‘President Obama, It’s Not Your Money!’

President Obama has decreed that he is going to tax people who make over $250,000 at a higher rate than people making less, and millions of people are OK with it. How did we get to the place when elected officials can tax American citizens at disproportionate rates to pay for debt that was never constitutionally authorized and programs that have no constitutional validity?

Politicians – Democrats and Republicans alike– know that there are fewer high wage earners than lower and middle income earners. The same is true of employers and employees. An employer gets one vote but his or her employees can cancel his vote many times over. It’s no wonder that some of earliest our founders were fearful of an unbridled democracy. John Winthrop (1590–1657) declared democracy to be “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”[1] John Cotton (1585–1652) wrote in 1636: “Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?”[2] In the Federalist Papers (No. 10), James Madison (1751–1836) wrote that democracies are “spectacles of turbulence and contention.” Pure democracies are “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property. . . . In general [they] have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”[3]