“Let mankind therefore learn experience from so many misfortunes, and bear no longer to hear the worst things called by the best names.” — Cato’s Letters No. 13 (1721)
By a narrow margin, citizens of the state of Massachusetts have voted to amend the Massachusetts Constitution to impose an additional four-percent tax on income over $1 million, with proceeds going toward education, roads and bridges, and public transportation.
While such misguided false philanthropy is nothing new for the Bay State, there was a particularly powerful organization promoting this latest legal plunder: the teachers union.
According to a study conducted by the Boston Globe of the campaign finance reports, “The MTA has coughed up $13.3 million for the so-called Fair Share Amendment, while its national counterpart, NEA, has doled out $7.2 million…. Which begs the question: What do the teachers want?”
Combined, the Massachusetts Teachers Association and its national organization spent $20.5 million to empower the state government to seize and redistribute the property of anyone in the state earning more than $1 million annually.
Did you notice the name that proponents of the measure used to sell their socialist scheme to the public? “The Fair Share Amendment.”
Reminds me of something writing over 300 years ago by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in their influential Cato’s Letters:
Yet even in countries where the highest liberty is allowed, and the greatest light shines, you generally find certain men, and bodies of men, set apart to mislead the multitude; who are ever abused with words, ever fond of the worst of things recommended by good names, and ever abhor the best things, and the most virtuous actions, disfigured by ill names. One of the great arts, therefore, of cheating men, is, to study the application and misapplication of sounds — a few loud words rule the majority.
There is so much in this newly approved Massachusetts amendment that will likely prod property owners and friends of liberty to flee the state and emigrate to states less hostile to success.
Consider these points published in January by Tufts University in its analysis of the measure:
- Some high-income residents may relocate to other states, but the number of movers is likely to be small.
- Tax avoidance could be widespread, cutting substantially into the amount of revenue raised by the levy.
- Together, cross-border moves and tax avoidance would reduce millionaires tax revenue by roughly 35 percent. (Absent these responses, the tax would be expected to raise $2.1 billion in 2023.)
Additionally, the Beacon Hill Institute predicts the probable economic effect of the amendment: “These effects would further manifest themselves as a reduction in private sector jobs, in disposable income, and in state gross domestic product. In 2023, for example, more than 4,000 families would leave the Bay State with employment dipping by nearly 9,000 jobs.”
One wonders what benefit the teachers union plans to derive from such a dreary economic outlook such as that predicted by economists and other astute observers at the Globe, Tufts, and the Beacon Hill Institute.
Of the many possible motivations that could be forwarded to explain the teachers unions’ spending tens of millions of dollars — dollars collected from dues paid by teachers whose welfare these unions claim to care about — perhaps this declaration made by H.L. Mencken offers some illumination: “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”
Brighter light and closer correspondence to the issue of increasing taxes on the rich with the alleged aim of raising revenue to fund education can be found in the following excerpt taken from the book Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars:
The quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort, so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible to the inferior class. With such an initial handicap, even bright lower class individuals have little if any hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life. This form of slavery is essential to maintain some measure of social order, peace, and tranquillity for the ruling upper class.
Recall the analysis of the newly passed amendment laid out above. The revenue raised by this tax will be nothing compared to the revenue and jobs lost as an effect of the hostile economic environment it will create.
With that in mind — that is to say, with the understanding that schools will almost certainly see no appreciable increase in monies made available to them — it seems that the teachers unions are doing what they were created to do and what the quotations above reveal — that is, to perpetuate the “public education” system foisted upon the families of the United States just over 100 years ago.
The goal of the public education system is to keep people ignorant so that they won’t be able to question the tactics of tyrants.
As the influential Welsh preacher Richard Price wrote in 1789:
Our first concern, as lovers of our country, must be to enlighten it. — Why are the nations of the world so patient under despotism? — Why do they crouch to tyrants, and submit to be treated as if they were a herd of cattle? Is it not because they are kept in darkness, and want knowledge?
Enlighten them and you will elevate them. Shew them they are men, and they will act like men. Give them just ideas of civil government, and let them know that it is an expedient for gaining protection against injury and defending their rights, and it will be impossible for them to submit to governments which, like most of those now in the world, are usurpations on the rights of men, and little better than contrivances for enabling the few to oppress the many.
Ignorance is the parent of bigotry, intolerance, persecution and slavery. Inform and instruct mankind; and these evils will be excluded.
It would appear, then, that the Massachusetts Teachers Association — and its national umbrella organization, the National Education Association — spent over $20 million to protect their near monopoly over the “education” of Massachusetts’ children by impoverishing the state and rendering the middle class of Massachusetts too financially fettered to even consider keeping their children home to be educated by their parents.
