E-Mails to Illinois State Legislators About Tax Revenue Sourcing and Land Value Taxation

     The State of Illinois currently suffers from a budget deficit, public debt, a pension crisis, and widespread disagreement about what to tax and how to solve the state's budget woes. I believe that Henry George, and his idea of Land Value Taxation, could do a lot to solve these problems.

     I wrote the two following e-mails on October 6^th, 2020, on the advice of the Lake County tax assessor, in order to communicate to my elected representatives what I think the solution should be. The first is addressed to a Democratic member of the Illinois State Assembly, and the second is addressed to a Republican member of the same body.

     The introductions, and names of the particular lawmakers, have been removed.

First E-Mail (to Democrats):

     My name is Joe Kopsick, I'm a 33-year-old voter from Waukegan. I'm also running for office.

     I was wondering if you've ever heard of Henry George or his idea of Land Value Taxation. George had a big influence on the Democratic Party in the 1880s, and almost became the mayor of New York City. I think George's ideas could do a lot to help Illinois's tax problems.

     Illinoisans are currently debating how to prevent property taxes from rising when property values rise, and how much to tax income. Instead of talking about how much to tax income, I believe we should be talking about whether to tax it at all.

     I also believe that we should pay less attention to the issue of whether "Is the tax funding something worthwhile", and more attention to "is it helpful, efficient, and ethical to tax this source of revenue in the first place?" If we keep taxing production, we will deplete our revenue base. But if we tax things we want to discourage, like destruction, then the need for government solutions to that destruction, will decrease, while the size of the budget decreases too. Government will enter the picture, solve the problem, and then go away; instead of sticking around forever to permanently administer programs that were originally intended only as temporary fixes.

     It's not that I think it's wrong to tax billionaires. It's that we should be taxing people for acquiring wealth through illicit or fraudulent purposes that take advantage of taxpayers; we shouldn't be taxing them solely for earning money, as if doing so were a crime. The people who pay the highest taxes, should be the people who acquired their wealth through destroying and wasting, or polluting, or selling things they didn't produce. People who produce and earn through their own hard work and effort, should either be taxed less than they are now, or else not at all. Or else they should be taxed solely in proportion to how much they owe the taxpayers for providing forms of assistance that helped them acquire their wealth.

     Capital gains taxes, and corporate income taxes, should of course be regarded as different from earned income that results from laboring in exchange for wages. But we must understand that imposing higher and higher taxes on income and property, will eventually have the effect of punishing or discouraging people from being more productive or increasing the value of their homes.

     This idea is called the Laffer Curve. Henry George's idea is basically just the Laffer Curve, but applied to land taxes and property taxes, instead of income taxes.

     Lawmakers must understand that most people don't like paying taxes; and for that reason, we should avoid taxing forms of voluntary exchange which we have no logical reason to discourage if we want people to prosper. I believe that earning income, and buying and selling, are harmless forms of productive economic activity, which should not be punished.

Second E-Mail (to Republicans):

     My name is Joe Kopsick, I'm a 33-year-old voter living in Waukegan. I'm also running for office.

     Are you familiar with the Laffer Curve (named for Reagan adviser Art Laffer)? It's the idea that if a person is taxed at too high a rate, they will eventually stop producing, in order to avoid taxes.

     I think the tax code should change, to reflect the fact that most people don't like taxes, and will try to avoid them. I think we should be taxing wasteful and destructive activities, in order to penalize them on purpose; instead of accidentally penalizing productivity, by confiscating people's money through income taxes, and by taxing sales.

     Earning money and buying and selling are are productive activities that harm nobody, and so in my opinion they should be completely untaxed, or at least taxed at a lower rate than they are now. [Raising expected revenues from other sources of revenue could easily replace the gaps in funding which would be caused by the elimination of income and sales taxes.]

     I believe that we should shift from a system based on taxing income and sales and the improvements we make to our homes, to a system based on taxing the non-improvement of land.

     Taxing unimproved land value at a higher rate than the rate at which we tax buildings, could even help solve the property tax problem. Property taxes would stop going up just because property values go up. This would also solve most of the gentrification problem.

     Several Pittsburgh suburbs tried this system for a while and had a lot of success with it (in decreasing unemployment, and decreasing the number of unoccupied properties that are just taking up space and have no economic activity happening on them).

