ConstitutionEconomicsGovernmentPolitics

Of Course a Majority of Americans Support Raising Taxes on Top Earners

Most of the people who were polled are not top earners, so it’s no surprise that a majority of them support raising taxes on top earners. Let’s take a poll of foxes who want to have access to the hen house? How about a poll of wolves who want to eat the sheep? What do you think the outcome of that vote will be?

The income amendment, the Sixteenth Amendment, was supposed to be a tax on the wealthy. The people who supported it did not believe that they would ever have to pay much.

This is why our founders did not develop a democracy. Democratic elements, yes; but not a pure majority-rule democracy.

John Winthrop (1588–1649), first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared direct democracy to be “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”1

John Cotton (1584–1652), seventeenth-century Puritan minister in Massachusetts, wrote in 1636: “Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?”2

James Madison (1751–1836), recognized as the “father of the Constitution,” wrote that democracies are “spectacles of turbulence and contention.” Pure democracies are “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property. . . . In general [they] have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”3

John Adams, the second president of the United States, stated that “the voice of the people is ‘sometimes the voice of Mahomet, of Caesar, of Catiline, the Pope, and the Devil.’”4

Social philosopher Francis A. Schaeffer described democracy as “the dictatorship of the 51%, with no controls and nothing with which to challenge the majority.”5 The logic is simple: “It means that if Hitler was able to get a 51% vote of the Germans, he had a right to kill the Jews.”6

In 1928, a citizenship manual was developed by the War Department. Training Manual No. TM 2000-25 on Citizenship, U.S. History and the Constitution was compiled and issued to teach young men in the armed forces the fundamental principles upon which the United States was founded. As the manual states, “Training in citizenship is the most vital of all subjects to that nation whose system of government, security of property, and full power to express individual initiative are based upon the intelligence, education, and character of each individual citizen.” The Manual’s authors expressed fear that if the “proper understanding of the history, ideals, and underlying principles of our political institutions” were ever forgotten the nation would be lost.

  1. Quoted in A. Marvyn Davies, Foundation of American Freedom: Calvinism in the Development of Democratic Thought and Action (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1955), 11. []
  2. Letter to Lord Say and Seal, quoted by Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, [1938) 1963), 1:209–210. Also see Edwin Powers, Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts: 1620–1692 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), 55. []
  3. Quoted in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist, “Federalist 10” (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 61. []
  4. John Adams, quoted by Gilbert Chinard, Honest John Adams (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., [1933] 1961), 241 in John Eidsmoe, “The Christian America Response to National Confessionalism,” in Gary Scott Smith, ed., God and Politics: Four Views on the Reformation of Civil Government (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1989), 227–228. []
  5. Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (1970) in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, 5 vols. (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 4:27. []
  6. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, 4:27. []
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