Common Sense Liberty

Peeved that a company had the audacity to minimize its tax burden, some politicians want to take a bite out of Apple. After investigating the company for months, Carl Levin’s (D, MI) Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations found nothing wrong. Zip. Zero, Nunca. Nada. As explained to the subcommittee by Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, Apple paid every penny of taxes it legally owed.

A bipartisan Congressional panel yesterday released its findings regarding Apple’s international tax regime and, specifically, how it was able to pay a relatively low tax rate when the U.S. corporate statutory tax rate is 35% (the highest in the developed world). The investigation turned up no wrongdoing, and that Apple follows the letter of the law and pays every dime of its legally-required taxes. –From townhall.com

That did not keep Carl Levin from hauling Cook in front of the committee in order to…well, we’re not sure. Embarrass him, perhaps? If so, it backfired. Cook explained the obvious and informed the Senator that he had no intention of repatriating billions of dollars kept overseas. Doing so would subject Apple to a boatload of taxes that it currently does not owe. How rude, legally retaining what one has earned.

In a fit of Congressional sanity, Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) went nuclear on Levin’s tactics, suggesting that every member of Congress minimizes his/her taxes and that the committee was simply bullying one of the most successful companies in history. Thank you, Senator Paul.

As the world devolves into a seething rage against the successful, let us pause to ask where Congress would be without companies like Apple. First, they would be without their iPhones. Sad enough, but they would also be without the billions that Apple does pay in taxes ($6 billion in 2012). To say that Levin is biting the hand that feeds him is an embarrassing understatement.

A government that grows continually has to eat continually. When Congress noses around for something to devour, it faces a problem of perception. Citizens are not happy when you start gnawing on their legs, but they can live with your gnawing on someone else’s leg as long as you throw them a scrap or two. Thus, Congress’s dilemma–how to eat from the hand of businesses like Apple while making it look like they are bravely beating them up for being greedy. Fortunately for them, Joe and Jane Citizen make that easy.

First Joe and Jane hate the rich. They don’t know why, they just hate them. Most citizens have never met the Jobs, Gates, and Bransons of this world, but they are deeply suspicious that anyone with that much money had to do something wrong. I suspect that each of us who has fallen short of billionaire status has at least once or twice lamented his lot in life, thinking that somehow the game must be rigged, else we too would own a yacht. Those of us who take the time to understand these things soon shrug those feelings of inadequacy off and go on about our business. We know that only a few people make billions just as only a few people get to play in the Majors. We also celebrate the victories of the successful, knowing that we too might join them one day by contributing our own unique value to the world.

Second, Joe and Jane never take the time to figure out just how little difference taxing the rich makes to the fiscal outlook of an entire country, especially one as big as the United States. Were they to take a look downward, they would see that while pack leaders like Levin distract them, the other cur are munching their way up from ankle height to heaven-knows-where. They are already being eaten, but their envy of the rich keeps them from noticing.

Good thing, too, if you happen to be a progressive. No amount of clawing at the rich will ever fund the kind of government that progressives are absolutely sure is desirable. Even if we were to focus exclusively on peeling the Apples of this world, we would soon find ourselves being cored. So, government has to mute, buffer, distort, and outright lie about how and how much taxation is directed at the middle class. Joe and Jane will feel like Dumb and Dumber when the dogs turn on them in the not-too-distant future.

As Levin’s brand of spectacle makes headlines, you who call yourselves progressives should give pause. When one encourages the government to go after the rich, he is in reality encouraging the government to go after everyone. Everyone includes you and those you think will benefit from the benevolence of a large and all-encompassing government. When that happens, will you still have a taste for Apples?

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*The research of Kahneman and Tversky is a bit more complex than that, but the lesson is basically the same.

Poor IRS, the institution no one loves. Well, I am about to change that. IRS, thank you. Yes, thank you for being so colossally stupid that you let yourselves be caught red-handed doing what you have done surreptitiously for decades.

Not that we have not known about the IRS’s shenanigans for all these many years. It’s just that it seemed the stuff of intrigue–dark and sinister goings-on at some mysterious level of governance unvisited by we denizens of the non-political world. Had it not been for Nixon, we probably would not have noticed at all.