     I think this idea could potentially get Democrats to understand how destructive the income tax is, and understand that they really are discouraging productivity and earnings. And once the Democrats understand that, bipartisan compromise with Republicans will be a more realistic prospect.

Conclusion of Both E-Mails:

     Does this make sense to you? Are you interested in learning more about Henry George and Land Value Taxation? If so, please e-mail me at jwkopsick@gmail.com, or call me at 608-417-9395.

     This is a personalized e-mail and not an automatically generated message; I am contacting you on behalf of myself, not on the behalf of any organization.

     Thanks for reading, I look forward to your response.

     Joseph W. Kopsick

     608-417-9395

     jwkopsick@gmail.com

     Waukegan, IL 60085

E-Mails Written on October 6th, 2020

Introduction Written on October 8th, 2020

Originally Published on October 8th, 2020

The Alt-Right, and Nietzsche's "Slave and Master Morality"

     Nietzsche described Christianity as having a "slave morality"; essentially because it lionizes a murder victim as a god, reveres martyrs, and rewards those who submit. Christianity asserts "Christ conquered death"; that our god did not die, and transcended death. The Alt-Right and neo-Nazis fall victim to the same "slave morality" for which Nietzsche criticized Christians for falling, however.

     The Alt-Right see Nazi sympathizers and white nationalists as victims, and characterize anyone and everyone in conflict with them as "the real fascists". Including by pointing to their tactics, which they baselessly use as evidence to connote ideological agreement between the two groups. The use of violence alone does not make one a Nazi.

     The Alt-Right gives in to the "slave morality" concept, by endorsing its swapping of the positions of master and slave. They are every bit as willing to look like the victim, as are the "leftists" and "social justice warriors" whom they criticize. And they do this while claiming that the real victimizers are the people who admit that some people have been victimized, and those who try to draw attention to it. Additionally, those who admit that even when institutional, governmental discrimination ended in one sector, the effects last until this day.

     Most perplexingly of all, it seems that the Alt-Right are so committed to reinforcing this master / slave relationship, that they are not even willing to dismantle it, nor create a state of classlessness, even if solely to prevent themselves from becoming the underclass. That's because the “slave morality” rewards both submission and dominance.

     When the white nationalists marched on Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2018 - shouting "the Jews will not replace us" - they weren't saying "we refuse to let the Jews replace white people as the race that controls America". "The Jews will not replace us" means that they don't want the Jewish people, whom they believe to be controlling the U.S., to replace white people with non-white people, as the Jews' favored race of non-Jews. The idea is that whites would earn a place high in the racial hierarchy, and that then, as the Jews' favored non-Jewish race, they would be inferior to Jewish people, but otherwise in charge of the country, and allowed to keep the other races down. That's what they think.

     Of course, some of them do want to defeat and destroy and replace Jewish people, and it would be naive to suggest that many of them don't want to do that. But the Alt-Right are so cucked by their own ideology, that they seem more willing to assent to a place in the middle of the racial hierarchy which they perceive, than to destroy it altogether.

     As confusing as it seems, I think the rationale for this is fairly simple: it would be too difficult for them to admit that there is a racial hierarchy without using Jewish people in positions of power and influence as the evidence, without exposing white dominance of avenues of control at the same time. Additionally, if, by the phrase, they had meant “Jews will not replace white people as the dominant race”, then that would have been to admit that they are afraid of a Jewish take-over. That shows fear, and showing fear is not acceptable to people whose ideology is based on control.

     On the other hand, the Alt-Right is also unable to claim that whites are in control. They would like to do this, because that would be a way to express dominance. However, to say that whites are in control would be to admit that Jewish people have not taken over white society. It would dismantle the whole crux of their argument; which is that whites need to be in control, and therefore need to do something. They also believe that "cultural Marxism" is a Jewish conspiracy to destroy nations, by introducing multiculturalism and immigration, as a way to make them homogenous. This, the Alt-Right believes, leads to the erosion of social cohesiveness - which they believe to be based on common nation, heritage, and/or language – and also leads to the breakdown of welfare states. Which, for some reason, many of them support; just not for everybody, of course, only for white people.

     In a society which respects and protects individual rights, the whims of fleeting majorities can change constantly, without threatening the most important of anyone's natural rights.

