Talking to the tax man about slavery
First we had Grover Norquist insisting that if you're opposed to repeal of the estate tax, you're thinking like a Nazi. Now we have Paul Craig Roberts (former Reagan Treasury Department official) telling us that the slaves of the Old South had it easy compared with those of us living today under the savage whip of the Internal Revenue Service. Roberts' argument is wacky enough to deserve extensive quotation:
| | Compare an American taxpayer's situation today with that of a 19th century American slave. Not all slaves worked on cotton plantations. Some with marketable skills were leased to businesses or released to labor markets, where they worked for money wages. Just like the wages of today’s taxpayer, a portion of the slave's money wages was withheld. In those days the private owner, not the government, received the withheld portion of the slave’s wages.
Slaves in that situation were as free as today's American taxpayer to choose their housing from the available stock, purchase their food and clothing, and entertain themselves.
In fact, they were freer than today's American taxpayer. By hard work and thrift, they could save enough to purchase their freedom.
No American today can purchase his freedom from the IRS.
Slaves could also run away. Today, Americans who run away are pursued to the far ends of the earth. |
One's first impulse is to drive a rhetorical truck through the many vast logical and historical lapses in Roberts' thinking. But I'll leave that to the reader (or to Eugene Volokh, who does a fine job), and simply marvel at the expansive chutzpah of today's extremist right.
Let's see: We've now heard taxation likened to Nazism and slavery; what other provocative and tasteless comparisons await us? Is the IRS commissioner more vicious than Charles Manson? Do you feel raped every April 15? Is the form 1040 more repugnant than child pornography?
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