The IRS has never been apolitical. Since Roosevelt, powerful people have used the IRS to intimidate and harass their political opponents. Neither conservatives nor liberals are strangers to using the IRS inappropriately–or illegally. A President who openly sicced the IRS on his/her enemies would be ousted in a heartbeat. Therein lies the problem.

Barack Obama may not have directly ordered the IRS to pick on conservatives and libertarians, but the tenor of his administration offers no buffer to this kind of abuse. His core mentality is that no one knows better than him and no one had better slow him down. His willingness to use government to accomplish his ends borders on the sociopathic.

Those ends grow clearer by the day: more government, bigger government, more intrusive government–no matter what. Obama’s agenda is progressivism* taken to its logical conclusion, and that does not bode well for anyone, least of all the growing list of people who are supposed to benefit from this “noble” experiment. It’s hard to help the poor after one has destroyed everyone else’s incentive to produce anything.

The danger with Obama is that he really believes in the efficacy of government to right every perceived wrong and is seemingly incapable of grasping its limits. In his mind, this justifies most any tactic to git ‘er done. Where some would say that the end justifies the means, Obama simply does not appear to believe that there is such a thing as questionable means.

At least the President has retained enough of a grip on reality to know that some people do think there are limits to the methods by which one achieves his/her political goals. Thus he feigns outrage at actions that he indirectly endorses in speeches constantly. Conservatives and libertarians are the “enemy” in the President’s mind, an attitude not particularly new in American politics. The difference with the current President is that this is not just a political tactic. He seems to honestly believe that opponents to his agenda should not exist, that he should not have to offer any defense whatsoever to anyone at all for anything.

Obama is more than a bad President. The blood of a tyrant courses through his veins. He is appalled that anyone would have the audacity to object to anything he sees fit to do to mold his country (yes, I chose that word deliberately) into a socialist heaven. Socialism always dies, but not before lashing out at its victims viciously–usually the poor. They are the ones standing closest.

The United States “works” to the degree that it adheres to its founding principle–government serves to protect the rights of the individual. “Works” to a progressive means making it easy for government to do more and more. The difference is profound. The former ensures that individuals are not subject to the whims of their leaders by making it difficult for the government to do anything. The latter assumes disagreement to be an impediment to making things better through the power of government.

It is easy to pick on the President. After all, he embodies everything progressives love and libertarians hate. However, it would be a mistake to think that absent Barack Obama everything would be just hunky-dory. He is merely a lighthouse on a rocky island of bad ideas.

The jagged shoal of this mentality is that somehow society, this tangled collection of countless people interacting in countless ways, has a will comparable to an individual’s will. The idea, often associated with Rousseau, but having in reality a much longer intellectual lineage, is that governance is primarily an issue of finding out what that “general will” is and how it should be administered. In other words, what really matters is not what I want, think, or believe, but how my life supports society in general. The most audacious proponents of this idea suggest that in fact I cannot be happy or free otherwise. “Freedom” in this context means subjecting myself to the needs of society rather than asserting my individual will.

Even if the idea itself were not repugnant, its implementation would be. Thoughts are the province of the individual. Groups of people may share similar thoughts, but no collection of people actually has a thought. It is forgivable for convenience’ sake to speak as if groups do think, as when we say, “The family thinks not resuscitating Grandmother is the right thing to do.”

It is good to remember that we are speaking figuratively in such cases. The “family’s” thoughts on the matter may mean that everyone agrees precisely or that a strong-willed niece has bullied everyone into saying so. There is no family mind residing in a family brain and expressed through a family voice. There is only some commonly accepted definition of what individuals within that family want.

Translated to the context of government, this means that there is no such thing as what is “good for society.” There is only what is good for individuals within that society. We may speak of well or poorly functioning societies out of convenience, but in the final analysis, it is the individuals within who prosper or suffer.

The fact that there is no “general will” around which to build a government does not keep people like Barack Obama from claiming that there is, that they understand it, and that they should therefore should be assigned the task of implementing it. The result is never the betterment of individuals as a whole, but the realization of his individual vision. And for it to work, people who object to being subjugated to this vision must be silenced. Individualists openly claiming their lives for themselves may get other people started claiming the same thing.

