Do Americans Have A Moral Right To The Pre-Tax Earnings?
The idea that wealth earned by citizens is simply that which the government has allowed us to earn and subsequently keep is absurd. As is the idea that rights, like free speech, only exist because the government has not taken them from us.
This flies in the face of the spirit of independence our founders, well, founded this country upon.
Our founders intended the government to be an institution entirely beholden to the people. That’s why they described the rights in the constitution as given by an authority higher than the government (who or what that authority is is a discussion for another time) and then gave the people the power to protect those rights with the various structures for representative government in the Constitution culminating in a last-ditch defense against tyranny in the 2nd amendment.
Our government does not exist without the people. The wealth we create does not belong to the government. It belongs to us, and we decide what amount of it goes to the government by acting through our representative political process.
To try and claim that this is not so is to claim that our government is not controlled by the people, but instead that we are controlled by the government. And I don’t know many citizens who would agree with that.
