Taxing Liberals Fairly

With every passing news bite liberals announce their intent to wrap the hand of government around everything from health to the mere act of combustion. Their initiatives being hideously expensive, liberals seek to raise taxes. They argue that Americans of certain types should pay their "fair share". This, of course, means more.

This accusation of class unfairness ought to be eye-opening. If anyone should pay their fair share, it ought to be liberals themselves. In the very least we should examine the unfair economic advantages created by distorting policies or taxes. These policies have significantly tilted the economic playing field towards liberals over the last century and we might ask if it has been tilted too far.

The liberal economy has been created around the idea of intellectual property. Industries built on intellectual property have had the reputation of investment darlings because they have performed well relative to other sectors. Yet, notice how they operate. Industries based on intellectual property have a lower tax obligation and enjoy successive set of federal laws that limits distribution and grants monopolies. Imagine, if you will, if Exxon or GM did not have to pay various taxes, and could exclude competitors by filling out a federal form and hiring a lawyer.

Copyright has become excessive. Copyright was originally evisioned by the founding fathers as a monopoly of 14 years to encourage authors to write. Now, it's the life of authors plus nearly a century after they are dead. Copyright law allows the media industry and its captains to accumulate and collect rent on vast portfolios of books, movies, records, software and legal documents. A man cannot work his land without an army of regulators and a mile of government red tape, but intellectual property may be freely diced and sliced regardless of its effect upon society. A man cannot own but a few square yards of property without being taxed on it, every year, but a liberal magnate such as David Geffen could hold the rights to a Hollywood blockbuster worth billions of dollars, tax free. A man cannot spill a bucket of oil on an acre of land, without hurting someone under the law, but the liberal can crank out so called works that encourage violence and irresponsible sex without any responsibility to society.

Liberals demand that we should do what is natural, and for fairness on our lands. Liberals will not allow a man to defend his house from assault by an armed robber but they would send in the police if you copy a movie with your computer. The owner of a small business might get sued if he blocked someone from stealing from his store, but, a woman was just sued for nearly $200,000 for uploading a handful of songs to the internet. A rap star can make an album encouring people to shoot police, which is hardly grateful. If you post that album on the internet, those same police will protect that rap star's work. Liberal protest wiretaps to examine for terrorist traffic, but by the same token their lawyers demand that internet service providers examine every packet of information on the internet lest it contain a copy of one of their works. Copying an episode of publicly funded Sesame Street, is evidentally, more of a crime than planning a terrorist attack. Liberals have no problem allowing the Chinese to dump mountains of products on American shores, but send in armies of lawyers if the Chinese should copy a DVD. There is no justice in the liberal economy.

Some rebalancing of property is long overdue. Let us start with national health care. If liberals want national health care, it is not too much to ask that their industries help pay for it. Consider a progressive tax on intellectual property upon which their economy is based.

Various IP rights holders would be taxed based upon a federally assessed value of that right, similar to how governments already assess the property of land. This tax would be progressive, as liberals like to call it, in the fashion of income taxes. Small publishers would essentially pay 0 percentage and large properties would pay significantly higher. Our little web site might be tax free, but, the holder of Beatles songs or Star Wars movies might well be obligated to pay a few millions a year in taxes on that right.

A failure to pay IP taxes would cause that property to be seized and then auctioned off at a sort of a national IP sheriff's sale. Entire catalogues would be broken up and sold on a per song, per movie, basis. Those items not sold at auction would be placed in the public domain.

The intellectual property economy is as vast as it is untaxed. The software, legal, entertainment and academic industries measure in the hundreds of billions of intellectual property. If every movie studio pitched in, if every song paid its fair share, if every schoolbook, research paper, all paid their fair share in property taxes, there would be easily enough revenue to satisfy the expense of the national health care that these same people advocate. If every creative work sufferd as much federal regulation caused by mere public concern, as does an acre of land, then, there would probably be a lot less violence in art.

If liberals are genuinely interested in social justice and equality of taxation, then let's have it. How much social justice is there, when the owner of Michael Jackson's songs pays less in taxes than the owner of an acre of land under an I95 overpass?

Now liberals will no doubt argue that such taxation might damage their economy. We might then point out, just how much their taxation has damaged ours. One could hope that they learn that redistribution of wealth is never easy when it is your own, but in the very least, if liberals want national health care, they should help pay for it.