Tax Lawyer's Blog

“The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

- Vladmir Lenin -

Professor Richard Lavoie of Akron University laments that patriotism is more aligned with the anti-tax, small government movement than it is with high-taxes and big government:

The existing research suggests that patriotism may be a weaker tax compliance factor in the United States than elsewhere. In light of this possibility, the Tea Party movement has the potential to weaken this factor even more. Further, the Tea Party movement presents other challenges for the legitimacy of the tax system that could ultimately unbalance the taxpaying ethos in the United States.

And like all good progressive academicians he has a solution:

In order to strengthen the impact of patriotism on tax compliance, and lessen any adverse impact of the Tea Party movement on the country’s taxpaying ethos, the government should take steps to disentangle American patriotism from its anti-tax roots. Important first steps in this regard are outlined in the article, including the creation of a voluntary “Patriotic Remittance Tax”.

Making such changes will strengthen the bond between taxpayers and the government and help promote a vision of American patriotism that is positively associated with taxation rather than being antithetical to it.

Lavoie is seriously suggesting that the proponents of big government and high taxes engage in a campaign of propaganda that will “lessen the adverse impact of the Tea Party movement on the country’s taxpaying ethos” by labeling the opponents of high taxes and big government unpatriotic.

Saul Alinsky would be proud.

Back when Bush was in charge left wingers repeatedly assured us that dissent was the most patriotic thing an American citizen could do. But now that we have a liberal Executive and a liberal Congress, it appears that dissent is unpatriotic.

The hypocrisy is so palpable you need a pair of industrial shears to cut through it.

During the previous administration the left went on foreign soil to criticize George Bush’s war policies while American troops were in the field of combat. Today, Lavoie’s loathed Tea Partiers are criticizing Obama’s domestic policies and are doing it on American, not foreign, soil.¹

Lavoie has it backwards when he says that opposing big government and high taxes is (or should be seen as) unpatriotic. The most patriotic thing an American can do is oppose the unbridled expansion of government at the expense of individual freedom. And since the government expands through increased taxes, it is likewise patriotic to oppose high taxes, especially when you consider the federal government’s long and storied history of wasting taxpayers’ money.

(Hat Tip: Paul Caron)

Footnotes:

¹  Here are two examples of dissent that people of the left called patriotic during the Bush administration

Representative Pete Stark (D-CA):

[President Bush] you don’t have money to fund the war or children. But you’re going to spend it to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president’s amusement.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL):

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

      Now compare those vile and potentially seditious comments to the the following anti-tax statements that Lavoie would consider unpatriotic if spoken by a Tea Partier:

Thomas Jefferson:

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work to give to those who are not.

Thomas Paine:

There are two distinct classes of men…those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes.

Ronald Reagan:

Man is not free unless the government is limited.

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