RALEIGH — “A reasonable tax is the price of freedom.”
That’s the unintentionally funny laugh line thrown out Tuesday by Sen. John Kerr, a Goldsboro Democrat, as he defended a Senate budget plan that would increase spending $726 million, or 5.1 percent, and impose half a billion dollars in higher taxes next year.
The good senator was, of course, serious. He seriously thinks that raising taxes on children’s candy and soft drinks, among other egregious new levies, in order to spend more money subsidizing businesses, research labs, welfare bureaucracies, and unaccountable nonprofits is “the price of freedom.”
Ah, yes, as Patrick Henry once famously said, “Give me tax-funded chiropractic or give me death!” Much later, Barry Goldwater reminded us that, “Extremism in the defense of pork-barrel spending is no vice.” And who could forgot the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and More at Four.”
Or as Janis Joplin warbled, “Freedom’s just another word for taxing all that moves.”
Let’s be clear. The alternative to the Senate’s tax increases is not the abrogation of basic state responsibilities to ensure justice and safety. We are, instead, talking about whether the state should issue construction bonds that would roughly double NC’s budget for debt service after promising voters in 2000 that a yes vote for these bonds wouldn’t raise their taxes. We are talking about whether to offer free medical care to individuals with incomes far above the poverty line. We are talking about handing cash grants to some of America’s biggest corporations. We are talking about whether a disproportionately affluent group of UNC students and their families should continue to receive one of the most generous tuition subsidies in the United States.
We’re talking about the ridiculous Global TransPark, for Christ’s sake.
If Sen. Kerr and the rest of the political class in Raleigh truly believe that the freedom of North Carolinians would be endangered by rethinking these fiscal policies, they are grossly deluded, or at least in serious need of a dictionary.
Indeed, given the events we have just been witnessing overseas, as some 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq struggle to claim and preserve real freedom in the wake of bestial tyranny, it is revolting to argue that protecting state jobs or research subsidies is about preserving our “freedom.”
The only freedom North Carolinians will gain from the Senate budget plan is the freedom to choose whether to laugh at it or curse it.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.