From The American Lee Harris writes Why Not Soak the Rich? 3/6/13

Lee raises the question of why so many middle class republicans are so reluctant to raise the taxes on the wealthiest.  This confounds liberals who voiced this question in What’s The Matter With Kansas?

His article traces the redistribution of property through brute force and through the philosophical elite to settle on our system of  laws and why the middle class holds these property rights to be “sacred”.

He concluded:

Clearly Blackstone himself is a bit puzzled how nothing more than “a set of words upon parchment” came to hold such a grip over the imagination of his countrymen — and their American cousins, too, it must be added. Yet the brief sketch we have offered up to this point indicates that there should be nothing very surprising about this. A society whose members have been imbued from birth with superstitious awe before “a set of words upon parchment” will keep their quarrels and conflict over property restricted to courts of law. They will not resort to violence for their own gain, nor will they tolerate anyone attempting to do so. They will not try to rise up in revolutionary frenzy in order to expropriate the wealth of others. Nor will they long tolerate a government that refuses to honor their own sacred rights of property, confirmed by their own “set of words upon parchment.” All these factors taken together will redound to the general welfare, both politically and economically, of any society in which this peculiar superstition — or taboo — has taken root at the unshakable visceral level. Any society that has reached this point has traveled an immense distance from the world in which the ownership of property was decided simply by brute force.

Throughout history, soaking the rich has proven a quick fix to temporary emergencies and crises, like the one we are facing today. But it is inevitably a fix that comes with a high cost. By undermining the taboo against expropriating wealth, it makes all private property less secure, including the property of the middle class. Let liberal intellectuals poke holes in the myth of the sanctity of private property, but respect the power for good that this myth has conferred on those societies that are, for the most part, strongly under its spell. The superstitious awe and visceral reverence that ordinary people feel toward “a set of words upon parchment” has proven indispensable to securing economic prosperity and political stability over the course of centuries. The ordinary man’s reluctance to speculate philosophically about property, and its origins and rights, might make him appear dense or incurious to the sophisticated intellectual, who relishes such abstruse discussions, but this indefatigably hard-headed approach to such questions has had the altogether salubrious effect of steadying the boat and keeping it on an even keel, despite the winds of revolution that have tossed and wrecked those ships that lacked their ballast of common sense.

HKO

We know that the wealthy do not have the resources to support the welfare state that is proposed.  The educated middle class know that eventually the “rich” must be defined to include them. The mobility of the Americans also  creates the aspiration to be wealthy and may create some empathy as well.   We saw that the taxes on millionaires and billionaires made great campaign rhetoric but the first application came to those who made only $250,000.  Howard Dean noted that the middle class will ultimately have to increase their tax load to fund the government.

The real question is not why do conservatives vote against their self interest  as posed in What’s The Matter With Kansas.  The real question is why some think the middle class is so stupid that they will not recognize they they will ultimately be targeted for higher taxes as well. They understand that unless spending is reduced they will also have to pay higher taxes.

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