Responding in part to Jay Jardine’s impassioned defense of his right to property, a right which the ongoing debate over Joe Wood had ignored, Matt Fenwick writes:

I will take Jay’s advice, though, and check my premises. Here they are:
1) We have laws that require us to pay income tax
2) I want these laws to be as equitable as possible across all income brackets

For the record, I cannot understand how taxing stocks on the day they are sold versus the day they are bought makes one molecule of difference to how equitable the tax is across income brackets. But I’d like to focus on Matt’s and Jay’s shared notion that we ought to check our premises. (As an aside, I would reject as a “premise” the concept that “we have laws that require us to pay income tax”, which is no more a logical premise than “we have a monopoly medicare system”. These are government programs which are set up a certain way because they please a certain group of politicians. The programs could change as easily as Paul Martin changes his mind. For me, Paul Martin’s whim does not under any circumstance qualify as a “premise”.)

My premises include the following:
(1) I have a right to my own life and my own property
(2) If these rights are violated, for example by The State, it is preferable to me that they be violated less rather than more.

Therefore I share Jay’s position that income tax is theft: it may be carried out by a majority of my fellow “citizens” who vote themselves a massive share of my property, rather than a mugger who uses bullets instead of ballots to make my income his own, but the fundamental nature of this theft changes not one whit. I therefore believe that I have the moral right to withhold paying income tax to the government, in exactly the same way that I have the moral right to withhold my wallet from the mugger. However, I understand that if I don’t pay tax I go to jail, and if I don’t pay the mugger I will be beaten or worse. So, in both situations, frankly I pay up.

In a way, it is just as “evil” for a mugger to steal $20 from me as to steal $2000. But as far as my property and my enjoyment of it is concerned, I prefer the $20 mugging. My perspective on taxation is the same. It is just as evil for the Tories to take 40% of my income as for the Liberals to take 50% or the NDP to take 142%. But I prefer the 40% mugging. So I have tried to participate in the federal political process (joining parties, supporting candidates, etc) in an effort to reduce the impact of my mugging. Ayn Rand may have been morally correct that we ought not bargain about inches of evil, but I would happily try to convince the mugger to take less of my pay. I don’t feel that makes me complicit in my own robbery. Equally, I don’t feel morally responsible for stealing 40% of my own income if I support a Tory government which advocates that policy. What is the alternative? Imagine that my vote actually makes a difference. I can support a 40% mugging, or a 50% one. That doesn’t make the 40% mugging “the moral choice”–it just makes it the immoral choice which is the least injurious to me.

This is why some of the debate over Joe Wood and his tax bill leaves me a bit cold. Many commentators are working themselves into a lather over whether this-or-that tax code change is “fair” or “equitable” or “just”. My goodness, the guy is getting mugged–isn’t it in his interest, and in all of our interests as property owners and mugging victims, to shrink that bill? For that reason, because I believe it is never wrong to be on the side of tax freedom, I generally support every single maneuver to reduce someone’s taxes, whether you want to call it a loophole or a tax subsidy or a tax credit or whatever. The politicians can fool themselves that they have the right to divvy up my paycheck in a hundred different ways, to support causes which they think I must be forced to endorse, but the money remains mine–and anything that can be done to minimize that thievery is good for me.

It would be good for Joe Wood to have his tax bill reduced. It so happens that there is a perfectly reasonable moral argument which applies to him–namely, that the government is taxing phantom income without allowing phantom deductions–but to be honest I don’t deep down care about the specific argument. It’s his damn money, his, earned because he went to school and learned his expertise and applies this expertise for his employers who pay him for its benefit. The government doesn’t have any moral right to it at all, and if there seems to be a good reason to not pay his robber then for Pete’s sake I think we all should jump on it, on Joe’s behalf. I sure hope that he would come to my defense, if the government decided they were going to tax something as silly as phantom income which ended up hurting me rather than him.

I hope you’ll allow me this tenuous segue: fundamentally, this is why I’m so angry and disappointed about Friday’s Konvention Kerfuffle. I don’t think the Tories have any special claim to a superior morality than the Liberals. I don’t think “we” are better people than “they” are. I just want to be mugged a little less. I cannot, like Jay Jardine, turn my back on partisan politics just because all the parties want to violate my rights. This kind of libertarian virginity is perfectly justifiable, but ultimately it leaves the world of politics in the hands of the statists: say it with me now, brothers and sisters–if government is left to the socialists, then only the socialists will be in government. So put me in the category of the pre-Galt Dagny: I will work hard, harder, work my hardest to try to minimize the evil that is being done to me. I will support parties that are partially evil, because the alternative is a party that is more evil. And before you get your knickers in a twist: I don’t mean “evil” as if to say Liberals and Dippers are child molesters or murderers. But they are thieves, and the fact that the Tories want to steal a bit less of my property makes them a better choice: the lesser of a few evils, to coin a phrase. Pure libertarians may wish to say “a pox on all their houses”, but that does nothing to make my personal actual life any better.

