Senator Joe Lieberman Says Property Belongs First To Government, Not The People, by Tom Randall

BACKGROUND: Touring the State Fair in Iowa, where the first presidential vote will be held in 2004, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) criticized President Bush’s proposal to make the current temporary tax cuts permanent, saying, “That’s not spending restraint. Tax cuts are spending.”

TEN SECOND RESPONSE: To say tax cuts are spending implies all money belongs to the government. It doesn’t. Taxes are the people’s property, which the government takes from them.

THIRTY SECOND RESPONSE: Karl Marx, the founder of communism, would have believed taxes were spending because under communism all money and other forms of property first belong to the state. It does not. Money in America belongs to the people who work hard for it. Taxes are the money government takes from the people. To say, “Tax cuts are spending,” demonstrates the warped notion of freedom held by many in Washington.

DISCUSSION: The notion that property belongs first to the state not only goes against everything our Founding Fathers fought for, it refutes everything Americans and others fought and died for in the long Cold War against communism. Property, like power, in this and any free country, is not handed down from on high by the federal government. It is what a free people voluntarily hand down to the government that belongs to, and owes its existence to, them. Two quotes make the distinction clear:

“That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed” — The Declaration of Independence, Second Continental Congress, July 4, 1776

“In this sense, the theory of communists may be summed up in one sentence: Abolition of private property.” — The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848.

Very different world views.



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