You voiced your displeasure in the past at how it is unethical to force pro-lifers

to fund Planned Parenthood through tax dollars. Do you also think it is unethical
to force certain people to fund the subsidies of meat and dairy products if they do
not believe those products are ethical?

If it is in fact unethical to force someone to dole out tax money for something he
does not believe in, then it stands to reason that other protected classes must
exist, as well. Now, it is quite possible that Shapiro might demarcate abortion
from all other exceptions, but why � when the standard is mere personal revulsion �
stop at abortion? There are countless other logical categories, from pacifists
funding war, to Jainists chipping in for road-cleaning, where the offended party
might feel just as strongly against some item of the Social Contract that the rest
of us must consent to. More, note how abortion is utterly divorced in this case
from the global libertarian scope. Shapiro is not even making a libertarian
argument against abortion � for there is no such thing, as I will later show � but
appealing to an individual tax code by way of a local ethic damning that (and only
that) tax. By NOT appealing to the �unjustness� of taxation, as a whole, Shapiro
manages to open up his own economy to a free-rider problem of which he would
quickly lose control, thus making a caricature not only of the abortion issue, but
Shapiro�s wannabe exceptionalism, to boot.

I was wondering, how�s Kansas doing after their relatively large tax cuts? Is the
wealth �trickling down�?

Again, Ben Shapiro is not a full-on libertarian, but that�s irrelevant, since he
supports many of the same measures � tax breaks for the wealthy, huge reductions in
entitlement spending � Kansas has recently undertaken with predictable results.
From the libertarian perspective, they are arguing for a system that � for good
reason � has NEVER been implemented in its pure form. I mean, it would be unethical
to do so, but even disregarding basic human decency, it would be impossible to
implement without a violent revolution (�coercion�, in libertarian parlance), after
which the resultant anarchy (sorry, libs!) would inevitably give rise to the same
subsidy mindset � i.e., factionalism � as a mere product of animal psychology.

More pointedly, however, libertarianism suffers from the same endless purity-
testing that its hated mirror image � stateless communism � undergoes, with every
iteration of Stalin, Lenin, the Paris Commune, etc., being bastardizations of the
REAL thing�if only the �fakes� would get out of the way, and let the true believers
deliver on their promises. Likewise, the more typical, Shapiro-like conservative
response to Kansas�s budgetary woes and tepid business growth runs the gamut from
�that�s not what I�d do!� to pointing out all the ways the Kansas model does not
live up to some non-existent ideal. In other words, the No True Scotsman fallacy
writ large � across 82,000 square miles, no less, where people�s suffering is both
irrelevant as well as a piece of key evidence which can never be turned in against
the believer�s own zealotry.

Yet, again, Ben is silent on a tough query, forcing me to dig up other materials
where he makes his position clear:

'The wealthy in this country are by and large the job creators. Tax them, and they
will cut jobs because it impedes their ability to create. Money only stretches so
far so it�s not a matter of the wealthy simply wanting to earn more, but a matter
of making prudent decisions that don�t deplete their capital in a time when they
could lose everything in a weak market. If they�re not creating jobs now, they�ll
be cutting jobs if the taxes rise�

The truth is that if you talk simply in terms of effectiveness, the most effective
thing is to not tax the upper end of the income bracket very much at all because
those people are the ones actually earning money, producing products, providing
services and hiring people. A flat tax is the best balance between equity and
efficiency. I think it�s perfectly equitable because by nature percentages are
perfectly equitable � it�s not a flat sum, it�s a flat rate. If someone has a
smaller pie, a smaller piece will be taken out of the pie.'

A controversial point of view, as far as the research goes, yet look at how
confident Shapiro is at his own pronouncements. To be sure, there has been exactly
ZERO evidence that taxation is anything more than 1) a collective means of ensuring
social goods that an individual cannot guarantee; 2) equity. Business, innovation,
and recession have existed in pretty much every mature tax climate, with study
after study indicating not only the problem of getting an academic consensus on
whether tax cuts promote growth, but also how wildly divergent their conclusions
have in fact been. This is not an �opinion�, nor some liberal conspiracy against
big business. This is an honest reflection of the ONLY data that we have available.
If I were to guess, I�d presume that a neoliberal tax policy has a modest (at best)
effect on growth, but wreaks havoc on every other metric of the social good:
really, the only logical way to measure economic success in the long run.

But let us assume that Shapiro is correct. Let us assume that low tax rates do in
fact promote growth and employment. The assumption is that everyone benefits, but
while taxes have been cut from an �official� (but rarely paid, of course, by the
rich!) 70-90% down to the 30s and 20s, with multi-millionaires often paying even
less in between kickbacks and massive tax-dodging operations, the everyday American
isn�t doing so well. Real wages have declined alongside four decades of massive tax
cuts, even as worker productivity has risen quite a bit. Shapiro likes to say that
people more or less get what they deserve, and that �unfairness�, in the cosmic
sense, does not imply any inherent fairness in redistribution. More, the suckers
just need to work. Yet Americans have worked, at more hours for less pay and less
stability, netting corporations trillions since the 1970s and getting little in
return. In Shapiro�s proposed system, workers have done exactly as they should. But
the second the idea of a minimum wage or a progressive tax is brought up as some
sort of reward, they are treated exactly as what they�re NOT � an obstacle to
growth � rather than what they are: a buffer between the bottom and the runaway
rich, and a means to balance nearly half a century of losses with data-driven
entitlements that ultimately do MORE for fiscal balance than Shapiro�s economically
haphazard, faith-based system of tax cuts for the rich.

-Alex Sheremet, 'Why Ben Shapiro Is A Total Fraud'

http://alexsheremet.com/ben-shapiro-total-fraud/

economie, conservatisme, neoliberalisme,