Not only is enforced egalitarianism apparently unconstitutional, it’s also a goal which is both economically plus philosophically impossible to achieve, as well as being societalcide, self-destruction — because it only leads (every damn time in the history of human civilization) to Seven Kill Stele megadeath if the power vacuum of egalitarianism defection is not filled by the strong and rational.
We’re at a very dangerous juncture for Western civilization because it seems nearly everyone (at least in the West) incorrectly thinks egalitarianism is beneficial.
Click all my links, otherwise you’ll bypass reading points which support my conclusions.
Impossibility of Enforcing Fairness
Martin Armstrong recently wrote:
How is it possible that we can have legalized class warfare and politicians run on extorting the rich at gun point with threat of imprisonment if they do not pay their “fair share” which is somehow a higher percentage than everyone else and this miraculously does not violate Equal Protection and Justice for All?
Which echos the theme of what I had written before that:
The dilemma you describe of the inability to have liberty without forcing liberty—which as you point out is ironically the antithesis of liberty—exists because of the collective’s capability to use more force than the individual. Max Weber’s canonical definition of government is: a monopoly on the use of force.
What you’re essentially pointing out is that liberty is not possible because leeches game the political economics and subject the society to their leeching. And any conservative group that claims to offer a better (e.g. “more righteous or meritorious”) order is still depending on collectivized force and thus is a power vacuum that ultimately is captured by leeches. Both the Libertards and Conservatzars are hypocrites.
Thus my current goal with my decentralized ledger R&D is to ameliorate the power of the centralized collective.
The more resources we put technologically out-of-the-reach of leeches, the more impotent leeching becomes.
Leeching destroys society not because society can’t produce enough for most people to be lazy, but because leeching (aka socialism aka Marxism) enable/force totalitarianism wherein the most powerful who captures the power vacuum must also be the most corrupt (in order to retain power) and megadeath all those leeches in the end. Leeching is a cyclical, repeating self-destructive cancer on civilization that periodically razes civilization to the ground in a 600 year Dark Age.
Again I view my decentralized ledger technology work very seriously, because we are entering (at least in the West) the totalitarian end-game phase of socialism.
Unconstitutionality of Enforcing Fairness
Martin Armstrong continued to explain the profound unconstitutionality of enforcing fairness:
The Supreme Court dances around this issue that clearly is unconstitutional and is a Communist idea championed by Karl Marx, which is the cornerstone of leftist politics. Yet, when we peal back the veneer and we look at the same principle in other contexts, we suddenly see a conflict of law. For example.
… [discussion of landmark Supreme Court majority decision supporting the constitutional argument in a related context] …paying dues toward union functions outside collective bargaining was unconstitutional and held that the unions “may not exact any funds from nonmembers without their affirmative consent.” In other words, unions would have to ask for nonmembers’ permission to collect political assessments and, possibly, any dues at all. “Individuals should not be compelled to subsidize private groups or private speech.”
The very idea that a person should pay a progressively higher percentage of their income based upon their God given skills flies in the face of certainly the Fifth Amendment Taking Clause, which reads: “[n]o person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Nowhere in the Constitution is there any hint that equal justice applies for all except if you make more than your neighbor. Progressive taxation also violated the Freedom of Religion under the First Amendment for one of the Ten Commandments is very clear on the subject:
As is well known, the climax of the constitutional controversy in the United States over a federal income tax came in 1895 in the celebrated Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 429 (1895). An income tax with explicitly graduated rates, enacted during the Civil War, was held to be constitutional in Springer v. United States, 102 U.S. 586 (i88o), however, the progressive feature of that tax was not in controversy during that case so it was not actually decided. What is usually remembered about these cases is that the Supreme Court adopted the views of taxpayers’ counsel that a tax on the income from real and personal property is a direct tax within the constitutional requirement that direct taxes be apportioned among the states, and that since these aspects of the tax were not separable the whole tax, the result was that the tax was patently unconstitutional.
So the Supreme Court ruled that a prior version of the income tax was unconstitutional for the same structure that the new one had, but the Supreme Court due to a tie vote avoided ruling on the progressive nature of new one (which is the ancestor of the one we have until now). And the worst part is the people cheered this unconstitutional tax because the witless fall into the woodchipper:
Nonetheless, lift the rug and we discover the origin of progressive taxation. The tax in question in 1894, had a flat rate of 2% on income but allowed each individual taxpayer an exemption of $4,ooo. Therefore, anyone earning more than $4,000 were discriminated against creating progressiveness which the public cheered as to be expected. That is the argument against democracy for it allows the majority to treat any minority unfairly.
In presenting their positions to the Court, counsel for the taxpayers did argue a substantial portion of their brief on the progressive nature of the tax in addition to the direct taxation argument. They maintained that the tax, because of the various progressive exemptions, violated the constitutional requirement of uniformity of indirect taxes and contravened the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. They focused on the $4,ooo exemption. On the issue of uniformity the Court divided four to four and therefore expressed no opinion. Even the dissenting opinions avoided discussing the issue.
Chief Justice Steven Fields did write an opinion arguing for the unconstitutionality of progressive taxation:
Only in the concurring opinion of Justice Field is the question or progressiveness even explored. Justice Steven Field (on bench 1863 – December 1, 1897) argued that it was indeed the arbitrariness of the exemption that would in itself have been a sufficient basis for invalidating the tax. The income tax law under consideration was marked by discriminating features which affect the whole law. It discriminated between those who receive an income of $4,ooo and those who do not. It was a blatant and arbitrary discrimination embodied within the whole legislation. Justice Field thus is the only Justice to directly address the issue whereas everyone else has avoided discussing the validity of progressive taxation because it benefits government.
Nature Isn’t Fair
Armstrong goes on to explain that more than a decade later in 1916 during a time of war, Chief Justice Edward White wrote a decision on the progressive nature of income taxation and made corrupt, baseless jurisprudence claims w.r.t. the Equal Protection issue. So essentially the Constitution had been usurped at that point and the rule of law and due process abandoned.
Nature is a meritocracy only in the sense that it’s an evolutionary competition for resiliency of the species and maximization of total entropy in the Universe. If this bothers anyone emotionally or for what ever reason, then they live in denial, but that won’t help anyone advert the reality of it. Caveat emptor. And “inalienable or natural rights” don’t exist.
Equal opportunity can’t be enforced because nature will never allow it. Equality would be devoid of competition and entropy would cease to increase in violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is fundamental to the physics of our Universe.