Column: Jennifer Vogt-Erickson, My Point of View

As a high school teacher, I was taken aback a few months ago when a couple of my students questioned a memo asking everyone to refrain from using a certain fragrance due to serious health problems experienced by another student. “Why should we worry about what happens to them? It’s our right to wear what we want to. If they get sick, that’s their problem.”

This could be a narrow case of teenage myopia run amok, but then again it might not be. In light of prevailing attitudes toward government and taxation, extreme narcissism should not be surprising. It is a logical extension of what’s-in-it-for-me, individualistic, all-government-directives-are-socialism thinking. Not that those particular students subscribe to such politics, but their cavalier remarks have a familiar ring.

Would this self-serving resistance have been thinkable during World War II, when everybody, not just those who were fighting, was expected to sacrifice in order to win the war? People put their own wants in second place behind the needs of the country, and many did it proudly, including young people. It was a national effort, involving high taxes and conservation of resources.

I suspect such true patriotism would be difficult to muster today, when it is hard to get people to willingly pay enough taxes to plow snow on a regular basis.

Somewhere in the intervening 60-plus years, the idea that taxation itself is bad, once on the fringe, became widely socially acceptable.

The idea even has an acolyte at the reins of the U.S. House Budget Committee. Chairman Paul Ryan considers Ayn Rand’s ideas to be the main inspiration for his political career.

Ponder this for awhile: One of Rand’s books is titled “The Virtue of Selfishness.” (Huh?) In Rand’s popular novel “The Fountainhead,” she describes the hero, Howard Roark, as being “born without the ability to consider others.” (This is, coincidentally, the definition of a sociopath.)

In Rand’s and Ryan’s worldview, the wealthy have the right to enjoy their riches without responsibility for the welfare of others. The markets, driven by profit motive, are inherently moral. Taxation is “looting.”

My late grandmother might have deployed one of her favorite terms to describe this situation: “Warped thinking.”

Here are the attitudes I grew up with in my law-abiding, hard-working, devout Christian, intact family: Paying taxes is patriotic. The government provides valuable services at a reasonable cost. Our country gives us opportunities, and we give back through our taxes. Taxes are an investment in our country. The needs of the whole are more important than the wants of oneself. Our money doesn’t belong to us; it belongs to God. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

(Note: While I certainly challenge the notion that Republicans are the repository of so-called Christian family values, I am not making commentary on non-Christian or non-nuclear families.)

It is easy for conservative talk show hosts in the United States to rail against taxation when they are sitting atop personal media fortunes they want to hoard like dragons. It is expedient for some politicians to call for shrinking government when they are hounded by throngs of people who get their talking points from aforementioned talk show hosts. It is painless for conservative Congressmen and -women to insert the mendacious and sophomoric phrase “job-killing” in the title of anti-health care reform legislation when they keep their premium health coverage at taxpayer expense regardless.

But what about the rest of society?

For additional perspective, I turn to the U.S. in the early 1950s and Norway today.

Remember the good old days of the 1950s? The highest income tax bracket was 92 percent instead of 35 percent, and President Dwight Eisenhower defended it, even though Republicans controlled Congress, and they could have easily lowered it (which they did, to 91 percent). Back then, middle-income families paid substantially less of their income in taxes, and the wealthiest families paid substantially more. Yet somehow the 1950s were a very productive period.

Next consider present-day Norway, a country with almost as many Norwegians as Minnesota has. (I am joking. Sort of.)

A recent article in Inc. Magazine (“In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism” by Max Chafkin, Jan. 20, 2011, http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/in-norway-start-ups-say-ja-to-socialism.html) asserts that “taxes-vs.-jobs” thinking is false. One Norwegian entrepreneur shared that he is far less worried about tax burdens than about his personal impact on the world:

‘At one point, I asked Wiggo Dalmo why he was still working so hard to expand his company: Why not just have a nice life — especially given that the authorities would take a hefty chunk of whatever additional money he made? “For me personally, building something to change the world is the kick,” he says. “The worst thing to me is people who chose the easiest path. We should use our wonderful years to do something on this earth.”’

That is what it boils down to. Do something good for the world and leave it a better place. Teenagers might be excused for a little navel-gazing (only when it’s harmless), but adults should focus on their role in making the bigger picture brighter for everybody.

Like my grandmother would quote from the Bible, “For to whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required.”

Albert Lea resident Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party. Normally, My Point of View appears every Tuesday.