To the Editor:
Re “Higher Taxes Wouldn’t End Some Deficits” (front page, Jan. 20):
I was encouraged to read that some states are considering raising taxes, albeit reluctantly perhaps. I am retired now, but as a union member for 33 years I contributed a small percentage of my salary as dues. The union provided many benefits that I most likely could not have attained on my own. Whether called dues or taxes, they are the cost of membership.
Lately certain voices of the right seem to imply that paying for anything that might be a benefit for everyone (including most likely themselves) is some sort of abhorrent socialist crime against individual freedom.
Perhaps instead they would prefer the logical conclusion to their anti-tax protestations—no government at all, leading inevitably to Hobbes’s state of nature—“nasty, brutish and short.”
I’ll opt for paying a few taxes any day. Or dues.
Mike Dater
Portsmouth, N.H., Jan. 20, 2011
Note from KBJ: Instead of advocating coercion of those with different values, this man should be engaged in persuasion of his fellow progressives, many of whom, such as George Soros, are filthy rich. If all the progressives in this country wrote a check to the United States Government amounting to 10% of their income, the problems that progressives claim to be concerned about would be solved.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 