President Trump appears contemptuous of the great American contribution to democratic government: Lincoln’s ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’.

It is an ideal which is never easy to achieve and maintain. That is because ‘the people’ is not a coherent whole, but the summation of a lot of disparate entities. The stated intent was that all people should be treated equally without differentiating between sub-groups of the population, defined by race, religion or any other classification. Should a sub-group be excluded from such equality they should have access to remedy. Should a sub-group be enabled to circumvent those principles and in so doing, exploit the rest, it would be a clear democratic malfunction in need of correction.
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We live in an interdependent world, both within and between nation states. We all need clean air and water, safety, security and defence, the rule of law and justice for all, plus public highways (free from pot-holes), plus, in a civilized society, health and social care, education, and access to the commons such as libraries, museums, art galleries, parks, rivers and the seaside, all free at the point of delivery. But they all have to be paid for.

In the past it was thought ‘not very unreasonable’, as Adam Smith put it, ‘that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion, but something more than in that proportion.’ Such progressive taxation seemed to be regarded as simply a matter of fairness. But the mainstream economic belief system which now rules, has effectively outlawed the very idea of progressive taxation. Today it is rarely ever mentioned. A low single flat rate of income tax is regarded as the ideal.

The world is run by what Roosevelt referred to as organised money, which comprised the leaders of the finance sector, financialised business, the media and relevant strands of academia and politics, all lubricated by the revolving doors, enabling migration between all these sectors and government itself.
Continue reading The Simple Truth about Progressive Taxation →