Tax Day 2010: Suicide watch

In an America in which the top 10 percent of the wage earners pay 73 percent of federal incomes taxes ...

In an America in which, by that same government's estimate, the top income-tax bracket will have to balloon to 88 percent by 2040 to cover the cost of just ObamaCare ...

In an America in which the president, in a 2001 interview, pined for a Supreme Court that supports "redistribution of wealth" ...

We ask you to pause on this Tax Day 2010 to consider a few quotes from history:

From P.A. Kropotkin (1884): "The immense and ever increasing sums which the state wrings from the people are never enough for it: it mortgages the income of future generations and steers resolutely toward bankruptcy."

From William Cobbett (1811): "The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor and to give it to those who do not labor."

Yes, taxes are necessary for the operation of a democratic republic. But a system gamed to create more and more free riders (the fancy economics term for freeloaders) by wringing dry the very class whose wealth creates even more wealth for society is doomed to failure.

The power to tax indeed involves the power to destroy. And, we somberly remind, to commit national suicide.