     In the sense that they refuse to challenge the racial hierarchy which they oppose, even when it could benefit them, the Alt-Right are just like the Republicans. The Alt-Right and Republicans both refuse to recognize individual rights, and the illegitimacy of hierarchy, even if only as a way to prevent the disaster they fear, which is that America will get overtaken by a non-white majority.

     Likewise, the Republicans are just like the Democrats, because they too refuse to recognize individual rights, but also oppose stronger supermajoritarian measures to prevent the oppression of minorities by majorities. And Democrats refuse to do so, even if only as a way to prevent the disaster they fear, which is that America will get taken over by Republicans (which happens every several years, and which, for all intents and purposes, is unavoidable).

     In a way, the Democrats, Republicans, and the Alt-Right, are all enabling each other; by subscribing to the same master / slave system; the same hierarchical system, whether racialized or not, and the same reckless disregard for individuals' natural rights to be free from control by majority and minority alike. They even support the same economic system; a right-wing system uniting aspects of capitalism, mercantilism, Keynesianism, liberal-conservatism and a neoliberal market economy, and “state socialism” (which is really just capitalism, but with a welfare system which benefits the select few).

In Defense of Allowing Denial of Coverage on the Basis of Pre-Existing Conditions

Written on January 11th, 2017

Edited on January 25th, 2017

          Health insurance companies should be free to deny subscribers coverage, and raise the prices of premiums, on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions.
     It may sound inhumane to advance this position, but it only seems cruel when we forget that insurance is supposed to insure against things that haven't happened yet; it is irrational to insure against getting a disease that you already have. If you have a pre-existing condition; what you need isn't health insurance; it's health care.

Taking this position seems even more inhumane when we forget that the provision of Obamacare that opposes that pre-existing conditions policy, by design, rests (in terms of implementation) on the completely illogical Individual Insurance Purchase Mandate, which was somehow found by the majority of the Supreme Court to be the most appropriate part of Obamacare. This means that once the Mandate falls, most of the rest of Obamacare falls. Moreover, the health insurance industry might not even need to exist.

It's not necessary to compel anyone to purchase health insurance, especially with people they may not want to be in the same pool with; whether that's because they have expensive conditions, or because they're older (and therefore more prone to disease), or simply because their political values - and their ideas about what health policy should look like - are different from other subscribers'. It is not only unnecessary to compel anyone to be in the same health insurance pool as any other particular person, for whatever reason; it is a violation of our constitutionally recognized freedom of, to, and from association.

Single-payer systems and public options can be made obsolete through the focused pooling of assets into voluntary health insurance cooperative plans. This idea replaces competition-destroying monopsonies (one-buyer systems; i.e., single-payer systems) with consumer-cooperative purchasing societies; market actors that can grow as large as necessary (in terms of purchasing power) in order to affect prices in a way that obtains low premium prices for all members of the pool.

The only way to justify continuing the Pre-Existing Conditions provision of Obamacare on grounds of freeing and opening people's access to trade in health insurance, is to absurdly argue that ordering someone to purchase something, is the same thing as allowing them to purchase it.

The blatantly unconstitutional Individual Insurance Purchase Mandate flies in the face of the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause, and the Supreme Court opinion that upheld it undermines everything that a logical and fiscally responsible society ought to understand about what the difference should be between fees and fines, and between taxation and theft.

The government regulates people for refraining to engage in commerce by buying health insurance. Next it tries to address the problem of people being uninsured because they can't afford it, by requiring people to spend money they can't afford to buy the insurance. It passes this off as helping the poor.

Finally, it regulates the commerce (buying the policy) because it's commerce now, even though you wouldn't have engaged in commerce unless they ordered you to buy it. Still, you're theirs to regulate, even if they only have federal jurisdiction but you can't even buy policies from other states.

None of this is necessary. Doctors' Hippocratic Oaths include pledges to help patients regardless of their ability to pay. If Hippocratic Oaths were enforceable (whether by government, or by non-state-actor contract enforcement agencies), then doctors who agree to abide by that oath would not legally be free to decide whether to turn patients away.

If that happened, and if the parts of Obamacare that violate the Constitution were repealed, then patients wouldn't need health insurance companies. Not only that, but our supposedly caring government wouldn't even force patients to trade with health insurance companies. Without the Individual Mandate, government couldn't force us to buy from these companies; and without the Individual Mandate, there would be no need for government to force companies to accept us.

