Taxes Diminish Freedom

To the Editor:

President Obama’s speech that said, “You didn’t build that,” shows ignorance and is purposefully misleading of the facts as well as our history and Constitutional construct.

Note: The first two English colonies (Jamestown 1607 and Plymouth 1620) were not government projects, but “private” commercial operations.

Who knew the Pilgrims had all those roads and bridges, parks and whatnot when they got here to “create” the United States of America. Consider: How did Lewis and Clark find the Northwest Passage without GPS? How did settlers travel west without federal government-provided roads? In fact there were no federal funded roads before President Eisenhower.

All of our original colleges and universities were not built, funded, or even aided by government funds but by churches and private citizens for the first 160 years.

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a machine with commonality of parts. The Wright brothers, not government, invented airplanes. Ford created the assembly line for automobiles all without government help. And doctors who were not on the government’s payroll cured disease.

Regarding NASA, remember that McDonnell Douglas built the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft. North American built the Apollo command module. Grumman built the Lunar Module. And the Saturn-V Rocket was built by North American, Douglas Aircraft, and IBM. NASA did a god job managing the effort, but they built or designed darn little.

Look at a quote by Abraham Lincoln relating to the premise used by President Obama in his speech — “These are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of King-craft were of this class they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because they said the people were better off for being ridden.” Kings and progressives like Obama did not think the people competent.

Obama is ignoring our Constitution that says all men are born equal, no man is automatically the boss of another. Instead he is creating his own “un-Constitution,” one that says, “all men are created dependent,” with their only inalienable rights being their obligation to the government under which they live. This is the antithesis of what our Founders created via the US Constitution in 1789.

Without all of these businesses that both Obama and Elizabeth Warren like to demonize, creating jobs and products that people buy because they are useful, the government would have no income to tax. No jobs, no income taxes. The money for government comes from taxpayers and businesses in the private sector.

Excessive taxes diminishes peoples’ economic freedom and along with it every other freedom.

Daniel Kormanik

178 Hanover Road, Newtown                                           July 30, 2012