Arbeit Macht Frei in America

In Federalist 36, Alexander Hamilton specifies that federal taxes are of two types: Direct and Indirect. Of the latter, he cites duties and excises, taxes on items of consumption. A tax on income is NOT an indirect tax, and was not understood to be such at the time of ratification, though Brett Kavanaugh baldly declares it such in his Moore majority opinion. Kavanaugh avers that a tax on income from the time of ratification of the Constitution was understood to be an indirect tax and can only be considered such under the Constitution. Nothing so blatantly false has been written by a Supreme Court justice, excepting perhaps when Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called Carrie Buck an imbecile, or Roger Taney declared African Americans devoid of rights as citizens in perpetuity. The prior, or course, led to extensive forced sterilizations across America. That latter led to the Civil War.

I believe in his Moore opinion, Brett Kavanaugh, along with his fellow affirming justices, has ushered in a change in the status of citizens that is as foreboding as Taney's decision in Dred Scott. We have entered a new era of unlimited federal taxing power that threatens to reduce citizens to subjects, citizens to serfs. We are considerably farther along the road to serfdom with this decision.

There is and can be no more direct tax than a tax on someone's income. That income is a representation of the life of that individual, his or her initiative, and natural talent, along with efforts in education, skill development, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

Proponents of income taxes, like Kavanaugh and the majority of justices, seem to want to classify "indirect" taxes as transactional, then list income as a transaction and thus an indirect tax. This reduces the artist, the entrepreneur, and the worker to a less-than-human status, existing and creating and producing, living, as a transactional process only. It is a tax on labor, on creativity, on ingenuity, on effort, on human life.

Lincoln, at a gut level, understood that slavery was a theft of a person's capacities. He recounted once being asked as a lad to row a gentleman across a river. He did so, and the gentleman tossed him a dollar in payment for his services. The notion clicked in his head that this was a correct recompense for the engagement of his time and abilities, that it validated his capacities and very being. And so he had a gut-level, instinctual opposition to slavery, to the notion that other people would have their efforts and abilities exploited by masters for the masters' benefits alone. As Jefferson put it, this was a system of men booted and spurred to saddle and ride other human beings.

About three decades ago, I visited the Auschwitz prison camp. I walked under the title across the entrance: Arbeit Macht Frei. After touring the camp, I left feeling sick. On return to the hotel, I turned on the evening news to find Bill Clinton giving a speech. In that speech, he referred to the need to develop, "...our human capital." The juxtaposition of those experiences created a link in my mind, and the statement by Clinton exacerbated the sickness I felt. The sensation was like having eaten rotten fish in both cases. How can you reduce human beings to "capital"? A commodity. A means to an end.

With the top federal income tax rate at close to 40%, one might believe that all of us are living under a tax system that considers us as 3/5 of a person, with up to 2/5 owned by the federal government which claims up to that fraction of our lives.

Kavanaugh's decision necessitates, I would suggest, an amended verse to the West Side Story song, "America":

Arbeit Macht Frie in America
That is the lie in America
Pay tax and die in America.

(With apologies to Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins.)