          Remember, this is the same government that is limiting people's choices about what kind of medications they can try to save their own lives, taxing profits and sales of medical devices (raising prices and increasing malpractice lawsuits in the process), and enforcing medical patents for overly lengthy time periods in order to benefit Big Pharma (which makes the problem of availability of medical devices worse).

Meanwhile, the Third World suffers from disease, and Americans aren't allowed to buy cheaper drugs that imitate the patented ones, from Canada or Mexico. Figures in liberal media that "open borders is a Koch brothers proposal" so that we won't become aware of the hazardous effects that state and national borders have on the affordability and variety of consumer goods (medications and medical devices included). There are plenty of changes to health policy that would be more appropriate than six of the seven major provisions of P.P.A.C.A..

          I oppose the Pre-Existing Conditions provision because it takes away a valuable freedom - the right of the insurance company to deny coverage - without compensating them for this takings, and without allowing individual insurance companies to refuse or opt-out. If the Supreme Court had ruled the other way, this takings would be seen as the extrajudicial theft that it constitutionally is.

            Barack Obama's signature piece of legislation was a failure and a waste of public attention and money. In my opinion, about eighty-five percent of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has absolutely no constitutional or economic merit to it. I believe that it has only served to make the health care and insurance industries more complicated (both for its employees and for patients); more plagued with financial and procedural problems; and less compatible with civil liberties, due process of law, the right of private property, and a federal government that enforces strictly limited intellectual property rights laws, and obeys suggestions by the framers about what kind of taxes are permissible and why.

           We should be allowing more people to buy insurance, not forcing people to do so. If young people are allowed to stay on their parents' insurance until they're 26, that's fine, because that's freedom. It would not be freedom if they were ordered to stay on their parents' plans. For the same reason, government allowing denial of coverage is a freedom, while government forcing you to be covered by compelling you to buy, is the opposite of freedom; it is command-and-control economics.

Annual Net Contribution to U.S. Federal Revenue, per Capita and by State, 2007 and 2012

 

If the Democrat / Republican divide were based on the above data set,
(in terms of voting in the electoral college)

Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and Florida would become Republican,

and North Dakota, Nebraska, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Indiana would become Democratic.

For more entries on social services, public planning, and welfare, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/loss-of-public-planning-department.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/11/jurisdictional-aterritorialism-bastiat.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/12/on-konkin-schulman-bastiat-and-agorism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/07/agorism-summary.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/08/panarchist-welfare-economics.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-market-anarchism.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/03/market-anarchism-economists-vs.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/08/anarchist-kindergarten-open-letter-to.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/proposal-for-cooperative-party-of-oregon.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/12/nonapartism-in-social-market-economy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/conservatives-for-georgism-and-social.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/initial-reaction-to-scott-walkers.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/initial-reaction-to-scott-walkers_20.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/municipal-services-fifth-amendment-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-proper-role-of-government.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-general-welfare-clause.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/taxpayer-funded-benefits-for.html

For more entries on taxation, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/12/taxes-and-unemployment.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/07/top-marginal-tax-rate-1913-2011.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/10/pay-gap-tax.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/01/proposed-us-federal-government-budget.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-philosophy-of-taxation-and.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/viewing-legislation-through-economic.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/taxes-and-unemployment.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/2011-new-york-times-budget-puzzle.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/conversation-with-liberal-on-taxing.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/conservatives-for-georgism-and-social.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/using-profit-incentive-to-promote.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/john-locke-roderick-long-and-voluntary.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/economic-policy-for-2012-us-house.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/sources-of-federal-revenue.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/taxpayer-funded-benefits-for.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/tax-increases.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/tax-cuts.html

CPAC Straw Poll Results, 2006-2011

For more entries on election studies, please visit:

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/10/2010-2013-election-season-predictions.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2010/11/110th-111th-congress-votes-in_07.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/03/2012-electoral-college-predictions.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2011/05/2012-republican-presidential-candidates.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/09/pareto-optimality-in-political-economy.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/10/us-political-spectrum-2008-2013.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2013/11/percentage-of-public-support-for.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/03/is-this-electoral-map-of-2016.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/03/tea-party-approval-ratings-of-possible.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/top-8-potential-presidential-candidate.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/04/2012-gop-presidential-candidates-ranked.html

http://www.aquarianagrarian.blogspot.com/2014/05/campaign-finance-reform.html