WHAT IS IT WITH CONSERVATIVES AND TAXES?

Russell Kirk was a reasonable conservative of the old school (e.g., he didn't want an American Empire) and Prof. Bainbridge linked to a talk Kirk gave at the Heritage Foundation in early 1991. This was just about 2 years before Pres. Clinton raised taxes and we had the greatest post-War expansion in American history yet Kirk seems obsessed with taxation:

Oppressive Taxation. With respect to a sharp increase in the level of taxes, it seems as if the Bush Administration really does not understand the principle of diminishing returns, or know the history of the consequences of excessive taxation. When computing our federal income tax very recently, my wife and I discovered that more than half our gross income is taken in taxation -- federal income tax; Social Security taxes; state income taxes; village, township, and county taxes, school property tax; sales taxes. And we are not of the number of Franklin Roosevelt's "malefactors of great wealth." We are in the process of educating four young daughters, paying off mortgages, trying to save something for one's declining years -- I, being seventy-two years of age already -- and contributing to charitable causes. Yet we are better off than many taxpayers. What straw will break the camel's back?

A state that annually exacts in taxes half of a citizen's income is more oppressive, financially, than the despotisms of old. In the ancient monarchies of China, a tax load of more than ten percent would have been thought unjust. Excessive taxation is a major cause of the decline and fall of great states: so writes C. Northcote Parkinson, the author of Parkinson's Law, in his last book.

"Taxation, taken to the limit and beyond, has always been a sign of decadence and a prelude to disaster," as Parkinson puts it. "For government expenditure is the chief cause of inflation and is also the means of government interference in commercial, industrial, and social life. Where evil has been averted it has normally been from lack of funds. Where evil has been done it was usually because the perpetrators had money to spend."