by Richard A. Cheatham, Press Media Group, LLC
I’m presently engaged in a dialogue with one of the people who claims to “represent” me in the state legislature. He emailed me his newsletter in which he included a number of articles concerning the on-going debate about higher or lower taxes. The newsletter set up the issue saying “it all comes down to the bottom line...taxes vs. services.”
He put it as, “there is always a tension between the important need to keep family taxes low and at the same time respond to the demand for more services to more people and for improved services.” That’s the way most politicians see it, higher taxes and more services vs. lower taxes and fewer services. He talked about that paradigm as “economic truth.” That paradigm, however, is not the real choice, nor is it economic truth.
He launched into a justification for our present high taxes. He listed all sorts of things that the state was obligated to provide that cost lots of money. (I’m always amused when politicians talk about “free” public education and then mention that it costs about $8,000 to $9,000 per child per year. That’s “free” alright!) He talked about this obligation and that obligation, this need and that need, all that had to be paid for through state revenues.
The critical flaw in his argument, and in the argument employed by most of the rest of the professional political class, is that most of the obligations they say must be funded through taxation could, and should, be satisfied far better by providers in the free market without confiscation or compulsion.
It’s simply not the case that the state, through taxation, must provide all the services they presently provide. People have always had wants and needs and provided for them without the help of the state. They would still do so in the absence of state “help.” In addition, state provided “solutions” are classically of poor quality and value per dollar spent due to the monopolistic nature of state “enterprises” that don’t have to perform well or efficiently in order to be well funded!
You can like Robert Kennedy or not, but he once said, “Some look at the world and think ‘why?’ Others look at the world and think ‘why not?’” I happen to like that latter approach. Too many of today’s political “leaders” and lawmakers can’t wonder “why not.”
©2005 by Richard A. Cheatham. All rights reserved. Mr.Cheatham is a professional speaker/writer whose weekly column, “Drawing Back The Veil” appears weekly in The Lynchburg Ledger. Mr. Cheatham is syndicated through Press Media Group, LLC, 434-332-2845. Contact him through, Living History Assoc., Ltd., at www.LHALtd.com or DrawBackVeil@aol.com.