What Mitt Romney paid or did not pay in taxes is none of our business. He’s been filing with the IRS for more than 40 years. If he was doing something illegal, he would have been caught a long time ago. Carl Bernstein, co-author of All the President’s Men, asked this absurd question: How can “we have a candidate for President of the United States who won’t release his tax returns?”

It’s simple: There is no requirement for a presidential candidate to make his tax returns public. The same is true of Congress. That’s why Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, “the two Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives, are among hundreds of elected officials from both parties who refused to release their tax records,” McClatchy News Service report.

Here’s a slogan for the GOP: “People Want Jobs Not Mitt’s Tax Returns.”

Liberals want to attack Mitt Romney for being rich and doing everything he could to keep as much money as he could. When the Romneys spend their own money, liberals go apoplectic. When Obama spends OUR money, liberals praise him as the messiah.

The Kennedys were and are super rich. Some put their fortune at $1 billion. John Kerry is mega-rich. I don’t recall that their millions were a campaign issue.

Liberals want Romney to release his tax returns so they can find something to make envious voters mad. Envy is what drives the underclass. That’s why they’re the underclass. They are so concerned about what other people earn that they do little to better themselves. They blame the rich for their own poverty.

Politicians, social theorists, special interest groups, and unions are perched like vultures ready to pick clean any productive citizen, whether it’s a lemonade stand or a presidential candidate.

Winston Churchill wrote that “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

Envy is quantitatively different from jealousy. The envier is a destroyer:

“I’d like to have what he has, but I know I can never get it. Nobody should be allowed to have it or at least that much of it. If I can’t have it, neither should anyone, and if I can’t make this happen, I’ll make sure it costs him a lot of money to own it. I’ll work to destroy people who can afford these things. Maybe I can get the government to make it illegal to own or too expensive to keep.”

In his book Envy (1966), Helmut Schoeck “called attention to the deadly role played in society by envy. Envy demands the leveling of all things, because the envious man finds superiority in others intolerable. He sees it as better to turn the world into hell rather than to allow anyone to prosper more than himself, or to be superior to him. Envy negates progress.”1

It’s no wonder that the Bible describes envy as “rottenness of the bones” (Prov. 14:30, KJV). Here’s a perfect example of the effects of envy:

“Now Isaac sowed in that land, and reaped in the same year a hundredfold. And the Lord blessed him, and the man became rich, and continued to grow richer until he became very wealthy; for he had possessions of flocks and herds and a great household, so that the Philistines envied him. Now all the wells which his father’s servants had dug in the days of Abraham his father, the Philistines stopped up by filling them with earth” (Gen. 26:12–15).

Spoiling the wells hurt everybody, including the enviers. The politics of envy is destroying America.

1. R. J. Rushdoony, The Roots of Inflation (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1982), 33. [↩]