I’d missed this one from last month by U.S. Senator Jim DeMint:
Our nation was born from the idea of “no taxation without representation”—that citizens should not be taxed by governments in which they have no political voice. Yet now lawmakers in Washington want to overturn that bedrock principle in order to extract more revenues from American consumers.
The Marketplace Fairness Act recently introduced in the Senate would require online retailers to collect and pay sales taxes to states where they have no physical presence or democratic recourse. Overstock.com, eBay and the like could have to pay sales taxes to any state from which an Internet user placed an order, even if the company’s headquarters, warehouses and sales staff are located entirely in other states.
Such online sales tax proposals are taxation without representation. The proposed federal law tells businesses that there is no escape from the clutches of tax-hungry politicians. That concept is antithetical to our federalist system, which promotes competition among our states for the best economic policies.
