Tax code tyrant meets high school coach

I think I can personally guarantee Al Gore will never fulfill a campaign promise he repeated in last week's debate-universal preschool for 3-year-olds: My kids aren't going.

So Gore's program-if ever enacted-won't be universal. It will be just another gold-plated brick in the- ever-heightening wall between the two remaining classes in American society: those whom the government takes care of, and those who take care of themselves.

Call me old-fashioned, but I intend to do everything I can to ensure that my children stay on the self-sufficient side of that wall from birth to death, free and independent people, embracing and perpetuating the republican values they inherited from their republican ancestors.

When other 3-year-olds are dumped off by their working noms at government holding centers receive their early indoctrination in government dependency, I intend to make certain my kids are at home in their own backyard; playing with their own Tonka trucks and toy guns-watched over by their own mom, who makes`them lunch everyday with bologna and cheese purchased with our own money.

As the presidential debates have made clear, Al Gore's campaign strategy is simple: He wants to make a deal. Not with everyone, but with a specific subset of Americansthese whose values do not impede them from accepting permanent government dependency.

Gore is begging these people to calculate just one thing this election year: their material self-interest. He is reversing Jack Kennedy's famous phrase-"ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"-and imploring voters to understand how the new and expanded government programs he is proposing will personally benefit them and thus justify their voting for him.

But there is an obvious catch in this deal. Someone must pay for it.

For Gore's programs to be a net benefit to their recipients, they must pay those recipients more then they cost those recipients. The government must force someone else to make up the difference.

In the private sector-and in the Ten Commandmentsthat's called theft.

If your neighbor knocks on your door, points a gun in your face, and says, "Give me $2,000 so I can put my 3year-old in preschool" you could summon the police and have him arrested. In most jurisdictions, a jury would still convict him. Most preachers, priests and rabbis would condemn his act as gravely immoral.

But if the Internal Revenue Service informs you that you need to pay $3,000 in taxes, so some federal bureaucrats can take a cut, before turning it over to Al Gore, so he can send it back to a state government, so the bureaucrats there can take their own cut, before turning it over to a local preschool, so your neighbor can deposit his children there and then vote for Al Gore in gratitude, it is called Democratic politics

If the Constitution still held force, this form of politics would be illegal. The things the federal government could do for you would be limited to a few enumerated items. It could secure your town against foreign invaders and illegal immigrants. It could arrest, convict and imprison criminals who violated federal laws (like the one against accepting campaign contributions from Communist regimes). It could coin the money you use and issue patents to protect your inventions. And it could even arguably build an interstate highway on which you could travel in a private fossil-fuel-burning vehicle.

But it could not provide you with a preschool in which to deposit your 3year-old.

On the other hand, the 5th Amendment does guarantee that private property shall not "be taken for public use without just compensation."

The Constitution, too, says: Thou shah not steal,

A man's paycheck is his property. If the government takes some of it for public use, it must provide just compensation. If the government spends the money on a constitutionally sanctioned activity that serves the general welfare of the nation-like, say, declaring and conducting a war-just compensation is made and the principle of the 5th Amendment is upheld. In return for a piece of your paycheck, the government is compensating you by stopping Imperial Japan from invading the United States.

But there is no "just compensation" made to a worker whose income is expropriated by the federal government to send another man's child to preschool.

This is simply a taking.

So, the calculation behind Gore's politics is as bold as the deal itself: He believes there are more takers than payers.

If he's right, America may have passed a point of no return. The balance of political power may have permanently tilted to the class of people on the loot-and-vote side of goldbrick wall. In that case, the trick for the government will be to maintain enough free and independent peoplewho pay for their own lives and raise their own childrento subsidize the burgeoning dependent class.

That won't be easy. Descent into the dependent class is likely to be a one-way trip. In the Supreme Court-enforced religion-free zones of government dependency, people who surrender their independence in the first instance cannot be expected to subsequently experience a character transformation that makes them want to reassert their moral and economic autonomy.