Alejandro A. Tagliavini *
Is about time to discover the demagogues and say that all taxes fall on the weakest. In fact, the State, the monopoly violence – always destructive – is undoubtedly the main creator of poverty, if not the only one.
More than 80 billionaires published an open letter urging governments to raise taxes «immediately» and «permanently» to the wealthiest to finance the recovery. Signatories include Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Co-Founder Jerry Greenfield, Screenwriter Richard Curtis, Filmmaker Abigail Disney, Former Managing Director of BlackRock Inc. Morris Pearl, and Danish-Iranian businessman Djaffar Shalchi.
For years, millionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates have asked for more taxes. A year ago, a group that included George Soros, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, and the heirs to Hyatt and Disney also published a letter suggesting a fortune tax.
First and foremost, they should demand that restrictions – via the state monopoly of violence – be lifted on markets that are nothing but people working, producing, and trading peacefully and voluntarily. Because these restrictions, especially quarantines, are on track to double the number of deaths from starvation.
Then it would be interesting to know how they made their fortune. It happens that some of them have done it, precisely, taking advantage of state power -violence- as is the case of Bill Gates, who favors himself with the “copyright laws” that institute intellectual monopolies, as if ideas had an owner, impeding competition making the products more expensive to the poor.
In that open letter published in anticipation of the G20 finance ministers meeting and an extraordinary European summit, the group calling itself «Millionaires for Humanity» claimed that the wealthiest «have a critical role … to heal the world «
Let’s see, if «Millionaires for Humanity» is voluntarily determined to help, why do they insist in being forced by the state violence, to pay taxes? why not become an NGO and donate voluntarily? It seems that they want to “escape the bundle”. It is that a private foundation would be financed directly with its resources, instead the taxes will derive them downwards.
«No society has made the poor richer by making the rich poor» says one of the best Spanish economists, Daniel Lacalle. When the State coercively takes resources from a company, this company must cover that gap because it exists to obtain profits and thus attract investments and be able to grow in the service it provides to the community.
So, it will cover that cost, for example, by raising prices or lowering wages. In other words, the greater the economic capacity of a person, the more forcefully the taxes will be transferred downwards until they reach the unemployed person who has to absorb the increase in prices without being able to transfer it due to the lack of income to increase.
Demagogues say that money coercively withdrawn from the market returns to welfare. In the first place, little of the proceeds ends in welfare and then what theoretically goes to the poor goes through a bureaucracy -and corruption- that consumes a good part and, therefore, what reaches the poor is less than what was taken from them : This is how poverty exists, because of state violence.
* Senior Advisor at The Cedar Portfolio and Member of the Advisory Council of the Center on Global Prosperity, de Oakland, California
Alejandro A. Tagliavini 
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