Proposed taxes would redistribute money

America now appears to be divided into two social strata: those who work or save for a living and those who vote for a living. The former have just suffered through another stressful tax season; the latter did not.

The 17th century French finance minister to Louis XIV, Jean Baptiste Colbert, once wrote: “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.”

Nearly a century later, the French freethinker Voltaire wrote in his anti-Christian Dictionnaire Philosophique: “In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other.”

In the 21st century, the Politburo-by-the-Potomac proposes for us new taxes which, intentionally or not, incorporate the very essence of Colbert's and Voltaire's tax principles. This administration gives special meaning to the term “redistributionism.”

Roger W. Smith

Waterloo