Obama Factotum Geithner Gets It Wrong--Being an American is NOT an State-Granted "Privilege"

Lawrence Lindsey writes in the WSJ:

Last week Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that the "most fortunate Americans" should pay more in taxes for the "privilege of being an American." One can debate different ways of balancing the budget. But Mr. Geithner's argument highlights an unfortunate and very destructive instinct that seems to permeate the Obama administration about the respective roles of citizens and their government. His position has three problems: one philosophical, one empirical, and one logical.

Philosophically, the concept that being an American is a "privilege" upends the whole basis on which America was founded. Privileges are things granted to one individual by another, higher-ranking, individual. For example, in my house my children's use of the family car is a privilege. One presumes Mr. Geithner believes that the "privilege" of being an American is granted by the presumably higher-ranking, governing powers that be.

This is an age-old view that our Founding Fathers rejected. First, they argued that the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., economic liberty) were natural rights, endowed by our Creator, not by government. Second, the governing powers do not out-rank the citizens. Rather it is the citizens who grant government officials their "just powers." As Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, governments are instituted among men based on their consent in order to secure the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The notion that a governing authority grants privileges to those it governs directly contradicts Jefferson's declaration.

But it is this same notion that recently allowed the Health and Human Services Department to order religious institutions to pay for things they find abhorrent. Religious freedom is presumably a "privilege" that can be revoked for some transient and novel public-policy reason...

Exactly. Which is the problem with Canada's much-vaunted Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the one Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks is superior to the U.S. Constitution): What the government giveth, the government can taketh away.