But what of debt?

Glenn Reynolds dis­cusses mar­ginal tax rates at Instapun­dit. High mar­ginal tax rates encour­age peo­ple to ‘go Galt’ when those peo­ple can obtain extra income with extra effort (e.g. free­lancers, sales­men on com­mis­sion, small busi­ness own­ers con­tem­plat­ing open­ing for more days or hours): very often, they will pre­fer leisure time to the dwin­dling return on invest­ment (invest­ment of time, effort, and risk).

Of course, that is all pred­i­cated on being able to make ends meet: those who can­not earn enough to cover expenses will do what­ever it takes to earn enough to cover the short­fall. A gov­ern­ment can thus raise the mar­ginal tax rates with­out reper­cus­sions: a per­son in need of an extra dol­lar with earn $90 and let the gov­ern­ment take $89 in taxes, if the alter­na­tive is starv­ing, los­ing a job for lack of gaso­line to get to said job, or not hav­ing a roof over the family’s head.

Coun­ter­in­tu­itively, a gov­ern­ment that is heav­ily in debt, or a gov­ern­ment that wants to pur­chase votes with free­bies to cer­tain classes of peo­ple, wants the pro­duc­tive class to be irre­spon­si­ble with its money. The hous­ing bub­ble, the infla­tion in food prices, the higher edu­ca­tion bub­ble, sky­rock­et­ing health insur­ance costs, and higher energy costs pre­vent the pro­duc­tive class from going Galt with its mar­ginal income.

Oba­maCare is par­tic­u­larly per­ni­cious: force the entire pro­duc­tive class to fun­nel large sums of money into health care spend­ing via gold-​plated plans that sub­sidise the non-​productive class, and you’ve given peo­ple the choice between being eter­nally yoked to the plow or dying for lack of health care. (Amanda Mar­cotte rel­ishes the idea that we are all forced to pay for her sex life as a cost of insur­ing our­selves and our kids against can­cer and heart failure.)

Ris­ing food prices (influ­enced in no small part by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, e.g. the ethanol man­date, var­i­ous car­rots and sticks of sub­si­dies) yoke all peo­ple to the plow: work more, let­ting the gov­ern­ment take its pound of flesh in the process, or starve.

The hous­ing bub­ble and the higher edu­ca­tion bub­ble have the same effect: those who work for a liv­ing are forced to work much harder to cover the same costs as a pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion. Prof. Reynold’s cor­re­spon­dents are all in the posi­tion of hav­ing paid off houses and stu­dent loans — the spoils of hav­ing been born in a time wherein a col­lege edu­ca­tion cost about 500 minimum-​wage hours per year and a house could be pur­chased on husband’s salary while the wife stayed at home. The younger gen­er­a­tion (my gen­er­a­tion) is yoked to the plow, forced to tend to as many of the government’s fields as it desires.

Do you need a con­spir­acy in order to cre­ate this? No — you just need badly aligned incen­tives, i.e. a rapa­cious gov­ern­ment with unsus­tain­able lev­els of spend­ing and debt, as well as the power to influ­ence the price of food, hous­ing, edu­ca­tion, and energy. But as long as the gov­ern­ment can­not live within its means, it would pre­fer us to not live within ours, so that we will have to con­stantly increase our means, regard­less of what the gov­ern­ment will take from such increased production.