Fortunately, we have not yet reached the point where objectors are routinely spirited away in the middle of the night. We have, though, reached the point where it is obvious that disagreement from willful individuals is not to be tolerated. “Reject the voices…” has become more than a suggestion that the opposing side is mistaken; it has become a thinly-disguised call to shut them up.

And what better way to shut people up than the IRS. An audit, whether it uncovers anything untoward or not, consumes enormous amounts of time and is always nerve-wracking because it is nearly impossible to discern what the real rules are. A tax code as complicated as ours practically begs bureaucrats with a grudge to abuse it. They need not have a direct order from the President; only a general understanding of who the “enemy” is.

Thankfully, at least a few Democrats are outraged over the real issue–that the IRS was used to bully opponents of the Administration. As for the rest, they are content to wallow in the worst excuse of all–that Republicans do it too. As it comes to light just how many of them were complicit in siccing the IRS on their opponents, we may see some sheepish legislators soon.

The same IRS that harasses conservatives can harass liberals too. As in romance, the person who cheats with you will likely cheat on you. The solution is not to cheat at all.

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*We used to call this “liberalism,” but people started to figure out what it really meant, so “progressivism” serves in its stead now.

Obama’s War On the Individual: http://ow.ly/kSRW4

Should you ever wonder what fuels the President’s incessant drive to grow government, look no further than his recent commencement speech at The Ohio State University. One could be forgiven for concluding that he hates the Founders’ vision of America as a country of free individuals.

As intellectual descendants of the Renaissance, the Founders inherited a healthy skepticism of political and religious authority. They also inherited a healthy respect for the individual. These two ideas are complementary–rejecting the authority of monarchs and priests is an empty gesture without recognizing one’s own authority on what to believe and how to act. Individual liberty in body and soul was recognized as the end for which government was the means.

The Founders recognized that while government is necessary to secure individual liberty, it is also a threat to that liberty. Their solution, never explicitly applied before in human history, was to formally recognize freedom as the point of government.

Were freedom possible without government, the solution would have been easy–eliminate it altogether. Unfortunately, we resemble dieters more than alcoholics–an alcoholic can live without drinking, but a dieter still has to eat. Government is both necessary and dangerous–a dilemma for which no better solution exists than the US Constitution.

The fact that individual liberty is the central point of our political system does not mean people must act always and only alone. No one, libertarians included, believes that collective action is bad per se. Working together is uniquely human and marvelously effective in getting individuals what they want. Other than making sure no one initiates violence against another, though, no central authority is needed to dictate how, when, and for how long groups of people work together. Projects and the groups of people who execute them form, function, and then disband as dictated by the needs of the individuals who comprise them.

All of this is completely lost on the President, whose only notion of collective action is the government-enforced variety. To his way of thinking, there is nothing a group of people can do that can’t be done better when directed by government. No good is ever created that cannot be amplified by authority–especially authority over business.

The very businesses Obama seems to loathe are wonderful examples of what human beings can achieve working together voluntarily. Yet individual ambition is denigrated by the President as if it were 1) a bad thing, 2) not in fact part and parcel of any collective achievement. Individual ambition drives both individual action and cooperation with others who value similar things. A baseball player works to improve his individual stats, but also tempers his individual ambition for the good of the team. These two drives are complementary, not antithetical. The player who thinks only of himself will soon find himself a pariah among his teammates. The one who lacks individual ambition will never even make the team.

These trade-offs are worked out quite well without the all-knowing eye of Obama’s preferred kind of government watching o’er. My beef is simple–no one should be forced to engage in collective action absent a deeply compelling reason, say, fending off a Canadian invasion. First, it violates individual rights, which means any alleged improvement to the collective is immaterial. Second, evidence of the government’s efficacy in improving upon the voluntary cooperation of individually ambitious citizens is scant.

The President’s contempt for the individual extends well beyond economic rights. His apoplectic accusations of Congress “gumming up the works” on issues like gun control reveal a deep-seated conviction that he knows better than each of us how the world should look and who should get to do what when. He at times appears to lament the fact that he has to bother checking with anyone at all. Someone should have told him in which country he was seeking office.

Last, Barack Obama detests that anyone is even allowed to object to his vision of a collectivist nation. His admonition to graduates not to look for “tyranny lurking around the corner,” as apparently some of us do*, speaks volumes about what he really wants deep down–to impose without restraint what he thinks is best–for you, for me, and for whoever is to be. I don’t think we need to look around the corner anymore.

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*Guilty as charged.

You Can’t Fix Fascist: http://ow.ly/kILXj

As Ron White notes, you can’t fix stupid. To that I would add that you can’t fix fascist. No better example can be provided than the aftermath of the Boston bombing. As a libertarian blogger, I mostly hear from thoughtful people wondering how we allowed government to grow so big and what we can do about it. Then there’s the anarchist fringe–people who believe that everything, and I mean everything, that government does is illegitimate. Even they have something valuable to offer–a thought-provoking if sometimes kooky lot. Not so for the scum-ridden worms who managed to turn Boston into an excuse to flaunt their fascist side.

I have always refrained from blocking people on Facebook, deleting posts on my page, or otherwise squelching points of view with which I disagree. Intellectual honesty demands that thinking people expose themselves to the ideas contained in The Communist Manifesto, Mein Kampf, and the NY Times editorial page if for no other reason than to remind oneself that people really do think like that. I altered my no-block policy when mindless vitriol starting showing up after the second alleged bomber was caught. I blocked and/or deleted the posts of more than one person whose skull is teeming with spiders.

The offenders were convinced that Muslims in general were to blame for Boston and should be killed. I neither practice nor defend any organized religion, but I do have the good sense to know that Muslims, like libertarians, Christians, and redheads, are not all cut from the same cloth. Some of the sicker posts gleefully noted that the death of the first brother meant one less Muslim on the planet. Just to be clear, I have no qualms whatsoever about killing a man who is lobbing bombs and firing guns at the police. I do have a problem with hateful simpletons who equate his actions with the millions of people who practice Islam peacefully.

One popular post shows a crusty old man looking down the barrel of a gun toward the camera. The caption reads, “How to wink at a Muslim.” Now I ask you, if you have even considered passing that one on, what in heaven’s name makes that funny? Other posts delighted in making references to celebrations of the first brother’s death with a feast featuring pork. To kill someone who poses an imminent threat is perfectly legitimate; to celebrate it in such a crass manner is disgusting.

Is there, within all of us, a dark corner where such bigotry and hatred lives? I wonder sometimes, given the growing number of radical Muslims, homophobic Christians, misogynists, and misandrists who seem to come crawling out of the cellar lately. Is it just easier to assume that every member of a group of people is the same and deserves contempt or is something much worse than laziness at work here?

I suspect bigotry and its political manifestation fascism is a highly contagious disease, but for all my musings about the root cause, there remains a more important question. What should good people do about it? Talking to bigots rarely works; talking to fascists never does. If they were capable of listening and learning, they would be incapable of holding the views they hold. I learned this recently when I (admittedly impolitely*) suggested to someone that calling for the death of all Muslims was, well, misguided. In my view, the author had leapt over bigotry and done a belly-flop in the cesspool of fascism. His response was to offer to put his boot in my mouth. To paraphrase an old saying, don’t try to teach a fascist to think–it just frustrates you and energizes the fascist.

Yet to let such things pass unchallenged is little better than participating oneself. The less noble part of me wanted an chance to grab that boot, twist off the foot within it, and bludgeon the offender unconscious. It was not one of my better moments and I am not particularly proud of it, but maybe, just maybe, there was someone reading the exchange who not only agreed with me, but who learned from me when to shut up and walk away. Perhaps there was even a bigot reading it who will now think twice before becoming a full-blown fascist.

I have no pat answer, no rule of thumb, no guide for good people. I wish I did. Perhaps each one of us must answer the question for ourselves as to when and how to challenge hatefulness. I do know one thing, though. Letting it fester in our society will be our undoing. Better to challenge a bigot now than deal with a fascist later. Just be careful out there–a true fascist can’t be fixed.

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*I told him that if he could not do better than that to just shut up.

“Best book ever written!” –Terry Noel http://ow.ly/knqCe