Politicians Don't Pay Taxes

It used to be thought that heroism and "courage" meant being willing to go out into the lists, candidly and unafraid, to battle the mighty and despotic powers-that-be. Can we really call it "courage" when a [Walter] Mondale or a [Bruce] Babbitt frankly calls upon the eager state apparatus to increase still further its already outrageous and parasitic plunder of the hard-earned money of honest and productive American citizens? Whooping it up for higher taxes is the moral equivalent of some Ugandan theoretician of a few years ago publicly urging Idi Amin to pile on his looting and despotism still further, or of a Mafia consiligieri advising the capo to add an extra ten percent to the "protection fees" imposed on neighborhood stores. We can think of many names for this sort of activity, but "courage" is surely not one of them.

It might be objected that, after all, a politician who urges higher taxes is not only imposing suffering on other people; he himself as a taxpayer will also have to bear the same deprivations as other citizens. Isn't there, then, a kind of nobility, even if misguided, in his plea for "belt-tightening" common sacrifice?

To meet this question, we must realize a vital truth that has long remained discreetly veiled to the tax-burdened citizenry. And that is: contrary to carefully instilled myth, politicians and bureaucrats pay no taxes. Take, for example, a politician who receives a salary of, say, $80,000; assume he duly files his income tax return, and pays $20,000. We must realize that he does not in reality pay $20,000 in taxes; instead, he is simply a net tax-receiver of $60,000. The notion that he pays taxes is simply an accounting fiction, designed to bamboozle the citizenry into believing that he and the rest of us are on the same moral and financial footing before the law. He pays nothing; he is simply extracting $60,000 per annum from our pockets. The only virtue of the United Nations' employees is that they are frankly and openly exempt from all taxes levied by any nation-state - which simply makes their position the same as other national bureaucrats, except uncamouflaged and unadorned.

The same principle, too, applies to sales or property or any other tax. Bureaucrats and politicians do not pay them; they are simply subtracted from the net transfer to themselves from the body of taxpayers.

-Murray N. Rothbard, Making Economic Sense, p. 212-213, "Babbity and Taxes: A Profile in Courage?"

Something to keep in mind when some jackass bureaucrat mentions how he and his brethren will be "sacrificing" along with the rest of us if taxes are raised. They won't be sacrificing anything; they merely soak up less productive wealth from the rest of us.

By the way, I'm glad I bought those Mises Institute books. I've finished them all except for Making Economic Sense. I'm about halfway through it and am quite pleased with the content. Some of it is obviously duplicated in Rockwell's The Economics of Liberty, but otherwise I'm struck by the clarity and fervor of Rothbard's writing. I still don't have any of his "serious" work like Man, Economy, and State, but reading these opinion articles from his days publishing at The Free Market has been enlightening.

Posted by Drizzten at May 06, 2004 04:09 PM