage. In fact they show themselves to be cowards. They must either follow the argument where their own principles lead, or give up their supposed “principles” in favor of a more liberal position (which I hate). And yet they take neither course, being resolute in their state of unreason. I therefore fear for the republic. Real men must stand up, in the name of freedom, for nothing less than the complete abolition of the state!
