President Biden revived one of the Democrat/left’s greatest hits in his shoutfest that passed for a State of the Union address last month:
And now it’s my goal to cut the federal deficit $3 trillion more by making big corporations and the very wealthy finally pay their fair share.
Look, I’m a capitalist.
If you want to make a million bucks – great!
Just pay your fair share in taxes.
Tell it to Hunter, Joe! And by the way, Joe, you’re the kind of “capitalist” who gives capitalism a bad name.
I am quite sure that I have paid more than my share in taxes for many years. It ought to be a crime. Instead, it’s the law.
What is your fair share? They never do tell us.
Why so shy? We we can never quit worrying about their coming back for more. There is a reason they never tell us what our “fair share” is.
Modern American leftism is anchored in a deep hostility to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern liberalism lie in an assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Thus, to take a recent example, the EPA rule mandating the replacement of cars, trucks, and buses as we know them with electric simulacra in the name of controlling the climate.
William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State was published by Encounter Books in 2010 and remains in print with a preface Bill wrote for the paperback edition. Along with Paul Rahe’s Soft Despotism and Philip Hamburger’s Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, it is a key to understanding the current era of American politics.
Upon the original publication of Never Enough in 2010, George Will drew attention to it in his excellent column “The danger of a government with unlimited power.” Michael Lind attacked Will and came to the defense of liberalism. Voegeli struck back in the NRO column “Why liberalism is dangerous.” Voegeli had reignited an argument that ultimately requires us to recover a basic understanding of limited constitutional government.
In its Winter 2011/2012 issue the Claremont Review of Books published Bill’s preface to the paperback edition as the essay “Enough already.” In this essay Voegeli meditated (among other things) on the timing of the book’s original publication.
Listening to Biden’s shoutfest last month I annoyed myself with my old thoughts about the claim regarding the obligation to pay our “fair share.” Why do they never tell us what it is? I had forgotten the answer that Bill supplied until I saw his book on my bookshelf this morning when I sat down to write. I thought some readers might find the book and related items of interest.
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