One of my friends just brought an interesting article to my attention. It’s a Wall Street Journal opinion piece written by Ari Fleischer (former White House Press Secretary) entitled “The Taxpaying Minority.” From the title you can guess he states the usual stats: top 40% of the population pays 99% of taxes, top 10% pay 71%, and the bottom 40% payNOTHING!

For a free democracy to exist into perpetuity it must endow its citizenry with a sense of responsibility for the stewardship of State. The only way to do so is to levy taxes upon everyone who has any say in government. Everyone who can vote must be required to pay taxes, no matter how little the amount. Allowing a large, and growing, segment of the population to evade paying anything into the system, yet to keep their power to vote and influence policy is a recipe for disaster.

An unconstrained Democracy that fails to safeguard property rights will always tend to force a minority to pay the bills for the majority. Right now we have 60% of the population forcing 40% to pay the bills…why not make 1% pay for the other 99%?

Civilizations seem to have a fairly well-defined lifecycle. From initial growth there follows a period of properity up until citizens realize they can vote themselves gifts from the public treasury. British historian, Alexander Tyler, says “the majority will always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits…with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy.”

It’s a tried and true axiom of reality/economics that when something is free it loses value, i.e. if you get free healthcare you are less circumspect in your consumption of those resources. My friend’s father runs a manufacturing plant that had an odd thing happenwhen the company decided to give free healthcare to its employees, there was a sharp increase in people taking sick days and heading to the doctor. Crazy, right? Can you guess the solution? Not many people liked him, but when my friend’s father introduced a nominal co-pay there was a drastic reduction in the number of people getting sick. If only all diseases could be so easily cured!

I hope America can get its act together and fix one of the only safeguards to ensuring our Democracy doesn’t devolve into apathetic, dependent, serfdom. The rich should pay more taxes since they derive greater benefit from government, but the middle class and poor also derive benefits for which they must pay their proportionate share. Pandering to these majority voting blocks by promising to stick it to the rich even more sounds great from a podium, but has only one inevitable outcome.