wealth

A few days ago, it was my pleasure to spend two hours listening to the ideas and concerns of a well-educated and politically informed – dare I say socially privileged – self-described socialist.

Heartland’s Donald Kendal and Justin Haskins are joined by Isaac Orr in episode #201 of the In The Tank Podcast. This episode features work from the Center of the American Experiment, FEE, PERC, and the Reason Foundation.

Dangerous manmade global cooling, global warming, climate change and extreme weather claims continue to justify what has become a $1.5-trillion-per-year industry: tens of billions spent annually on one-sided research and hundreds of billions sent to crony corporatists to subsidize replacing dependable, affordable carbon-based fuels with unreliable, expensive “renewable” energy.

My very first job as an engineering student was as a surveyor in Powell, Wyoming. What a great start for a young, impressionable youth, to be surrounded by men and women with a frontier spirit devoid of politics and overflowing with straight talk. Now, with more than a half-century of experience in the energy field, I find it painful to see some of these people being cowed by the radical green philosophy and told to run from the riches bestowed on their land in the form of coal.

It seems that when Chief Justice John Marshall was preparing the opinion for McCulloch v. Maryland he tapped into an eternal truth. “The power to tax is the power to destroy,” he wrote on behalf of a unanimous Supreme Court. Those words are no less true in 2014 than they were in 1819. Taxation appropriates money from one person or group of people in order to give it to others. There is no way to escape taxes. But there is a way to make taxes somewhat fairer. One way is to make taxes flatter and expand the tax base.

The only way to permanently rid a society of a ‘gap’ in either wealth or income is by making everybody equally poor. If nobody has any more wealth than anybody else, then nobody can be ‘wealthy.’