There is one candidate for public office whom I will never vote for. That’s not because the candidate belongs to a party that I do not support. Nor is it a matter of gender or religion or likability.

The person I will never choose on an election day is the one who promises never to raise taxes.

This promise signals to me the candidate’s manifest unfitness for holding office. Rather than being elected, this politician ought to be sent home to spend more quality time with the family.

To my mind, taxes are the necessary tools of good government. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said, they are the price we pay for a civilized society.

But, setting their face against any increase in taxes whatever, many members of Congress are now chaining that society to a fiscal wall. Furthermore, they are depriving the president of the flexibility he needs to deal with the national debt ceiling.

The anti-tax absolutists are wasting our time and that of everyone in the federal government. In doing so, they are demonstrating the bad judgment of voters who sent them to Washington in the first place.

You might possibly now consider me a one-issue voter. That is not true. In this matter we are not talking about an issue; rather we are dealing with the constitutional responsibility of legislators. Their judgment of future events should not be hog-tied by slogans.

So you will not find me supporting Michelle Bachmann any time soon. This is not because of her migraines—an affliction she shares with Abraham Lincoln, among others.

Rather, it’s her stated determination never to raise taxes that erases her from my political dance card. She seems to be pleasing her Tea Party supporters and even the often sharp voters in Iowa, but I could not imagine endorsing her candidacy.

And Bachmann does not stand alone. Republican candidates in favor of fair taxation—familiar figures in my youth—have become as rare as whooping cranes.

Along with me, you may have noticed that the taxes these politicians will never raise are those not being paid by rich people. As a class, the rich are not a notably oppressed group. Warren Buffet pointed out a few years ago that he paid a far smaller share of his income in taxes than the clerks in his office.

For some, though, taxes are intrinsically evil.

If you consider government as the problem, as many of these anti-taxers do, you undermine the society in which you live. When we disagree with our officials, we should vote them out of office. We should not starve the system.

The consequences of never raising taxes could be catastrophic for programs of special importance to us older citizens. Ultimately, we would find our Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs stripped of funds.

Looking at the views of the anti-taxers, you might be tempted to judge the United States a high-tax country. However, the tax rates in our country remain much lower than those in most other nations of the industrialized world.

As a citizen I would not favor unreasonably high taxes for the captains of industry. However, the unreasonably high pay many of them are receiving brings out the lurking non-capitalist in me.

The never-new-taxes religion practiced by politicians remains absurd. Let’s expose this ridiculous creed for the harm that it is doing to our country and its citizens.