A civilized society costs money

“Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.” Guess which “lefty” said that? Let me help. He was born into a wealthy Boston Brahmin family. His father, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., was a lawyer, physician, and an exceptional poet. Our Oliver was a Harvard graduate who went on to earn a law degree there. He was named a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court when it had some standards, honor, and integrity. Theodore Roosevelt., hardly a wild-eyed liberal, put him on the Court in 1902 where he served until 1932.

He served with such distinction that he is honored today as one of the best justices ever. He is, moreover, far from the current court Republicans as one could be. Mr. Injustice Thomas, and Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Alito certainly haven’t studied his truly judicial approach to the job. Holmes thought taxes brought a civilized society. Today, Speaker Mike Johnson and his buddies like Marjorie Taylor Greene are themselves not civilized.

Holmes was an ardent supporter of the First Amendment, but also was prime in developing “the clear and present danger” limitation on free speech. Encouraging insurrection is not covered by free speech, even for a president.

Current Republican tax policy can be summed up easily: ‘‘Them what has, gets.” I’m told Mike Johnson has asked the House Chaplain to include those words in the opening prayer of the House. That may be only a rumor, but certainly not beyond his pious character.

It is true that taxes were a major issue in the American Revolution, since we had no vote in Parliament. Today’s Tea Party is not paying to some distant parliament. It may surprise some, even those who can read, that we have been a democracy for a long time and send nothing to the Exchequer.

Democrats do understand that some taxes may have to be cut. They are wary, but not rigid. After COVID, for example. some enterprises suffered and deserved help. They got it. But the Republicans seemed focused only on help for big corporations and the already rich.

Today, President Biden is fighting to make the tax system fairer. He has proposed a new billionaires minimum tax. He would go after multinational corporations shifting jobs overseas.

The Holmes description should apply on the state level as well. Making Iowa a civilized society again has grown more difficult in recent years thanks to Gov. Kim Reynolds and the Republicans in the Legislature. A civilized society, a democratic one, doesn’t take lunch from kids, sap public schools of money they need, or shrink funds for medical care for the elderly.

I certainly don’t expect Reynolds to read the senior Holmes’s poetry; I do wish she might read what Holmes the Younger thinks about how we get to civilized society.

There is a better way to make Iowa civilized. It is to put blind politics aside and follow President Biden’s lead on new social programs, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. This isn’t class warfare. It’s the search for a civilized society.

Norman Sherman of Coralville has worked extensively in politics, including as Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s press secretary, and authored a memoir “From Nowhere to Somewhere.”