Governments, all governments are enabled by power and wealth, and in that order, because from the very first the powerful individual by means of his excepional moral or physical strength took for himself whatever collective wealth there was and declared himself leader of his people.
The power of any government has always stemmed from the wealth it has acquired from its people, freely given or forcefully taken, by taxation or other means. Furthermore, governments without wealthy citizens whose wealth thy can tax or steal will struggle and eventually collapse.
Listening to the presidential candidates one wonders if they have not forgotten that the wealth they would spend in support of educational, health, job, housing and other programs can only come from an increase in tax revenues. And that increasing tax revenues can only come from an increase in the country’s gross national product, that is, from an increase in the production of goods and services.
Shouldn’t then the presidential candidates be most of all talking about how they will increase the country’s output of goods and services, because only by additional taxes on additional goods and services, bringing in additional tax revenues, will there be additional monies for the educational, health, job, housing and other programs that the people, large numbers of them, perhaps that one half of the population that doesn’t pay income taxes, want and need.
But they don’t, and we hear little or nothing from them about the nature of wealth promotion and creation. Our country’s wealth has since its beginnings come from two sources, its great natural resources and its creative, inventive, and entrepreneurial people. We are reaching the end of the first, whether it’s farmland, oil underground, mountains of minerals, or other such, and as a result we are more and more dependent on the second, on our people.
Wouldn’t you think that the government, and even more the presidential candidates, would all the time be talking about how best to create a climate in which smart, inventive, and energetic people, people of all ages, would be more apt to take that risk, carry out that idea, make the prototype of the next big thing?