Robert Redford, Champion of Higher Taxes, Sues to Get His Tax Money Back

So he really was HYDRA, all along.

Just shush about "Spoiler Alerts," Spoiler-Alert-Yellers. The movie's been out for half a year and it's pretty obvious that when a guy you never saw before accuses the guy you've seen in six movies (Nick Fury) of being the Bad Guy, the guy saying Nick Fury is the Bad Guy is himself the Bad Guy.

So enough of your movie-based distractions and nonsense. I have politics to write about!

Robert Redford is suing New York state related to the sale of Sundance Channel.

The actor-director sued the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance in Albany County Supreme Court on July 30 claiming that he's being overtaxed on money his company made when it sold off a stake in the channel in 2005.

According to Courthouse News Service, Redford is being taxed $1.6 million by New York ($845,066 in taxes plus $727,404 in interest owed) on the money he made. But Redford, a Utah resident, says he paid taxes on the revenue in Utah and therefore doesn't owe New York.

Here's what really annoys me about progressives:

Progressives understand, correctly, that people are far more willing to place burdens on others than they are to place them on themselves.

Hence, you have situations, as persisted in the 70s, for example, where people are broadly in favor of criminalizing pornography, and yet they themselves are simultaneously consumers of it.

Why? Well, when they think about the criminal penalties, they're thinking about others. When they're thinking about watching some porn, they're just thinking about themselves -- and why would they themselves go to prison? They're nice respectable law-abiding folks. They just happened to pick up an issue of Hustler. That's not really a crime, is it?

But progressives apply this insight only to those things they're politically or personally interested in-- generally questions involving sexual licentiousness.

But let's extend this insight to, say, taxation.

It is extraordinarily easy to arbitrarily declare that some person, Not You, should pay huge amounts of taxes to the government. You can than talk about all the Public Goods such taxes could buy, and then finish off with a declaration of how short-sighted and, frankly, Evil the people resisting the taxes on themselves are.

But what about when that same burden is applied to yourself, Mr. Redford? Because that's the real test. It costs nothing to you to declare that someone not named Robert Redford should be shellacked with confiscatory taxes to pay for all these important Public Goods.

And if we speak instead about shellacking Mr. Robert Redford himself...?

Instapundit frequently notes that Hollywood, while agitating angrily for higher taxes on "the rich" and "corporations," simultaneously lobbies very hard to secure tax concessions for filming in states in cities.

And they almost always get them-- thus immunizing Hollywood from the high taxes on business operations that they urge for every other business in the world.

I would end this post by saying "Maybe Redford should consider the basic human failing of being very eager to impose burdens and demands on others, while becoming self-righteously indignant when those burdens and demands are placed on himself," and harmonizing those two impulses within him, but that's absurd.

They never think, and they never will.

posted by Ace at 02:32 PM

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