1. I’m continuing my way through Henry Hazlitt’s free-market classic, Economics in One Lesson. Today, I read the chapter “Taxes Discourage Production”.
I’ve heard a lot of its contents before. Taxes discourage production, drive down wages, and increase prices. After all, if an employer is paying money in taxes, that means he’s not using that money to produce and to pay his workers. Moreover, to make money, he ends up passing on the cost of taxes to his consumers. Taxes also discourage work, for why would people want to work their hides off for the government?
I suppose that all makes a degree of sense. Still, I wonder: how many millions do some people need? Can they even spend all that money? How do we know that an extra million will even go to production and wages? Can’t people still strive for a comfortable existence, notwithstanding taxes? In the 1950′s, there were high tax rates after a certain income, which (in those days) was still a high income! A person could live a comfortable life, even with the high tax rates.
(Yet, Lou Cannon says that the high marginal taxes of the 1950′s were a significant factor in Ronald Reagan changing from a Democrat to a Republican. Here his wife, Jane Wyman, had left him, and the government was taking a bunch of his hard-earned money!)
In countries with national health insurance, don’t people get their money back in the form of cheap health care? In America, our taxes are not as high as the taxes of Canada and Europe. Yet, our health care premiums and the cost of health care are astronomically higher. Doesn’t that divert our money from being used for production?
Something interesting Hazlitt says: a lot of our federal government’s revenue doesn’t come from income taxes. I remember watching a video of Ron Paul in 1988 making a similar point. If my memory serves me correctly (and it doesn’t always), that was his justification for proposing to abolish the income tax.
2. In Bringing the Hidden to Light, I read Yochanan Muffs’ essay, “On Biblical Anthropomorphism”. Muffs states the following on page 163:
Monotheistic theologians—Jewish or Muslim—are also in an uncomfortable position. They feel the truth of God’s personhood yet realize that the absolute cannot be human in any real sense…What they are left with is a person who is not much of a personality.
3. In A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66, Sommer appears to defend the view that Isaiah 40-66 was by a single author. Many scholars nowadays believe in three Isaiahs (or more). For them, Isaiah 40-55 was written in exile, and Isaiah 56-66 was written in Israel’s post-exilic period.
My terminology has been confusing, for I was confused. I use the term Second-Third Isaiah in one post because I thought Sommer believed in three Isaiahs. But then I saw him referring to chapters in Third Isaiah as “Deutero-Isaiah”. I thought that Deutero-Isaiah could encompass Third Isaiah, for I forgot that scholars call Third Isaiah “Trito-Isaiah”, not “Deutero-Isaiah”. After all, “Deutero” means “second”. Duh, James.
So Sommer believes in the unity of Isaiah 40-66. He appears to base this on the use of similar phrases of allusion throughout that section. But couldn’t an author of Third Isaiah imitate the style of Second Isaiah? (Sommer may address this, but I don’t remember.)
Also, I may be wrong on this, but I thought that Sommer acknowledged an issue that many scholars notice when they look at Isaiah 40-66, an issue that influences many of them to believe in Third Isaiah. That issue is that, in Isaiah 40-55, we see grandiose promises. In Isaiah 56-66, we see an explanation for why those promises did not materialize: Israel’s sin. It would make sense that the grandiose promises would come during the exile, the time in which many scholars assign Second Isaiah. And the disappointment would suit Israel’s post-exilic period, which is when many scholars date Third Isaiah. How does Sommer handle this?