Just when you think American politics can’t get any more surreal, a walking tapeworm stands up in front of 150 other tapeworms at a fundraiser hosted by private equity manager and tapeworm Marc Leder, and accuses 47 percent of Americans — who allegedly don’t pay any taxes — of parasitism.
“… there are 47 percent … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them. … And the government should give it to them.”
If you think about it, it’s a fair guess most of those 47 percent don’t have big enough paychecks to pay income taxes on because the kinds of people in Romney’s audience — people who can afford $50,000 for a plate of canned chicken a la king and frozen peas — stole it from them.
Because, you see, the 47% do pay taxes. They pay taxes to the owners of this country — of whom Romney’s audience are probably a typical sample.
They — we — pay taxes every time we pay higher rent or a higher mortgage on a parcel of land because the government enforces absentee title to vacant and unimproved land and takes it out of competition with landlord property.
We pay taxes every time we pay a 2000% markup on a pill under patent, a software CD under copyright or a pair of trademarked sneakers some sweatshop workers got paid almost nothing to produce, because of the state’s enforcement of so-called “intellectual property.”
We pay taxes every time we buy a piece of consumer electronics, 80% of the price of which is embedded rents on patents rather than actual labor and materials.
We pay taxes on every manufactured good that carries a 20% oligopoly pricing markup, because of the state’s regulatory cartels.
We pay taxes every time we pay artificially inflated interest because the state gives “private” usurers a monopoly on issuing the medium of exchange.
We pay taxes every time we hire a cab licensed under the medallion system, use professional services regulated by state licensing cartels, or make purchases at brick-and-mortar shops protected from competition by local zoning laws.
We pay taxes every time we get pay for a day’s work that’s less than the value we create, because the state’s artificial property rights make land and capital artificially scarce and expensive for labor and thereby shift bargaining power in the labor market toward the employers of labor.
And that’s before we even get to the web “official” sales taxes, “sin” taxes, personal property taxes and payroll taxes that encumber virtually every activity and transaction the political class takes notice of.
It’s the kinds of people in Mittens’ audience — an audience of landlords, usurers, monopolists and bosses, to whom we pay the taxes enumerated above every time we make a purchase or do a day’s work — who are dependent on, and are taken very, very good care of by government, largely at the expense of the working public they look down on.
