>Finally the compariuon to income tax is flawed in os many ways it is
>almost impossible to account for them all. The basic point is that
>progressive taxation si not reparations paid from the rich to the
>poor. It reflects the idea that pre-tax income is not an
>unqualified entitlement, that society has prior claims on people's
>income to attain necessary goals such as financing public goods the
>market cannot provide (roads, schools, defense, etc.), to help
>provide for those who cannot provide for themselves -- not ina
>fingere-pointing way, saying, this the fault of the rich, but rather
>because people shouldn't starve on the street, and to do so in
>accord with ability to pay because addition money is worth less to
>rich than to the poor.
Perhaps, arguments for reparations ought to be tied not to arguments for income taxes but to arguments for estate and inheritance taxes. When Theodore Roosevelt argued for a progressive estate tax, he cleverly employed a good deal of finger-pointing and guilt-tripping by using a rhetorical division between "fortunes well-won and fortunes ill-won," "those gained as an incident to performing great services to the community as a whole, and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law-honesty":
<blockquote>1906 In a speech on April 14, 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed a progressive estate tax:
It is important to this people to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes, and the use of those fortunes, both corporate and individual, in business. We should discriminate in the sharpest way between fortunes well-won and fortunes ill-won; between those gained as an incident to performing great services to the community as a whole, and those gained in evil fashion by keeping just within the limits of mere law-honesty.
Of course no amount of charity in spending such fortunes in any way compensates for misconduct in making them. As a matter of personal conviction, and without pretending to discuss the details or formulate the system, I feel that we shall ultimately have to consider the adoption of some such scheme as that of a progressive tax on all fortunes, beyond a certain amount either given in life or devised or bequeathed upon death to any individual -- a tax so framed as to put it out of the power of the owner of one of these enormous fortunes to hand on more than a certain amount to any one individual; the tax, of course, to be imposed by the National and not the State Government.
Such taxation should, of course, be aimed merely at the inheritance or transmission in their entirety of those fortunes swollen beyond all healthy limits.
<http://www.tax.org/Museum/1901-1932.htm></blockquote>
Also, the federal and state governments practice asset forfeitures, confiscating fortunes tied to drug dealing, money laundering, terrorism, and the like. Asset forfeiture laws have been misapplied by the Right, to be sure, increasing the hardships of (sometimes totally innocent) victims of the "war on drugs" and "war on terror" and their families. Suppose, though, that the American people succeed in electing a left-wing populist government. Wouldn't it be a good idea to craft asset forfeiture laws against corporations found to have benefited from forced labor (regardless of forced laborers' racial and ethnic identities), land theft, ethnic cleansing, environmental destruction, and so on, in order to socialize the confiscated wealth for the benefit of the poor here and elsewhere? The idea is to say that we will take over bad corporations and operate them for the common good but allow good corporate citizens to stay in business, which will get us to a kind of progressive mixed economy. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>