by
Walter E. Williams
Recently
by Walter E. Williams: Unasked
and Unanswered Questions
There’s a move
on to prohibit Washington’s football team from calling itself “Redskins,”
even though a 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision said that it has
that right. Now the name change advocates are turning to the political
arena and intimidation. The NCAA has already banned the University
of North Dakota from calling its football team the “Fighting Sioux.”
This is the
classic method of busybodies and tyrants; they start out with something
trivial or small and then magnify and extend it. If these people
are successful in banning the use of Indian names for football teams,
you can bet the rent money that won’t end their agenda. Our military
has a number of fighting aircraft named with what busybodies and
tyrants might consider racial slights, such as the Apache, Iroquois,
Kiowa, Lakota and Mescalero. We also have military aircraft named
after animals, such as the Eagle, Falcon, Raptor, Cobra and Dolphin.
The people fighting against the Redskins name might form a coalition
with the PETA animal rights kooks to ban the use of animal names.
Another example
of the strategy of starting out small is that of the tobacco zealots.
In 1965, in the name of health, tobacco zealots successfully got
Congress to enact the Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act. A
few years later, they were successful in getting a complete smoking
ban on planes, and that success emboldened them to seek many other
bans. The issue here is not smoking but tyrant strategy. Suppose
that in 1965, the tobacco tyrants demanded that Congress enact a
law banning smoking in bars, in workplaces, in restaurants, in apartments,
within 25 feet of entrances, in ballparks, on beaches, on sidewalks
and in other places. Had they revealed and demanded their full agenda
back in 1965, there would have been so much resistance that they
wouldn’t have gotten anything. By the way, much of their later success
was a result of a bogus Environmental Protection Agency study on
secondhand smoke. I’d like to hear whether EPA scientists are willing
to declare that people can die from secondhand smoke at a beach,
on a sidewalk, in a park or within 25 feet of a building.
During the
legislative and subsequent state ratification debates over the 16th
Amendment — which established the income tax — the political task
of overturning the Constitution’s prohibition of such tax was considerably
eased by political promises that any income tax levied would fall
upon only the wealthiest 3 to 5 percent of the population. Most
Americans paid no federal income tax, and those earning $500,000
or more paid only 7 percent. In 1913, only 358,000 Americans filed
1040 forms, compared with today’s 140 million. That’s the rope-a-dope
strategy. To get the votes of the masses, politicians start out
small and exploit the politics of envy by promising that only the
rich will be taxed.
In
1898, Congress imposed a temporary federal excise tax on telephones
as a revenue measure during the Spanish-American War. At that time,
only the rich owned phones. Soon nearly all Americans owned phones.
Both the rich and the poor paid the telephone excise tax. Congress
repealed this “temporary” Spanish-American War tax in 2006. Nobel
laureate Milton Friedman had it right when he said, “Nothing is
so permanent as a temporary government program.”
The Tax Reform
Act of 1969, called the alternative minimum tax, was created to
raise revenue from 155 “rich” Americans who legally avoided federal
income taxes by buying tax-free municipal bonds. Today more than
4 million Americans are hit by the AMT, and most of them hardly
qualify as rich.
Here’s another
rope-a-dope just beginning. The National Transportation Safety Board
recently recommended that states reduce the allowable blood alcohol
content by more than a third — to 0.05 percent, as opposed to today’s
0.08 percent. The NTSB is calling it a recommendation just to test
the waters. If the board doesn’t see resistance, its next move will
be to threaten noncomplying states with a cutoff of highway construction
funds. Setting the legal limit at 0.05 percent is not these people’s
end objective. Their end objective is to outlaw any amount of alcohol
in the blood while one is driving.
June
25, 2013
Walter
E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics
at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist.
To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page.
Copyright
© 2013 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell