Source:  How Today's Conservatism Lost Touch with Reality, by Fareed Zakaria. Time, June 16, 2011.

"Conservatism is true." That's what George Will told me when I interviewed him as an eager student many years ago. His formulation might have been a touch arrogant, but Will's basic point was intelligent. Conservatism, he explained, was rooted in reality. Unlike the abstract theories of Marxism and socialism, it started not from an imagined society but from the world as it actually exists. From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, the greatest conservative thinkers have said that to change societies, one must understand them, accept them as they are and help them evolve.

Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America's present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.

Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.

Many Republican businessmen have told me that the Obama Administration is the most hostile to business in 50 years. Really? More than that of Richard Nixon, who presided over tax rates that reached 70%, regulations that spanned whole industries, and who actually instituted price and wage controls?

In fact, right now any discussion of government involvement in the economy — even to build vital infrastructure — is impossible because it is a cardinal tenet of the new conservatism that such involvement is always and forever bad. Meanwhile, across the globe, the world's fastest-growing economy, China, has managed to use government involvement to create growth and jobs for three decades. From Singapore to South Korea to Germany to Canada, evidence abounds that some strategic actions by the government can act as catalysts for free-market growth.

Of course, American history suggests that as well. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the U.S. government made massive investments in science and technology, in state universities and in infant industries. It built infrastructure that was the envy of the rest of the world. Those investments triggered two generations of economic growth and put the U.S. on top of the world of technology and innovation.

But that history has been forgotten. When considering health care, for example, Republicans confidently assert that their ideas will lower costs, when we simply do not have much evidence for this. What we do know is that of the world's richest countries, the U.S. has by far the greatest involvement of free markets and the private sector in health care. It also consumes the largest share of GDP, with no significant gains in health on any measurable outcome. We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don't bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. "I know it works in practice," the old saw goes, "but does it work in theory?"

Conservatives used to be the ones with heads firmly based in reality. Their reforms were powerful because they used the market, streamlined government and empowered individuals. Their effects were large-scale and important: think of the reform of the tax code in the 1980s, for example, which was spearheaded by conservatives. Today conservatives shy away from the sensible ideas of the Bowles-Simpson commission on deficit reduction because those ideas are too deeply rooted in, well, reality. Does anyone think we are really going to get federal spending to the level it was at under Calvin Coolidge, as Paul Ryan's plan assumes? Does anyone think we will deport 11 million people?

We need conservative ideas to modernize the U.S. economy and reform American government. But what we have instead are policies that don't reform but just cut and starve government — a strategy that pays little attention to history or best practices from around the world and is based instead on a theory. It turns out that conservatives are the woolly-headed professors after all.

Submitted by:  Soullfire

Money; the Federal Reserve can print it, the Federal Government can borrow as much of it as they want, but we need to earn ours; after we do, we’ll have every government agency or municipality trying to take as much of it away from us as they possibly can (without causing a revolution). First they’ll try to look sincere as they explain to us that taking our money is really for our own good, or the greater good, or the future, or our children’s future; they’ll tell us that they’ll use our earnings better than we can. We’ll actually be better off after they confiscate the money that we worked for. All we need to do is trust them and shovel it over, they’ll do the rest.

They try to use benign, friendly sounding words to describe what they’re doing; It’s not “theft”, it’s not “looting”, it’s not “extortion”; they prefer “withholding.” If the government didn’t “withhold” their cut from our paychecks, and we had to write them a check each month, I think most of us would feel differently about the income taxes that we pay.

We the People, will inevitably try to hang on to as much of our earnings as we can, when we do, we’ll be labeled “greedy.” If a person is “greedy” for wanting to keep what they worked hard for, what would you call the person that didn’t earn it, but thinks they have a right to it? What would you call the people that take it by force?

The IRS or other tax agencies will threaten to use force to take their “fair share” of our income. They don’t really do too much saber rattling until they have to, but we all know what the consequences would be. If the IRS doesn’t get what they want (out of what we worked for), they’ll eventually send people with guns to either take it, or put us into a prison. If you don’t believe that, just ask Wesley Snipes; you can contact him at Pennsylvania's McKean Federal Correctional Institute. So much for the idea of a “free country”.

