Taxes, Progress, and Censorship April 27, 2011March 24, 2017 PROGRESS Yesterday: the link to where your tax dollars go. Today: the progress those tax dollars have allowed us to make since pulling back from the brink of depression. THE CASE FOR TAXATION Russell Bell: “Isn’t the best rationale for tax policy that it makes us free, safe, healthy, wealthy, protects persons and property, makes society just? Steve Jobs isn’t wealthy just because he’s brilliant but because he lives in a society that maintains a physical infrastructure that makes the stuff Apple Computer produces the next thing almost everyone wants to buy and an educational infrastructure that provides him competent workers and citizens wealthy enough to buy his products. We will have a freer, safer, healthier, and wealthier country if we expect government to provide the services that make us that way and pay for them. You accept the argument that taxes are a burden and that wealthy people have to pay a larger share because they can, not that taxes are the appropriate price of valuable services and the wealthy pay a larger share because they reap a greater benefit. Have you read Edmund Phelps’ Rewarding Work: How To Restore Participation And Self-Support To Free Enterprise? It’s about the social value of work. The underlying idea is that society can spend money on individuals that benefits society. I commend this idea as the legitimizing idea for taxes. You can read my modest and short review here.” UTERUS. THERE: I SAID IT If you have five minutes (or a uterus), watch this censored Florida legislator make his case for choice. He calls out his state legislative colleagues for espousing small, hand s-off government for corporations but big, intrusive government for average citizens like his wife.