What Percent are You?

The Occupy Wall Street crowd claims to stand with the 99% against the 1%.  A conservative news service points out that the 1% earn more than $506,000 a year.  But when it comes to figuring out legitimate government policy, we are not characterized sufficiently by our income.  In fact, our income ought to be as irrelevant as race, religion, sex, or sexuality in government policy.  Making it as important as it is commonly made is highly materialistic.  Note that it is the socialist left that makes the most of income and in that shows its lack of spirituality and its extreme materialism.

Is it not odd that if a man takes the risks of owning his own company and works 70 hours a week and therefor someday may make a higher income than a man who takes a nice, safe 40 hour a week job as an employee and who watches TV for 30 hours a week, the hardworking businessman is taxed more?  The businessman is required to be an unpaid tax collector, is held responsible for all of his employee's safety, is forced to pay for the unemployment of employees whether they ever worked for his company or not, and is supposed to see to it that his company complies with more than 200,000 pages of often-conflicting regulations or suffer crippling fines.  The businessman may very well have 45 hours of his life each week taken by force from him for government purposes.  The employee is more likely to have only 6 or 8 hours of his life claimed by government each week.  These hours taken by force are the equivalent of slavery.

By what right does government enslave one man for many more hours a week than another?  Worse yet, the government really only does it for the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks.  That is where the money is.  It just is not easy for the government to figure out how to take anything it wants out of the 30 hours a week our hypothetical employee is watching TV.  The government simply wants to steal and it is easy to steal from the hardworking businessman, whether it is his mandated service to the government collecting taxes, complying with regulation, or as safety inspector and provider, or the money he earned with his time.  The government is clearly just Willy Sutton.

It is absurd that people spend so much time characterizing themselves in terms of their income.  Legitimate government has the sole purpose of protecting the equal, sovereign individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of personal happiness.  As far as government policy is concerned there are only two numbers that characterize each of us.  They are 1 and 0.0000000032.  You do know what the later number is, do you not?