Saturday, June 30, 2012

For the power to tax is the power to destroy

In his Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II warned us that, "....totalitarianism arises out of a denial of truth in the objective sense. If there is no transcendent truth, in obedience to which man achieves his full identity, then there is no sure principle for guaranteeing just relations between people. Their self-interest as a class, group or nation would inevitably set them in opposition to one another. If one does not acknowledge transcendent truth, then the force of power takes over, and each person tends to make full use of the means at his disposal in order to impose his own interests or his own opinion, with no regard for the rights of others. People are then respected only to the extent that they can be exploited for selfish ends. Thus, the root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person who, as the visible image of the invisible God, is therefore by his very nature the subject of rights which no one may violate — no individual, group, class, nation or State. Not even the majority of a social body may violate these rights, by going against the minority, by isolating, oppressing, or exploiting it, or by attempting to annihilate it.." (No. 44).


We ignore this truth at our own peril. So many are asleep as this country races toward tyranny. The ObamaCare mandate has been upheld and the socialist agenda to use the power of government to control the health decisions of Americans gains momentum.  But this is only the beginning of the socialist power grab.  Their ultimate goal is to place the power of government over the rights of citizens.

Stefano Gennarini, J.D., writing for Turtle Bay and Beyond, puts things in perspective nicely: "When you voted for this sleek, well spoken and sophisticated politician four years ago you may have never suspected it, or perhaps you knew it all along: he is an old fashioned believer in the absolute state.


What the health care law has really brought home is how un-american Obama is. Here we have a president who wants to force people to buy health insurance. It is hard to believe we have been even speaking about this for the past three years! Obama has no qualms about forcing people to buy health insurance, telling us that it is perfectly within the government’s prerogative to do something like that.

Now, that sounds like a French monarch in pre-revolutionary France ordering his subjects to kneel, Napoleon Bonaparte re-writing the laws of half of Europe, or even more recently, a Communist party telling people what they can and cannot do.

Indeed, here in America we believe in government by, from, and for the people, not the other way around. The Constitution of the United States, the first Constitution, and the model for all subsequent ones, sets up a government of limited, enumerated powers. This is a peculiarly and exclusively American novelty. And we have always understood this to mean, that there are certain things that the government cannot do, like telling religious employers to pay for abortions, or forcing people to buy health insurance, stop smoking and drinking sugary drinks.

Obama instead, seems to believe in a government philosophy that is totalitarian, like those of Europe. All these things would be possible in Europe, where the government is seen as the absolute embodiment of sovereignty, just like a king was perceived as the embodiment of the will of God. But not in America, that is until Obama became King… I mean, President.

Many of us hoped Roberts would be the one to lead the charge against such a notion of absolute government. Thankfully, our chief justice has delivered us from the power to regulate commerce, which had oppressed us so for the last three quarters of a century. For the power to regulate commerce was indeed oppressive, seeing as it was used to regulate commerce between states in harmful substances like marijuana, and home grown cereals and grains. No longer shall these abuses continue because we now know that 'economic inactivity' cannot be regulated under the commerce clause of the Constitution.

After all, we have a written Constitution, and our government is one of enumerated powers. Enumerated powers indeed, except for those that are in fact unlimited. For example, the power to tax.

For the power to tax is the power to destroy, and destroy us it will. Soon there will be taxes for all those of us who do not brush our teeth five times a day, don’t exercise regularly, smoke real tobacco as opposed to strawberry flavored electric cigarettes, drink sugary drinks etc. After all, these acts or omissions will affect our health, and ultimately also affect the price of the premiums that our fellow Americans are forced to pay. The only caveat is that, when Congress will enact these new taxes, they will have originated in the Senate, they will be called penalties, the anti-injunction act will not apply, and the President will have vigorously denied that they are a tax on national TV.

