Rodent Regatta

Why does Joe Lieberman believe in tyranny?

By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

As a Jew and a learned man, Senator Joseph Lieberman certainly understands the horrors of the racial genocide of the Third Reich and the class genocide of the Bolshevik Revolution. He should know better than Howard Dean and the other leftist presidential candidates that both ugly scars on human history began with a belief that the state was more important than the individual. That’s what makes his support of the tyranny of collectivism so inexplicable.

Lieberman outlined his economic platform in the October 27 edition of the Wall Street Journal. It is a collectivist, class-warfare platform. Like all forms of redistribution, it would use government power to forcibly take property from some citizens and give it to others. Specifically, it would take money from a small minority of higher-income citizens and give it to a large majority of lower-income citizens. Under his plan, couples earning more than $200,000 would see their taxes increase, and couples earning $200,000 or less would see their taxes decrease.

The Bolsheviks and Nazis also began thier reigns by confiscating property for state purposes—noble purposes in the twisted minds of those in power.

Of course, Lieberman is in no way advocating what the Bolsheviks and Nazis did next: send selected groups to the gulag and concentration camp. But make no mistake about it: Once the camouflage of his flowery rhetoric is stripped away, Lieberman is recommending tyranny—not the tyranny of a dictatorship, but the tyranny of the majority. Unlike the nation’s founders, he believes that if enough citizens band together, they have the moral and constitutional right to rob other people, especially if the others are part of a small demonized group.

Lieberman took 22 column-inches to justify his plan, but it can be summarized in 18 words: He proposes lowering the taxes of 98 percent of taxpayers and raising the taxes on the top 2 percent of taxpayers. In other words, he is saying that 98 percent of taxpayers have a right to the money of a small minority. It does not matter to him that the top 2 percent of wage earners already pay more than 35 percent of all federal income taxes.

One of Hitler’s first actions upon becoming the German chancellor in 1933 was to declare a one-day boycott against Jewish shops, thus depriving the owners of a portion of their income. At the time, Jews were a small minority, comprising about 6 percent of the German population.

There was no outcry in Germany or the rest of the world over the boycott. We know what came next in the absence of an outcry: German Jews were denied the right to vote, to marry gentiles, to own property and, finally, to live.

Virtually every American would say that the boycott was immoral, unfair and unjust. Why would they say that? Is it because they know about the atrocities that came later? Or is it because the boycott was immoral, unfair and unjust on its face, irrespective of the atrocities that followed?

I believe the latter—that it was immoral, unfair and unjust on its face for 94 percent of Germans to deprive 6 percent of Germans of part of their livelihood. It logically follows, then, that it is immoral, unfair and unjust for 98 percent of Americans to deprive 2 percent of Americans of part of their livelihood.

Some would say that this is an apples-to-oranges comparison—that there is not a moral equivalency between the confiscation of income based on race and the confiscation of income based on wealth. Of course, many of those who would say this are the same people who believe in racial preferences—in giving favored races preferential treatment over less-favored races.

Others would say that it is immoral, unfair and unjust for the wealthy to have too much money and not share it with the poor. In fact, that’s what Lieberman suggested in his op-ed. He called his plan a ”tax fairness plan.”

The problem with such thinking is that 98 percent of Americans are not poor and unable to provide for themselves. Only 10 percent or so do not have the mental or physical ability to provide the necessities of life to themselves or their families. But Lieberman is not saying that the state should give 10 percent of Americans other people’s money. Nor is he saying that 10 percent should be helped through private charity. He is saying that the state should forcibly take money from 2 percent of Americans and give it to the remaining 98 percent, which, under his plan, includes couples with a combined income of $200,000. That’s a strange and expansive definition of fairness.

Having painted himself into an intellectual corner, Lieberman tried to escape by talking about the dramatic increase over the years in the regressive payroll tax, in health care costs and in college tuition—costs that are borne, he said, by the middle-class. In doing so, he left footprints of wet paint all over his economic platform.

Lieberman’s rationale is wrong for two reasons. First, the middle-class does not consist of 98 percent of Americans and those earning up to $200,000. Second, although Republicans share much of the blame, his party is mostly responsible for skyrocketing payroll taxes, health care costs and tuition. Democratic presidents enacted Social Security and Medicare, both of which rely on intergenerational transfer payments and are truly Ponzi schemes. Moreover, it was a Democratic president who destroyed a consumer market in health insurance 60 years ago through a misguided policy that made workers dependent on their employers for health insurance. And Democrats more than Republicans have advocated expansions of the student loan program and increased subsidies to education, both of which have resulted in the cost of education increasing three times faster than inflation.

With paint brush in hand, Lieberman went on to rail against the declining share of taxes paid by corporations. He did not say that corporate taxes are simply passed on to consumers in higher prices for goods and services.

Lieberman uses these extraneous issues to hide his true belief. Like other Democrats and an alarming number of Republicans, he believes that your money belongs to the collective, to be doled out by the state based on the whims, class resentments, selfishness and moral turpitude of the majority of voters and the party in power.

In view of history, it is inexplicable that a Jew would want the state to have so much power.

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.