If you don’t think of your money as just paper, if you think of it as your labor, your work, your risk, your time, your reward and your value to your employer, it suddenly means quite a lot more. It reflects the value of your work. It’s not just paper after all, is it?

Have you ever stopped to think about how much you pay in taxes? I’m not just talking about your income tax (but that’s bad enough), if you added them all up, how much of your money goes to governments?

The top federal income tax rate is now 35%, but most of us are probably paying at the 25 or 28% tax rate. At least one day in four, you’re not working for yourself or your family; you’re working for the Federal Government. That comes out to three months of each year, but we’re still not even close to finished.

New York State takes another 7% from our earnings, which means we’re paying 32% or 35% of our income to our governments, 42% if we’re in the top tax bracket. Including New York State’s cut, we’re working about one day in three for governments. If you work in New York City, they’ll take between 2.907% and 3.648% of your earnings. That brings us to between 35% and 45% of our salaries going to taxes, so we’re up to about four months a year. That’s January, February, March and April before we get to keep any of what we work so hard for.

Of course we also have sales tax in NY, here in Nassau County it’s 8.625%. On a thirty thousand dollar car, that’s about $2,500, on a $100 dinner in a restaurant, that’s a little under nine bucks, on that $6,000 living room set, it’s more than $500. What do you think it all adds up to by the end of the year?

We also pay taxes on our property; if you have a small Cape Cod style home on 1/4 acre in my home town (Glen Cove, NY), you’re probably paying somewhere between seven and eight thousand dollars a year in property taxes; it goes up a lot higher than that, depending on square footage of the home and lot size. If you’re a renter, the property taxes are factored in, making your rent higher. There are taxes on your telephone bills, television bills, your cigarettes, your beer, your soda, nearly everything is taxed.

There are countless taxes that are more or less invisible that we don’t really think about; in NY we’re paying a tax of 61.9 cents per gallon of gasoline. Fill ‘er up! About 10 bucks from that 15 gallons of gasoline you just bought goes to our government.

The fuel taxes also drive up the cost of transportation and shipping. Nearly everything we own, eat or consume had to be shipped to us from somewhere; fuel taxes are factored into the price of everything we purchase.

The Corporate tax rate in the US is at 35% and is the second highest in the world, after Japan (no wonder unemployment is over 9%, how do we compete?). That 35% isn’t absorbed by the corporation, it’s factored into the price of their product and is hitting us pretty hard at the checkout line, for anything that’s American made anyway. Fewer and fewer things are American made, partially thanks to that 35% tax rate.

Companies are taxed on their employees (also causing prices to rise and contributing to unemployment). The payroll tax is based on how many employees a business has, which of course causes businesses to hire fewer employees. It also causes businesses to move out of our country.

They even tax the dead. The “Estate Tax or “Death Tax” will take a sizable portion of money that you thought you were leaving to the kids. If a person managed to accumulate a chunk of money after paying all of those taxes over the course of their life, and would like to leave it to their children, first the Feds will take their cut. If we die in debt, don’t expect them to take a share of that; they’ll allow your children to inherit your debt.

I realize governments run on money, and we need to pay taxes. It’s inescapable and to an extent understandable, but we’re really paying too much; we’re choking on them. We’re working more than half of our hours to feed the growing government (and they have the nerve to tell us that they’re working for us). The average, working American pays more in taxes than we do for food, housing and clothing combined. How much is “fair”? Does more than half sound “fair” to you? It sounds pretty unfair to me. Do you think it will ever be enough for them?

Nobel Prize winning economist FA Hayek wrote about the tyranny of top down economic planning in his book “The Road to Serfdom”. He explained that it leads to tyranny, taxation and eventually totalitarianism. Ayn Rand wrote about it too, her novel “Atlas Shrugged” might have seemed a bit far fetched to some in 1957, but these days it’s reading like actual headlines. If you haven’t read Hayek or Rand, give ‘em a go. While you’re at it, read the other side in Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto “Das Kapital”. See what parts of these philosopher’s theories you recognize in today’s America.

When the Government takes more than half of what we earn, it doesn’t really feel like we’re “On the Road to Serfdom”, it feels like we’ve arrived.

Submitted by:  Cidriullo                  Link to:  Original Post