Tax Neutrality

If leftists really believed in the separation of church and state, they should advocate tax neutrality and abolish the various loopholes in the tax system. But they do not. They want to engineer the tax system so as to favor their leftist causes. So what they mean by “church” in the phrase is “Christianity”. They want to marry their church of godlessness to the state and enforce that religion known as atheism-Marxism by state's power of the sword.

Tax neutrality means that the tax system does not favor one activity over another. The activity may be buying and owning a house, getting married and rearing children*, giving to one’s religious organization, versus renting, indulging in luxury, etc. When special tax breaks are given to some activities, what the government is really saying is that it believes these activities are more worthwhile than the society as a whole determines through the free-market system and the sum of individual decisions. That is a value judgment made by the governing class which pander to the rich and thereby share the rich’s riches. And value judgments are religious. In other words, by engineering the tax system our rulers are imposing the religious value judgments upon everyone by making their preferred activities less expensive and others more expensive. So much for separation of church and state.

The Tax Foundation’s recent paper on AMT and tax reform is a lucid exposition on the systemic problems in our completely rotten tax code. More patchwork will not fix it, only an overhaul will. But I am not holding my breath.

*A case can be made for favoring and encouraging marriage and having children, since that is essential for the survival of a nation. But one needs to be careful in making the case since anything can be argued in this way: the unwashed masses don’t know what’s best for them individually and collectively, so we must tinker the system (at the very least) to encourage them to behave in a certain way. And we know what results from such a line of argument.