Mitt Romney's Health Tax

BOSTON Massachusetts legislators have approved the nation's first bill requiring all residents to have health insurance, and Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, has said he will sign it.

Under the bill, the state would offer subsidies to private insurers for coverage of more low-income families. Companies with more than 10 employees that do not offer health insurance to the workers would pay the state $295 a year for each worker, money that would support the subsidies.

In Paine’s view, most warfare was essentially this conflict writ large. In part, war was an attempt by the plundering classes to increase revenue through the conquest of territories containing exploitable productive classes. In addition, it was an attempt by the plundering classes to distract their own productive classes from the abuses of government, for war served to “prevent people from looking into the defects and abuses of government.” Government encouraged national chauvinism because “it will have no excuse for its enormous revenue and taxation, except it can prove that, somewhere or another, it has enemies.” Most importantly, war was an attempt by the plundering classes to increase taxation in the territories already under their control by creating a crisis in which national humiliation or annihilation might result from resistance to tax increases. Paine asserted that “war is the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home: the object of it is an increase of revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretense must be made for expenditures.” In other words, “Taxes were not raised to carry on wars, wars were raised to carry on taxes”: The plundering classes who live on taxation promote war to raise revenue.[9]

In contrast to the plundering classes, war harms the productive classes because they “must all pay towards the expense” and gain none of the benefits. Successful wars of conquest do not lessen taxes; on the contrary, society is “taxed to pay for the charge of making them, and has not the same been the case in every war?” The plundering classes may “fatten on the folly of one country and the spoils of another; and, between their plunder and their prey, may go home rich. But the case is very different with the laboring farmer, the working tradesman, and the necessitous poor in England, the sweat of whose brow goes day after day to feed, in prodigality and sloth,” the army that “plunders” the productive classes on all sides of international conflicts.[10]

Paine, therefore, saw war as a system of exploitation. The “predatory classes” used state power to live off the “productive classes,” the multitudes who labor at the base of the social pyramid. States were wedded to “a continual system of war and extortion.”[11] The plundering classes’ thirst for taxation meant that perpetual war was the fate of societies dominated by the state.

It does not appear that Rand formed her views from close prior study of Paine or other American authors. But she did read some works, and she does refer approvingly to the founding fathers in her writings. That she understood their views in essentials may be due to their lasting influence in American culture and discourse, and their presence in secondary literature and even journalistic accounts which she may have read or discussed.

Her only reference to Paine comes from the 1940s, in a letter she wrote to Leonard Read, founder of the Foundation for Economic Education. It is not approving. Rand wrote that Paine was "not one of us" (Letters of Ayn Rand, p. 171), i.e., not a defender of the free market. In this she presumably refers to Paine's embrace of the French Revolution. (In that same letter, she championed Paterson's "The God of the Machine.")