Taxes, Tobacco, and Other Evils

The one incomparably powerful means of exploitation is the State. It is also the safest means, because it is irresponsible. It is exempt from all the basic sanctions of ordinary morality. It is free to murder, cheat, lie, steal, and persecute at its own good pleasure and without fear of reprisals.
-- Albert Jay Nock (1870-1945)

This was first posted at Mississippi Politics on February 22, 2007. It's a response to Sidney Salter's February 21 column in The Clarion-Ledger. Salter supports a bill in the Mississippi legislature which would greatly increase the tobacco tax while cutting in half the sales tax on groceries.

Sidney Salter wrote: "... in the keeping of his "no-new-tax" pledge, [Gov. Haley] Barbour has married the keeping of his word to bad public policy..."

It's hard to believe, isn't it? A politician is actually keeping his word, but that doesn't seem to matter much to Sidney.

"The question remains whether Mississippi Republicans [led by that evildoer, Gov. Barbour, a former Washington tobacco lobbyist] want the goals of their party in 2007 to be high taxes on food and low taxes on cigarettes."

The current tax rates on food, cigarettes, and just about everything else are creatures of the Democrats. In 1932, Mississippi became the first state to enact a flat-rate, general sales tax. A Democratic governor, Mike Conner, pushed this tax through the Democratic legislature. (Columnist Bill Minor knew Gov. Conner personally.)

In the early 1980s, Democratic Gov. William Winter and the Democratic-dominated legislature raised the sales tax from 5% to 6% for a "temporary" six-month period. At the end of that period, the powers that be decided to make the increase permanent. (Surprise, surprise!)

In 1992, The Clarion-Ledger and others told us that the sales tax needed to be raised from 6% to 7% in order to "save education." (While I can't recall for certain, I suspect that Sidney Salter supported this tax hike.) The proponents of the increase expressed no concern that the full 7% tax would apply to food as well as other retail purchases.

The Democratic-controlled legislature passed the sales tax hike and then overrode the courageous veto of a Republican governor, Kirk Fordice. Most Republican legislators voted against raising the tax.

For years, blacks were a persecuted minority. Today's persecuted minority, however, consists of people of all colors who use a legal product, tobacco.

If you want to see how insane government can become on the tobacco issue, take a look at what's going on in Washington state.

"A banner of bold, unmistakable colors..."

In 1976, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan narrowly lost the Republican presidential nomination to President Gerald Ford at the national convention in Kansas City. The convention's most dramatic moment, in my view, came when President Ford, following his acceptance speech, asked Reagan to come to the podium and address the convention. Reagan, who was sitting in the balcony with his wife Nancy, at first did not comprehend what the president had requested. Here are Reagan's impromptu remarks.

August 19, 1976

Thank you very much. Mr. President, Mrs. Ford, Mr. Vice President [Nelson Rockefeller], Mr. Vice President to be [Kansas Sen. Bob Dole], the distinguished guests here, and you, ladies and gentlemen: I am going to say fellow Republicans here, but also those who are watching from a distance, all of those millions of Democrats and independents who I know are looking for a cause around which to rally and which I believe we can give them.

Mr. President, before you arrived tonight, these wonderful people here, when we came in, gave Nancy and myself a welcome. That, plus this, and plus your kindness and generosity in honoring us by bringing us down here will give us a memory that will live in our hearts forever.

Watching on television these last few nights, and I have seen you also with the warmth that you greeted Nancy, and you also filled my heart with joy when you did that.

May I just say some words. There are cynics who say that a party platform is something that no one bothers to read and it doesn't very often amount to much.

Whether it is different this time than it has ever been before, I believe the Republican Party has a platform that is a banner of bold, unmistakable colors, with no pastel shades.

We have just heard a call to arms based on that platform, and a call to us to really be successful in communicating and reveal to the American people the difference between this platform and the platform of the opposing party, which is nothing but a revamp and a reissue and a running of a late, late show of the thing that we have been hearing from them for the last 40 years.

If I could just take a moment; I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that is going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now, on our Tricentennial.

It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and the issues today. I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day.

Then, as I tried to write -- let your own minds turn to that task. You are going to write for people a hundred years from now, who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don't know what kind of a world they will be living in.

And suddenly I thought to myself, if I write of the problems, they will be the domestic problems the President spoke of here tonight; the challenges confronting us, the erosion of freedom that has taken place under Democratic rule in this country, the invasion of private rights, the controls and restrictions on the vitality of the great free economy that we enjoy. These are our challenges that we must meet.

And then again, there is that challenge of which he spoke, that we live in a world in which the great powers have poised and aimed at each other horrible missiles of destruction, nuclear weapons that can in a matter of minutes arrive at each other's country and destroy, virtually, the civilized world we live in.

And suddenly it dawned on me, those who would read this letter a hundred years from now will know whether those missiles were fired. They will know whether we met our challenge. Whether they have the freedoms that we have known up until now will depend on what we do here.

Will they look back with appreciation and say, "Thank God for those people in 1976 who headed off that loss of freedom, who kept us now 100 years later free, who kept our world from nuclear destruction"?

And if we failed, they probably won't get to read the letter at all because it spoke of individual freedom, and they won't be allowed to talk of that or read of it.

This is our challenge; and this is why here in this hall tonight, better than we have ever done before, we have got to quit talking to each other and about each other and go out and communicate to the world that we may be fewer in numbers than we have ever been, but we carry the message they are waiting for.

We must go forth from here united, determined that what a great general said a few years ago is true: There is no substitute for victory, Mr. President.

Reagan 2020

'A Time for Choosing'

Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in Tampico, Illinois on February 6, 1911. To commemorate his birthday, I am posting the speech which Reagan delivered in behalf of Sen. Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in the fall of 1964. This speech is considered one of the greatest statements of the conservative philosophy.

I am going to talk of controversial things. I make no apology for this.

It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, "We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self government."


This idea -- that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power -- is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream--the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."

The Founding Fathers knew a government can't control the economy without controlling people. And they knew when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. So we have come to a time for choosing.

Public servants say, always with the best of intentions, "What greater service we could render if only we had a little more money and a little more power." But the truth is that outside of its legitimate function, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector.

Yet any time you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we're denounced as being opposed to their humanitarian goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their solutions with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help the less fortunate. They tell us we're always "against," never "for" anything.

We are for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we have accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem. However, we are against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments....

We are for aiding our allies by sharing our material blessings with nations which share our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world.

We need true tax reform that will at least make a start toward restoring for our children the American Dream that wealth is denied to no one, that each individual has the right to fly as high as his strength and ability will take him.... But we cannot have such reform while our tax policy is engineered by people who view the tax as a means of achieving changes in our social structure....

Have we the courage and the will to face up to the immorality and discrimination of the progressive tax, and demand a return to traditional proportionate taxation? . . . Today in our country the tax collector's share is 37 cents of every dollar earned. Freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp.

Are you willing to spend time studying the issues, making yourself aware, and then conveying that information to family and friends? Will you resist the temptation to get a government handout for your community? Realize that the doctor's fight against socialized medicine is your fight. We can't socialize the doctors without socializing the patients. Recognize that government invasion of public power is eventually an assault upon your own business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from customers, clients, or even government, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile hoping he'll eat you last.

If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation.

They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits--not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty."

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.

Reagan2020
Ronald Reagan, Citizen Politician
Ronald Reagan on Lawn Care