Star Parker: Free the Tax Code From Special Interests

A big tax bill is all it takes to see how perverse and dysfunctional our government has become.

Why are the halls of Congress now crawling with special interest lobbyists looking for opportunities to carve out some new benefit, or to protect existing special interests in the tax code?

The objective of the tax bill Republicans want to piece together is noble. Make the code more simple, logical and easy to use. The tax code should be an exercise in civic responsibility in which all participate to pay for the legitimate functions of government.

But what are those legitimate functions of government? What happened to that discussion? Why when the plate goes around in church do all feel privileged to contribute and participate in a noble cause? And why when government collects our taxes do we want to run and hide?

The answer, of course, is simple. What goes on in Washington is no longer a reflection, in Lincoln’s famous words, of government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The tax code has become an instrument of government power brokers to extract money from private citizens to finance pet schemes of Washington’s political class.

According to American Enterprise Institute economist and blogger Mark Perry, some 70 percent of the federal budget, about $2.6 trillion, is transfer payments — funds recycled from one set of private citizens to others. Most of federal government spending is not about paying for functions of government, but for social engineering, meddling in our lives.

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