Keep the yoke of burdensome taxes at bay

Spectrum, by Kerry Cope

If there is one thing that has become more apparent from the conclusion of the Conference of Alaskans, it is the complete lack of knowledge of the form of government that we are blessed with. Wake up! Pull yourself away from the front of your TV or PC and investigate the history of the nation you live in.

I do not consider myself an expert in this topic, but what I have done for myself and family is to collect as many texts as I can so that we may have a "library of history" to refer to in times of constructive debate. From some of these I would like to quote, first, on the topic of public debt.

Public debt leads to misery and decay:

"… I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers …"

This example reads to us the salutary lesson that private fortunes are destroyed by public as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments.

A departure from principle:

"… in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering … And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchednes and oppression." This was from "Democracy, by Thomas Jefferson" selected and arranged by Saul K. Padover PHD. Published by D. Appleton-Century Co. Inc.1939 New York, London.

Sounds pretty much right on the mark in regards to our present position, don't you think? In this text, the author recognizes the choices we have under different political philosophies, but cautions as to what will happen if we depart from the principles that our form of government is founded upon. The point that I am driving at is this: the question being asked, how to fund our state government, is the wrong question! What we should be asking is if this or that function of state government is operating within the guidelines of the principles that our form of government is based upon.

State income tax:

At this time, I would like to quote from another book in the family library.

"In 1979 I began a people's initiative to repeal the personal income tax. The Hammond-Miller administration, the bureaucracy, and the power elite fought the repeal effort at every turn. By January 1980, we had turned in more than twenty-one thousand petition signatures of Alaskans who wanted to get this burdensome, unnecessary tax off their backs. The tax-repeal initiative was slated for the 1980 election ballot. I knew Alaskans would approve it. I also introduced tax-repeal legislation in the legislature, hoping the legislature would repeal the tax. To thwart tax repeal, the governor and the legislature reluctantly passed a discriminatory tax-reduction proposal that fell far short of repeal. Even that was too much for Lt. Gov. Terry Miller, who had only been recently endorsed as the next governor by Jay Hammond. He decided to remove the people's tax-repeal initiative from the ballot. I was so infuriated that I took Miller to court to reinstate the initiative and started calling for a special session of the legislature to repeal the income tax outright. Finally, after the state supreme court threw out the initial tax-reduction statute, a special session was held. The personal income tax was totally repealed! The people finally got their way …," from "Freedom For Alaskans," by Dick Randolph Published by Caroline House Publishers Inc., Aurora, Ill., in 1982.

Just in case the reader is not aware, a heavy progressive or graduated income tax is one of Karl Marx's Ten Planks of The Communist Manifesto.

It is time for everyone to come to understand the guiding principles that our great nation was founded upon. Until we are of equal understanding of what our rights and responsibilities are under the original form of government, we will continue to ask for and fund policies that will continue to trample our individual rights, and eventually destroy us all.

Kerry Cope is a Big Lake resident.