No Coercion

I all too often find myself on the receiving end of accusations of greed. Online discussions with what I’ll call the authoritarian left (meaning, for this post, those who are proponents of initiating force against others in order to redistribute wealth) many times degenerate into libertarians and fiscal/economic conservatives being called “greedy” because they object to their wealth and property being taken from them and given to someone else.

But does that really make sense? Is it greedy to not want your wealth confiscated by force? I can’t see how it could be.

Rather, it seems to me that it’s the authoritarian left who are greedy. They have some goal they want to achieve (educating children or helping the poor and homeless perhaps), and rather than spending more of their own money and time and attempting to peacefully persuade others to contribute money or time to their cause, they instead resort to the use of force to compel others to contribute to the cause against their will, by which I mean they use the power of government to collect taxes and spend the money on their cause.

The fact is we all have causes that we support. And I would venture to say that most of us agree on some of the major ones. We all want to see poverty and homelessness eliminated. We all want to eradicate cancer and disease. We all want children to receive some kind of education (though we don’t all agree that they should be herded into the government control facilities known as public schools). The difference is that some of us are willing to spend our own time and money on these causes in proportion to how much we have to give and how strongly we feel about each cause, and others would rather spend less of their own time and money while forcing others to contribute against their will. So who really are the greedy ones?

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One of the things President Obama has been touting is his idea of a “culture of service” in which we all do something to “give back” and help the country.

What? Seriously?

Last I checked, most of us spend the first several months of the year serving our local, state, and federal governments. The average person doesn’t start earning more than his annual combined tax bill until March or April (for the country as a whole, it’s known as Tax Freedom Day, and the date was April 23rd last year).

So in addition to the involuntary service government extracts from us under threat of violence, the Prez has the gall to ask us to give up even more of our life to serve the country? Talk about adding insult to injury. And on top of that he wants to use the money his agents confiscate from us to fund national service programs! Is there a better definition of insanity?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for volunteer work to do those things in our communities that just wouldn’t get done by for-profit entities. But the best way to facilitate more of that would be to reduce our taxes and end the inefficient and malincented government programs that purport to do those same things (like welfare, Medicare, Social Security, the various service programs, etc).

When many Americans are struggling just to feed their kids and keep their water and power on, they don’t need the government’s Enforcer-in-Chief telling them to sacrifice even more. They need that 20-30% of their paychecks that is stolen from them.

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