Rich men find pleasure in owning yachts, race horses and sports teams. Pleasure is piled upon pleasure when a rich man can sell a team for many millions of dollars more than he paid knowing he is able to keep the first forty percent of his profit before government begins to tax the remainder.
The pleasures of poor men are nothing – yea, less than nothing – in comparison. They used to include cigarettes and drink. Used, I say, because government, having decided that cigarettes and drink are bad for us, has imposed such high taxes on them (especially cigarettes) it has put them all but out of reach. A man who has to choose from the Dollar Menu at McDonalds in order to eat can’t pay the $14 a pack, most of it in taxes, that cigarettes now cost in New York City.
A non-smoker will say he should quit, ignoring it that the man actually enjoys smoking in the way that he, the non-smoker, enjoys his $5 cup of designer coffee two or three times a day. (You won’t see a Starbucks in neighborhoods where the poor live.)
Because the man won’t quit voluntarily is exactly why government imposes its high taxes, federal, state and local. It aims to force him to quit. Why? It is as former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg once told Diane Sawyer in a television interview: “If keeping people healthy isn’t the business of government, I don’t know what is.”
Such a conception of government is alien to what men believed during the 1,200 years that Christendom existed prior to the so-called Reformation. During those many centuries the rulers of Catholic Europe and its outposts around the world, including the Americas, understood that besides keeping order the “business” of government is to enact and enforce laws that enable men more easily to attain the final end that all would desire if they know of it, spending eternity in Heaven, or at least not to damn themselves on account of living in a society where the will of God is unknown or must be ignored lest the “freedom of conscience” of those who do not believe in Him be violated – do not believe or don’t care.
I am very conscious as I write this that it is the thoughts I’m expressing that are alien, that it was Bloomberg who spoke according to the temper of the time, that his is the voice of that “progress” which has brought us finally to the fulfillment of our first ancestors’ dream in Eden: men and women living “as gods,” deciding for themselves what is good and what is evil. What you’re hearing from me is the voice of the thirteenth century. Nothing could be more foreign today.
I am also conscious that I’ve yet to register the points I intended when I lit a cigarette, poured a glass of wine and sat down to write these lines.
If you take a man’s pleasures from him, he is liable to try to indulge them another way. For instance, if you put cigarettes out of his reach by making him pay $14 for a pack, he’ll buy just one for 75 cents if he can find someone to sell it to him. Single cigarettes that are smuggled into New York from places with lower taxes and sold on the streets are called “loosies”. Their sale is so widespread in neighborhoods where the poor live that earlier this year NYC police were ordered, as they have been before, to crack down. That’s what they were doing the other week in the NYC borough of Staten Island when they came upon Eric Garner selling loosies. Since 2009 he had been arrested eight times for the same heinous crime. This time an officer put Garner in what appeared in a video to be an illegal chokehold. When the man was brought to the ground four or five other cops piled on him. Garner, who was overweight and asthmatic, couldn’t breathe. He died of asphyxiation.
Garner’s death, coming soon after renewed rioting in St. Louis over the killing of an “unarmed black teenager,” was seized upon by the media and individuals like the camera-hungry Rev. Al Sharpton, as another instance of the brutality of murderous white police born of inherent racism. That is an important issue but not the concern here.
A couple of voices with national reach, those of Sen. Rand Paul and, I gather, radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, were heard speaking to the link between the Garner case, excessive taxation and the nanny state, which needs money in order to make sure citizens eat right, keep buckled up and don’t smoke. That gets closer to my point.
Government did not decide all by itself to regulate the citizen’s life in ways touching on some of its most important and intimate aspects. After all, a liberal democracy like ours is premised on the theory that it operates according to the will of the people. What is crucial in this is that the people, deciding themselves to live according to their own will instead of God’s – in fact ignorant in many cases that His even exists – look to government to do exactly as it does. We expect the state to decide how our children will be educated, expect it to decide who is married, expect it now to keep us healthy. Somebody has to set some standards, has to set some rules. It was decided two centuries ago when the Constitution was written that it wouldn’t be Christianity doing it. God isn’t in the document. It begins, “We the people…”
If the result is schools that produce functional illiterates, “married” same-sex couples and death by chokehold in Staten Island, don’t blame the police or other authorities. It is simply the theory of democracy become real by our inviting government into areas where it doesn’t belong. (Don’t object that you didn’t invite it to intrude into your life. In a democracy the majority prevail. Government won’t distinguish you from everybody else any sooner than a drone missile killing someone deemed by the President to be a potential terrorist threat will leave unscathed persons sitting at the next table at an outdoor café in Yemen. Of course “minorities” can object, if they’re being “profiled,” but anybody else who is singled out will probably wish he hadn’t been.)
The early twentieth-century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, not exactly a champion of Catholic orthodoxy, wrote about this in his book The Tragic Sense of Life. Therein he contrasted modern time with the time when Christendom, now derided and despised, still existed. The Inquisitor, he conceded, was at least concerned with the welfare of men’s souls. “All the modern policeman wants is to break you.”
