America’s tax rates, we may recall with some surprise, impose basically the same terms on successful citizens as those imposed on the medieval serf. The top federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent, and when other taxes are piled on, the top rate easily reaches 50 percent. What that means is that half of the labor of these citizens is confiscated up front; another way to look at it is that the first half of the year they work for the government, and only the second half they work for themselves and their families.
Obama and many progressives consider these tax rates unfairly low—they would like to raise them. Obama, with Alinskyite caution, never says how much. But progressive scholars are more specific. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Reich proposes a top marginal tax rate of 55 percent. Economist Richard Wolff nostalgically invokes the period immediately following World War II when the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent. Wolff says that the rich, in paying a mere 40 percent currently, have enjoyed a massive “tax cut.” He’d like to see the rates go back up toward 90 percent.5 What this means is that successful people would get to keep 10 percent—10 cents of every dollar they earn. What’s remarkable about this is that if you took away that 10 percent, they’d essentially be reduced to slavery. Slavery is a system based on a 100 percent tax rate.
Now obviously some of this money goes toward providing the necessary and appropriate services of government. These services include defense, the police, the highways, product safety, environmental protection, and basic research. Notice, however, that these are benefits that accrue to all citizens. Everyone benefits from the common defense. The highways are there for everyone to use, even if some choose not to use them. So these activities fall under what the Constitution terms the “general welfare.” Contrast this with government transfer payments from one group of Americans to another. How does this promote the general welfare? Clearly it does not. It constitutes a forcible extortion from one group and an unearned benefit to another.
I acknowledge that we have moral obligations to our fellow citizens that go beyond equal treatment under the laws. Consider Bill Gates, who has a net worth of around $65 billion. Surely Gates can’t spend the bulk of that money, and since there is such a huge surplus, doesn’t he have an ethical duty to the needy people of America and perhaps also the world? Undoubtedly Gates’s billions can help with what government has been doing: fund schools, build roads, bail out banks, send money to Egypt and Israel, and give more people monthly checks. Yes, Gates has an ethical duty, but I believe that he—not the government—should discharge that duty. First, it’s his money and therefore he, not Obama or the U.S. Congress, should decide how much he wants to give away and who that money should go to. Gates may choose to buy mosquito nets for Africans or sponsor health research, and this is his prerogative. Second, since Gates earned the money he is much more likely to disburse it wisely. It seems that the Gates Foundation has done more good for society than we could entrust Obama to do with comparable resources.
Why is it theft for governments to engage in large-scale wealth redistribution? Recall why people come together to form governments in the first place. According to the early modern philosophers, people enter into a hypothetical “social contract.” They leave the state of nature and enter into society because they want protection from foreign and domestic thugs. This is the primary purpose of government. Yet it is not the only purpose. People together may also assign to government functions that promote the common good. The key feature of the common good, however, is that it benefits all citizens. It does not promote the common good for the state to require the people of the North to pay the mortgage bills of the people in the South. It does not promote the common good for the state to insist that successful people pay other people’s medical bills. We see here why Obamacare is so outrageous. It would be one thing for Obama to urge government subsidies to provide insurance for poor people who can’t afford it. Arguably that benefits the common good because we all benefit from a society with a safety net, a society that provides a minimal floor below which no citizen can fall. Obamacare, however, is not a safety net. Obama’s healthcare law forces all Americans to buy insurance—even people who don’t want it—and it imposes the additional cost of the premiums on Americans who already have insurance and are already paying for their own healthcare. Obamacare is a form of theft.
Progressive taxation is also theft. Of course, it is based on the claim that an earlier theft is being rectified. Absent the earlier theft, there is no legitimate rationale for the government to impose higher levels of confiscation on some citizens. Indeed, the only truly just form of taxation is proportional taxation. Proportional taxation means that everyone who is eligible to pay income taxes pays at the same rate. Of course the rich pay more, but they pay proportionately more. So above a certain floor, everyone pays a 10 or 15 or 25 percent federal income tax. Not only is proportional taxation consistent with the constitutional purpose of government—to promote the general, and not particular, welfare—but it also establishes a rule of fairness. It doesn’t matter what level of taxation democratic majorities choose, through their elected representatives, as long as that level is imposed on everyone. Right now we have a system where people can happily vote to raise taxes on others while keeping their own taxes the same or even lowering them. The current system is a progressive delight because it encourages envy and promotes state-sponsored theft.
