Jefferson Review

	Jefferson Review
	"Your Liberty is Our Interest"	January 21, 2001
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Wouldn't it be nice to have a downtown arena?

by Theresa Fritz Camoriano

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a brand new downtown arena and a top NBA franchise playing there, and a new, high-powered, non-polluting car for every licensed driver, and the highest quality health care and education for everyone in the world, and delicious, healthy, gourmet meals on everyone's table every day? And that's just for starters! Every one of us could add plenty to the wish list. Maybe an inexhaustible supply of our favorite drink on tap in our own kitchens, an infinite selection of our favorite music available at the touch of a button, or long vacations to exotic places.

Of course, the list of our desires is endless. Unfortunately, however, our resources are limited, as even the U.S. Congress is learning. We do not live in the land of the big rock candy mountain, with lemonade springs and cigarette trees, and we cannot have everything we want. We must work hard to produce resources, and, in our individual households as well as in state and federal governments, we must eventually make hard choices about how to spend those resources.

The question is, who will do the hard work to produce the resources, and who will control those resources and decide how they will be used? In our families, Mom and Dad do the work to earn the family income, and they make the spending decisions for the family, taking into account the desires and needs of all family members.

But governments do not work to produce the incomes they spend. We do not see President George Bush, Kentucky Governor Paul Patton, or Louisville Mayor Dave Armstrong filling the public coffers from the fruits of their own labor. Unlike Mom and Dad, governments obtain their resources by plunder (called taxation). Government is the only entity that has the legal right to put a gun to our heads and take our money, and that, in very plain terms, is what it does. Then, instead of Mom and Dad being able to use the money they have earned to buy the things they think should have the highest priority for their family, they are forced to hand over what they have earned to the government, so it can be spent according to someone else's priorities.

So, do the government officials spend the money to defend the people from those who would harm them, or do they spend it on arenas, or new cars, or gourmet food for everyone? In the past, there was a general understanding that money taken by the government through force should only be used for very limited purposes, namely, to defend the people's life, liberty, and property, and people should otherwise make their own decisions about the use of their own property. However, these days, there seems to be no limit to the purposes to which people believe the government should spend tax money. Building arenas, subsidizing businesses, and providing jobs to friends and help to everyone, all seem to be high on their list. And the public clamors for more! "Support my cause!" "No, mine!" they all shout. (The people, of course, becoming less and less capable of supporting their own priorities and more dependent upon the government as the tax burden increases.)

The government officials, trying to satisfy everyone's desires, especially their own, then make the government larger and plunder even more from the producers. So, the producers begin to move their homes and businesses away from a high plunder, high tax place to a place where they can continue to control more of what they have produced. After all, humans were not born to be enslaved. But they eventually find that they cannot escape the tax man's plunder. They begin to become discouraged from making the effort and taking the risks to produce more. Just as slaves are inclined to do the least amount of work necessary to survive, at some point, the tax slaves feel they are better off to relax and stop producing for the benefit of their government masters. The result, of course, is fewer resources, greater poverty, and more human suffering, as we have seen repeatedly throughout history, from ancient Rome to recent Russia.

As the ancient Romans and the modern Russians learned, providing bread and circuses (or arenas) through plunder is not the road to Eden. A society cannot plunder its way to utopia. Plunder, even when done legally, brings poverty and strife.

So, if we care about our towns and our country, what can we do to promote the prosperous, healthy places of which we dream? First, we can recognize that plunder is both morally wrong and economically wrong. We all know that it is wrong to steal from our neighbors, and we need to recognize that it is just as wrong to use the force of government to do the job for us, regardless of our good intentions. We can demand that government take only the minimum it needs to carry out its basic function of defending life, liberty and property. We can again respect the rights of each person to control his own mind and body and the fruits of his labor and investment. Then, we will see people using their resources to achieve their goals. And, if we want them to work toward achieving our goals, like arenas or quality health care, we can lead by example, putting our own resources into the cause, and then persuading them of the merits and value of our goals, not putting a gun to their heads.