Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are on the same page when it comes tipping. They both want to abolish taxes on tips. Of course, this should not surprise anyone. This is a presidential election year, when presidential candidates have to please the voters and purchase their votes. What better way to do so in the state of Nevada, a key swing state, and elsewhere than by promising to abolish income taxes for workers who receive tips?
I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we abolish taxes not just on tips but also on all other forms of income?
Given that we have all been born and raised under a federal income-tax system, I’m sure that to many Americans that would sound like a really radical and outrageous suggestion. After all, with no income taxes, how would the government fund Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, farm subsidies, and other welfare-state programs? How would it fund invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and other countries? How would it fund foreign aid to Israel, Ukraine, Egypt, and other foreign regimes? How would it fund the drug war? How would it fund America’s immigration police state along the border? How would it fund state-sponsored assassinations, torture, and indefinite detention? How would it fund the national-security establishment — i.e., the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA?
IRS building.
But let’s not forget something important: Our American ancestors lived without income taxation for more than 125 years. That’s right — for more than a century, there were no income taxes, income-tax returns, keeping track of deductions, April 15 filing deadline, IRS audits or harassment, and no IRS at all. Americans were free to keep 100 percent of their income, and there was nothing the governments could do about it!
What about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other welfare programs? They didn’t exist. That’s because our American ancestors rejected socialism and wanted nothing to do with it. Unlike Americans today, they didn’t believe in mandatory “charity.” They believed only in voluntary charity.
They also rejected the national-security state form of governmental structure that Americans today cherish in their quest to be kept “safe.” In fact, if the Constitution had called into existence a national-security state, there is no doubt that our American ancestors would not have accepted the Constitution. That would have meant that America would have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, whereby the federal government was denied the authority to impose any type of tax whatsoever.
For more than a century, there was also no foreign interventionism in Europe, Asia, and most of the rest of the world. Also, no drug war and no war on immigrants to fund.
The result of this unusual society? It became not only the most prosperous society in history but also the most charitable. When people were free to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, many poor people became rich. And the rich helped others through voluntary donations. That’s how the libraries, hospitals, churches, opera houses, and others got built.
But later Americans became afraid of freedom and began looking to the coercive apparatus of the government to keep them “safe” and “secure.” In the process, Americans became a weak, frightened, dependent people living under an all-powerful, controlling government, one whose rulers and masters compete to seek their votes every election cycle by offering them bribes in the form of political candy, like no more taxes on tips.
The question is: Can a nation of people who have traded away their freedom for the sake of being kept “safe” and “secure” with welfare and a national-security state win back their freedom? Of course, but it will require a fierce determination to abandon the welfare-warfare dole and its false and fake aura of “safety and security” in order to experience the virtues of a genuinely free society.