The Totalitarian Consensus
June 29, 2012 6 Comments
Fun brain teaser for Obamacare supporters and ‘constitutional lawyer’ sage-priests: Describe a conceivable government power that couldn’t, in principle, be cast as a tax.
I dare you. In fact should go ahead and offer a reward. I’d never have to pay out.
The draft. Assassination-by-Predator. Guantanamo. Criminalization of marijuana. Criminalization of anything.
Yes, anything financial can be cast as a tax, which makes sense if you think about it for a fraction of a second. Anything with non-financial coercive effects cannot be..
Report to the Fort or pay a tax. Go to jail for marijuana or pay a tax. Go to jail for (anything) or pay a tax. Can’t/don’t pay the tax, you go to jail. Stand under this exploding Predator or pay a tax. (Not sure what you mean by ‘Guantanamo’.)
Make the ‘tax’ largely (albeit not completely) unpayable and for all intents you replicate all those policies.
As I’ve said before, this idea that human behavior/action can be cleanly separated into stuff that’s ‘financial’ and stuff that somehow isn’t, is a superstition. One held, apparently, by the entire legal profession.
Oh sure but that’s not what happened. The ACA penalty is relatively small, means-tested, and not even enforceable with jail if you don’t pay. If you ignore everything about the law and the court’s opinion then your reductio works, but that’s not a good way to do public policy or constitutional law or really anything at all.
If I end up with a tax liability of $X000 and don’t pay it I’m pretty sure I will go to jail, even if some portion of that liability came from the ACA tax. Money is fungible. Why do I have to keep reminding people of this? Bizarre.
Maybe one can say a person wouldn’t go to jail for not paying the ACA tax if their final tax liability ended up being the exact amount of the ACA tax. Otherwise, it’s not clear how within a tax liability of $X000 dollars you’re supposed to separate out the Dollars Due To ACA Tax and the Dollars Due To Other Tax.
In any event, what are you arguing with? You were supposed to come up with examples of policies that couldn’t be cast as a ‘tax’. We agree that the ACA is not such a policy (=it is a tax), and I have described how those other policies could work as taxes as well.
The right to tax is a power of the federal government. Maybe the federal government always had the power to do literally anything it pleased as long as it was phrased as a financial penalty. Doesn’t make it right though.
Well, it basically depends on what ‘tax’ means or whether there are any limitations on what the government can ‘tax’ people *to do*. We are finding out, retroactively, that ‘tax’ means ‘exercise any power you feel like, as long as you do so via ‘taxing’ the people who don’t comply with that power’. This is the definition of ‘tax’ ratified by the Court yesterday, and although it was not obvious this was the definition we had been working with or that had been envisioned by those who put that word into the Constitution (and amendments), now this interpretation – i.e., unfettered totalitarianism – has become enshrined as part of our (small c) Constitution by Mr. Roberts & co.