Consider this startling fact. While the top 1 percent of Americans pays more than one-third of all federal income taxes, and the next 9 percent pays another third, the bottom 50 percent of Americans pays no federal income taxes at all. This is grossly unfair. Obama is right about the unfairness of the system. In reality it is unfair to the successful! It is also unfair that so many Americans who are earning money and are not poor nevertheless pay no federal income tax at all. The American Revolution was fought, in part, to advance the principle of “no taxation without representation.” Well, evidently half of the country currently has representation without taxation. This would seem to be a very troubling feature of our democracy, because we want citizens to have a stake in the system. Democracy is about self-government, not about making laws that affect only other people. Yet people who pay nothing into the federal income tax coffer are asked to make judgments about what constitutes a “fair share” for others and for themselves. No wonder that Obama’s demagoguery falls on so many receptive ears. He is telling people that it is just and proper that they, who contribute nothing into the system, should get more out of it, while others, who contribute a lot, should pay even more. Here’s the formula for Obama’s success: “They work, and you eat.”
CHAPTER 15
AMERICAN PANOPTICON
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.1
FRANZ KAFKA, THE TRIAL
In the previous chapter we saw how the government, in the name of fighting theft, has itself become a thief. In this chapter I show how the government is, through surveillance of American citizens, collecting the information that it can potentially use to carry out its theft. We think the government is spying on its citizens solely for the purpose of catching terrorists. For progressive government, I will show, there is a broader benefit. If the government has become a thief, then surveillance is nothing more than what thieves do. In other words, surveillance represents a case of our government casing out the joint. Government is assembling dossiers on its targets in the same manner that the thieves in the film Oceans 11 cased out the casinos before robbing them. Spying on citizens also enables the government to have power over its citizens, power that can be used to enforce conformity and deter opposition to government-sanctioned theft. In sum, the U.S. government is building the power not only to systematically steal from its citizens but also to use terror against them if they oppose this theft.
Let’s begin by recognizing that any state-sponsored theft is likely to be popular with people who are the beneficiaries of that theft.
If a gang of thieves robs a bank and then distributes the loot to a group of people, those people become very contented accomplices. Their contentment turns to pure bliss if they become convinced that the bank has long been stealing from them, and they are simply getting back what originally belonged to them, or what they had been unjustly deprived of. As George Bernard Shaw wryly put it a century ago, in a line I quoted at the beginning of the previous chapter: “Any government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.”
Still, Peter is less likely to be enthusiastic or to go along with the scheme. Peter knows he hasn’t been stealing from anyone; he has merely been outperforming everyone. So the progressives have to go to work on him, and they do so in three ways. The first—the most benign—is to try and convince Peter that he’s a thief. The progressive strategy here draws on Alinsky, and basically involves a radical redefinition of terms. “Greed” no longer means an illicit desire for something more than one’s due; “greed” in the progressive lexicon means “a desire to keep one’s own money.” The term “compassion” undergoes a similar transformation: it no longer means “suffering with or sympathizing with someone else’s situation,” rather; it now means “taking away other people’s money.” The more a government takes from its successful citizens, the more “compassionate” it is. The more the citizens try and hold on to their money, the “greedier” they are.
This is all a little preposterous, and not surprisingly this attempt at persuasion doesn’t often work. In that case, progressives attempt to induce dissenters and uncooperative elements to join the progressive coalition for their own advantage and protection. Obama, for instance, convinced insurance companies to back his healthcare scheme for their own benefit. He said, in effect: I’ll force Americans who don’t want insurance to buy it, and you will have more customers. The insurance companies backed Obamacare, not realizing that Obama’s ultimate goal is to have the government completely direct and control them. This technique is reminiscent of Alinsky’s boast that he could cajole millionaires to support revolutionary schemes that lead to short-term profits but also to their ultimate execution.
Even so, not every Peter capitulates, and eventually the progressives have to deal with hard-core resisters. (I am a good example of a hard-core resister.) Now they have a solution: use the power of the state to spy on citizens and collect personal information from their phone calls, emails, and financial and personal records. This information-gathering involves some of the most powerful agencies of government, from the IRS to the National Security Agency. Various rationales are given for this spying and data-collection, from serving people better to fighting terrorism. I am more interested in how this information can be used for purposes other than the ones the government is telling us about. One such purpose is to keep tabs on citizens for the purpose of taking their money. Obviously if you are going to steal from someone it helps to know what he has and where he keeps it. So surveillance, whatever its other purposes, has the benefit of letting the government collect information for its heist. Second, the information collected through government spying can also be used to achieve social compliance. It can be used to identify citizens who are uncooperative or dissenters, and then audit their tax returns or accuse them of crimes. The benefit of having extensive reams of personal data is that almost anyone can be found to have fallen afoul of the rules sometime or other. So everyone—the whole citizenry—is vulnerable. And the government wants them to know they are vulnerable. Ultimately, dissenters and hard-core resisters will be forced to capitulate out of fear. Under the leadership of Obama and the progressives, this is where we are now heading.