All of this makes Friday’s events particularly irritating for me. I have managed to convince myself that I can tolerate the more evil parts of the Tory platform, in order to benefit from the less evil parts. I prefer the less evil Tories to the more evil Liberals. I desperately want the lesser evil to triumph, not because I think The Sun Shines Out Of Stephen Harper’s Assembly, but because I just want to be mugged a little bit less. I am trying hard here not to make the perfect the enemy of the almost-good. But then the Tories show themselves to be such outrageous amateurs…

I almost don’t know what to say (ed. note: hasn’t it taken you several hundred words to get to the point where you’re speechless? shaddup ). There are only two parties that stand a quantifiable chance of winning the next federal election: the Liberals, at about a 90% probability of winning, and the Tories, at about 10%. But that 10% is only there because (a) Paul Martin is such a huge loser, and (b) the CPC just might grow up in the next several months. If Martin learns how to find his ass with both hands, or if Harper et al don’t get their heads out of theirs right quick, 10% becomes 5% becomes 1% becomes zip.

Right at this minute I’m starting to think zip is where we’re headed. There remains a deep division within the ranks of the CPC–not the so-cons vs. the neo-cons, or the West vs. the Rest, or the CAs vs. the PCs. The division is between the idealists and the cynics. The idealists think the CPC is their chance to create the perfect p
olitical party: it will be in favour of everything wonderful, and against everything hateful, and its internal democratic workings will be beyond reproach, and its grassroots will be the masters, and so on and so on. Every time the idealists see a problem with their own party, they try to ram through a solution or else they go crybabying to the media where they can always find a receptive ear to their anti-CPC complaints. I put such diverse candidates as Scott Reid and Craig Chandler in this category. I know Scott a little bit, and he is an extremely bright, kind, helpful, and creative person. I don’t know Craig Chandler from a hole in the wall, and he doesn’t frankly seem like someone I want to know better. But both have hurt the CPC this week, in trying to Make It Perfect: Chris with his Paean to So-Cons in the Globe, and Scott with his delegates-per-riding business yesterday. Neither of these two individuals seem to have given much thought to the following question: will my efforts today make it more likely, or less likely, that we will defeat the Liberals in the next election? (Of course, perhaps they HAVE thought about that, and just come to the painfully wrong conclusion.)

In contrast, the cynics say: this party isn’t perfect. Frankly, the voters aren’t perfect. Canadian voters seem to want a lot of crap that is bloody well idiotic–like subsidies to Bombardier and Official Languages Acts. Our responsibility as Tories is to find the way to advance the most electable parts of our ideal platform, and junk or ignore the rest. I’m not sure who would qualify as a cynic within the CPC–maybe James Moore, maybe Rahim Jaffer. I don’t know. One of the problems, of course, is that from the outside it’s hard to tell the difference between a cynic and a useless squish. It’s always easy to tell the idealists: look for cowboy hats or PhDs or anybody who uses the word “grassroots”. There are brilliant idealists and stupid idealists and weird idealists, and they all care more for the purity of their ideas than for getting elected. The cynics are quieter about their ideas, and speak more about electability. Unfortunately, so do the Liberals-in-Tory-clothing: the Joe Clarks, the Rick Borotsiks. It’s hard–maybe impossible–to tell the difference, from the outside, between those who are trying to get the right things done quietly, and those who favour quiet because all they really care about is their own personal ambition.

Until Friday, I thought Harper was a cynic. Now I’m not so sure. He may be a cynic, or a squish, or perhaps just a cynic who’s a poor manager. But the leadership team of Harper and MacKay, and the caucus including Scott Reid, has failed worse than I thought possible. How is it even imaginable that the big story out of the first day of the first CPC convention is: can the right be united? Forgive me for wanting to throw my hands up in the air and curse a blue streak. These guys remind me of that line P.J. O’Rourke used to describe Republicans–something like “the party that says government is incompetent, and then gets elected and proves it.” Except that with the current lack of management skill and good sense, I cannot see how the CPC is electable at all. And what makes this extra-super-duper-with-a-cherry-on-top frustrating: it’s not even the IDEAS which are making the CPC unelectable. It’s the freakin’ day-to-day management. I guess the old saw really is true: all the smart capitalists go into business, and all the smart socialists go into government. Which means, at election time, it’s the dumb righties against the smart lefties. And smart will beat dumb most of the time.

I truly don’t know what to do. The CPC are the only reasonably electable party I can support, but they need to figure out how to organize and manage themselves pretty darn quick. The whole thing is almost more depressing than irritating. I really don’t know what to do.

Except this: I do reserve the right to edit this rambling incoherent screed. And I still reserve the right to vote for this sorry bunch of amateurs. What the hell else can any of us do?