There are two distinct classes of men - those who pay taxes and those who receive and live upon taxes.
—
- Thomas Paine (via coeus)
Certainly true. This is because this idea of the “Middle Class” has always been something of a misnomer. The “Middle Class” merely represents the best that the non-ownership class is capable of achieving. If you don’t have access to ownership of productive resources you can forget about earning the kind of revenue that puts you in the highest reaches of a progressive tax system.
Of course, which “class of men” you ultimately belong to is a complex confluence of events. Surely your own strength of character can play a role as well as luck, inheritance, and influence. So it’s hard to hold either class truly accountable for its position in the bipolar hierarchy Thomas Paine imagines here, to point out the virtues of one relative to the other. Especially if you can’t claim that some sort of fate-based mechanism or deity is simply smiling on the fortunate.
At the end of the day, this distinction is a creation of our society more than a statement of preference. Paine’s comment doesn’t seem to indicate that those classes are intrinsic to our being or representative of our worth to the world. He also doesn’t note whether or not this is preferable to any other system of classification. My thought is that such a bifurcation of humanity is likely to be suboptimal, to result in unnecessary frictions that diminish our ability to coexist without constant resource conflict. Of course, it’s not clear that any other system is capable of willing itself into being.
(via correlationstonone)
No, this really isn’t true. At least, it’s no longer true in the U.S. in the way Paine meant it. We do not have a king. We do not have a set of property owning lords who live off the labor of the disenfranchised peasants. While we might learn useful things by analogy, things have changed significantly sicne Paine lived. The wealthy pay taxes. They pay a lot of taxes. They may not pay enough taxes—but they’re certainly not living off the taxes of others like feudal lords.
Worse yet, the people quoting Paine today are likely to be the Tea Party type claiming that either federal employees are those who “don’t pay taxes” or those in a low tax bracket receiving some sort of public assistance are the equivalent of the kings and tyrants Paine hated.
We could change it a bit to be more helpful. “There are two classes of people - those who pay interest and those who receive and live upon interest.”