The government, in other words, has not merely become an instrument of theft; it is also setting up the necessary apparatus to become a vehicle of terror. Just as progressives have figured out how to steal in the name of fighting theft, they are now acquiring the means to use terror against American citizens. Remarkably this power to inflict domestic terror is being accumulated in the name of fighting international terror. Defenders of government spying—on the left and on the right—insist that these are only potential dangers. Sure, the government may have the capacity to intimidate and prosecute its political adversaries and critics, but we can trust it will not use its power in this way. My own experience—detailed here—is that it can and will. Therefore I don’t have a whole lot of trust in the goodwill of the government; in this respect, I think I am squarely in the camp of the Founders. My experience may be anomalous, of course, but if it proves typical, then no one is safe. If progressives like Obama continue along this path, they will make the U.S. government itself into a terrorist state, one that resembles Iran and other totalitarian states that terrorize their own citizens.
Obama is clearly attracted by the totalitarian temptation. In February 2014, touring Monticello, Obama said, “That’s the good thing about being president, I can do whatever I want.” It was said in jest, but it is also, frankly, how he has attempted to govern—indeed he boasted in his 2014 state of the union speech that he was going to bypass Congress whenever it blocked his wishes and act through presidential edicts. This was not a new departure for Obama. In his first term, he made the remarkable statement, reported in the New York Times, that “it would be so much easier to be the president of China.”2 Ah yes. And why would it be so much easier? Because the president of China is basically a dictator. He doesn’t have to bother with checks and balances, or court approval, or even public opinion. The Chinese government can with impunity raid the bank accounts of its citizens, and also cow them into submission if they resist its policies. Now imagine what America would look like if Obama got his wish. We would be, like China, a state that did not shrink to use terror against its own citizens. This would be a different kind of terror than that of al Qaeda. It would be Alinskyite terror, involving intimidation and criminal prosecution rather than direct violence. Yet its reach would be much wider. While al Qaeda targets some Americans—mainly in an effort to strike out at symbols of American wealth and power—the U.S. government would target all Americans. Al Qaeda seeks to terrorize Americans through sporadic actions of violence, but these acts pose a very low probability of harm to any particular American family. The U.S. government by contrast would spy and collect information on all citizens; consequently, it would be in a position to intimidate, blackmail, or even arrest any American that stands in its way. Given the government’s obvious capacity to harm each one of us, we must conclude that in such a scenario al Qaeda would pose a smaller potential threat to our individual safety and freedom than our own government would.
The government’s mechanism for initiating a system of intimidation and terror is the American Panopticon. The term was made famous by the nineteenth-century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It was an architectural design for a prison. Bentham developed the concept on a 1785 trip to Russia with his brother. He was asked by Empress Catherine the Great to help her modernize the Russian penal system. Bentham obligingly designed his Panopticon. Bentham was a utilitarian, and he considered his Panopticon to be a model of progressive humaneness and efficiency. Catherine never implemented Bentham’s idea. Yet today there are several prisons around the world—including a few in America—that use Bentham’s architectural blueprint. None of them, however, fulfill Bentham’s actual objective for the Panopticon. That objective, remarkably, may be fulfilled not in any prison system but in America as a whole. A scheme once intended for prisoners now chillingly describes what’s happening to the American people.
Bentham’s basic idea was to build prisons as circular multi-tiered structures with a guard tower in the center. Each cell would be well-equipped but also completely transparent. Thus every prisoner could be observed at all times from the guard tower. Even a single guard would be sufficient to keep track of pretty much everything that was going on. The building would be lit around the perimeter, so inmates could not see each other, nor could they see who was observing them. Bentham argued that in this wa
y, through minimum effort, the state could monitor a large group of people at all times. Since prisoners would not know when they were being watched, they would have to regulate all their activities in fear that the authorities would know what they were doing. Bentham did not seek to limit his Panopticon to prisons. Rather, he proposed that this “simple idea in architecture” could be tried in prisons, and then, if it worked, extended to factories, schools, barracks, and hospitals.3
Bentham’s disregarded Panopticon has now become a grim reality. Thanks to a single man—the whistleblower Edward Snowden—we know that the U.S. government now uses the latest technology to spy on its citizens. This surveillance has been going on for a dozen years, although it has become ever more detailed and sophisticated. What precisely has our government been doing to us? A clear and ominous picture is now emerging. The Obama administration has been collecting our emails and texts, observing our web behavior, monitoring our phone calls, downloading our contact lists, viewing our apps and personal photo files, gathering our financial and personal data, reviewing our online purchasing habits, even tracking our movements. This is all done through the collection of “metadata.” The government stresses that metadata doesn’t typically involve content—the government monitors who you are calling and when, but not what you are saying; it can track your email traffic, but it cannot read your email without court sanction. But as a number of web savvy critics have pointed out, a sufficiently detailed log of metadata can easily establish the most specific content of an individual’s life.
It would be bad enough if the president himself were doing this. In fact, as Snowden said in an interview, “Any government analyst, at any time, can target anyone … anywhere.”4 The government has built huge data centers, such as a million-square-foot facility in Bluffdale, Utah, to assemble and process the information. The government even accesses the records of private companies such as Google, Yahoo, and AT&T to get the information it seeks.
Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Page 22