But of one thing we should all be glad, the Supreme Court’s institutional integrity is preserved for generations to come. In fifty years time, Americans and the world will be able to look back on these past twenty years of Supreme Court history as the period of the Catholic US Supreme Court. 'That' they will say, 'was the Court that established definitively that abortion is a woman’s right, and upheld the Health Care Law that threatened to put Catholic hospitals, schools, and tens of thousands of Catholic charities out of business out of judicial integrity and deference.' Never mind all the new Constitutional problems for the Supreme Court to resolve in the future because of the Court’s Catholic schizophrenia."


John Marshall, in a Supreme Court opinion denying the right of the State of Maryland to impose a tax on the Bank of the United States (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819), stressed firmly, "That the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create...are propositions not to be denied." 

For the power to tax is the power to destroy.  This is the socialist agenda.  To destroy America financially, to cripple her, in the hope that many will say, along with Dr. Henry Spaak, former Secretary General of NATO, "What we want is a man of sufficient stature to hold the alliances of all people and to lift us out of the economic morass into which we are sinking. Send us such a man, and be he god or devil, we will receive him."




3 comments:

Tim said...

Paul,

Isn't the piont here that the USA is a democracy. Yes the Government can tax you, but they can also be booted out by the citizens. The citizens retain ultimate power.

The Government taxes you and spends that money in lots of other ways. Some of your tax money pays for schools, some for the Army. Do you object to being taxed for those purposes too? Or do you accept that it is better to live in a country where kids are educated and you are kept safe from the bad-guys? Taxing and spending on healthcare really isn't quantitively different from taxing and spending on highways, schools, libraries, air defence or whatever.

I don't know how we can call ourselves a Christian nation if we have all this wealth and yet we still have people dying because of lack of health coverage. Noone likes paying tax, but when people's lives are at stake it strikes me as morally wrong to let them die. If the contraceptive mandate was removed, I would be a strong supported of Obamacare.

Paul Anthony Melanson said...

No. You're actually missing the point here Tim. As Stefano Gennarini has said, "Here we have a president who wants to force people to buy health insurance. It is hard to believe we have been even speaking about this for the past three years! Obama has no qualms about forcing people to buy health insurance, telling us that it is perfectly within the government’s prerogative to do something like that.

Now, that sounds like a French monarch in pre-revolutionary France ordering his subjects to kneel, Napoleon Bonaparte re-writing the laws of half of Europe, or even more recently, a Communist party telling people what they can and cannot do.

Indeed, here in America we believe in government by, from, and for the people, not the other way around. The Constitution of the United States, the first Constitution, and the model for all subsequent ones, sets up a government of limited, enumerated powers. This is a peculiarly and exclusively American novelty. And we have always understood this to mean, that there are certain things that the government cannot do, like telling religious employers to pay for abortions, or forcing people to buy health insurance, stop smoking and drinking sugary drinks."

You see Tim, this country was not founded as a Democracy. It was founded as a Constitutional Republic.

It's ironic that you write, "I don't know how we can call ourselves a Christian nation if we have all this wealth and yet we still have people dying because of lack of health coverage. No one likes paying tax, but when people's lives are at stake it strikes me as morally wrong to let them die."

Actually, ObamaCare will lead to rationing care. For example, ObamaCare creates a new office of comparative effectiveness research. This office will study the value of one treatment or therapy, comparing it with others, to see which is more effective.

But, as Newt Gingrich correctly notes, "Secular socialism [represented by the Obama agenda] has put comparative effectiveness research in the United States on the same path as in Britain: toward becoming a bureaucratic cost-control measure. The United Kingdom, which has a nationalized, single-payer health system, explicitly uses comparative effectiveness to ration medical care. Government uses this research to decide, sometimes with devastating consequences, which treatments its citizens can get." (To Save America, p. 105).

Paul Anthony Melanson said...

Here is one example of what happens when government takes over health care Tim:

http://www.naturalnews.com/
028460_elderly_hospitals.html

Elderly patients being put to death. Remember all the talk about death panels? Is this your idea of quality care? Of moral care?

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