Down with Power
L. Neil Smith
A Barbarous Relic of the Past
- Want a clear indication of what the welfare state is really all about? Note that the barest necessities of lifefood, clothing, shelter, transportation, and self-defenseare all taxed. -- L. Neil Smith
The average American ends up paying half of what he earns every year to governments at various levels. Aside from federal income and excise taxes, there are state taxes, county taxes, and city taxes of various kinds, not to mention a virtual plague of "special taxing districts".
Property taxes, use taxes, and sales taxes add to a burden that keeps most Americans "in their place", without hope for a better life for themselves or for their children. Criticized by grandiose authorities on economics both here and abroad because they have no savings, nobody ever argues back that, after all is said and done and everything is paid for, the Productive Class have no money left to save.
And if they did, it would be eaten away by capital gains taxes.
Americans have always worked hard to feed, clothe, and house their families, to drive them back and forth to school or church or Little League, to keep them healthy, safe, and secure. Now, thanks largely to the Internet, which allows them to communicate their discontents to one another, they've gotten understandably restive, having half of what they earn -- and their entire future in the bargain -- stolen by the nonproductive beneficiaries of a runaway government. Accusations coming from the thieves, that this attitude represents some kind of Neanderthal racism on the part of those who only wish to keep the fruits of their labor only bring America closer to some kind of great explosion.
Politicians should be aware that the American Revolution and the War Between The States both began as tax revolts, as did the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion and before it, to a certain extent, Shay's Rebellion of 1786. It's no wonder at all that tax parasites hate and fear the Tea Party movement. The original Tea party was all about taxation, too.
Individual observers in the establishment "lamestream" media differ on what they will admit motivates the Tea Party movement. Aside from their usual, reflexive accusations of race prejudice, the most ridiculous attempt to explain it away is that it's all about the federal deficit. I don't believe this for a minute. For better or worse, nobody who lives and works in the real world gives a rusty fuck about the criminally sloppy way the government jiggers its own books. They're much more interested in how they're going to pay this month's bills.
Or make the mortgage payment.
What they do give a damn about are the "four Ps": peace, freedom, progress, and prosperity. (Yes, I know "freedom" doesn't start with a P -- "writing" and "arithmetic" don't start Rs, either.) All four of those values are clearly threatened by legislation like the attempted Obama-Reed-Pelosi takeover of the medical sector, and -- more than anything else -- that's what sent people out into the streets in the summer of 2009, and brought them to the nation's capital in the summer of 2010. The government's failure to deal with illegal immigration, its high-handed and prissy disdain for people's religious beliefs, and its persistent attempts to disarm, to disautomobile (to coin a term), and to destroy the Productive Class all figure into the phenomenon, as well.
I was just a little kid when my mom and dad first told me about taxation, I was absolutely outraged. How dare anybody threaten to take my money -- I was a professional hunter: killing box elder bugs for a penny apiece on my grandmother's back porch was the major source of my income -- and inform me I had no choice about it? I'm still outraged, but I wonder about other little kids who drew a different lesson from this chapter of practical reality: if it's okay for the government to threaten people and steal from them, then why shouldn't it be okay for me?
When the average individual finally understands the full extent of what has been stolen from him or her, who can predict what will happen?
Look at it this way: half of everything each of us earns is taken from us by one government or another. This means that our ability to cope with the world around usto send our children to the doctor or the dentist, to keep our houses warm enough (or cool enough) for them, to make sure they have new shoes occasionally and a broader choice of entertainment and information than broadcast TV or the culture's dying newspapers can provide -- or to fulfill our dreams for the future, is slashed in half, just so that some bureaucrat or politician can use your money to keep himself and a string of bimbos wallowing in luxury and think of more ways to deprive you of your life, liberty, and property.
The fat you see, hanging in disgusting rolls off the bodies of the women down at the Department of Motor Vehicles, is the flesh of your children.
As if it weren't enough to subsist on only half of what you earn, everybody you do business with, individuals, companies, is in exactly the same boat. Each of them is paying half, or more, of his income to government. Which means that, when you finally save up enough for that pair of shoes, you'll be paying the shoemaker's taxes, as well as your own.
To review: you only get to keep one half of the money you have sweated to earn, and that money only goes half as far as it would in a truly free, untaxed economy. We all live on one quarter of the effort we have expended. (In effect, I only get paid for one world out of every four I write.) The restan unbelievable three quarters of our earningsgoes to the political sharks and their parasitic pilot fish.
But it gets worse.
Complying with thousands of idiotic and unconstitutional laws and regulations has a cost all its own. Many companies maintain an office, and a gaggle of employees, simply to fill out forms the government demands of it. The person -- hours squandered over the past century just completing Form 1040s could probably have built another Great Pyramid or two. Truckers cutting across the corner of a state without buying fuel may be taxed for the fuel they should have bought there. Environmental and "safety" regulations -- based on the same quality of science that gave us Global Warming -- add to the waste, until the cost of doing business doubles again. We find ourselves living on one eighth of what we earn, and wondering how the hell to make ends meet, while government takes seven eighths of it away, mostly to use against us.
To confiscate a phrase from the socialist economist John Maynard Keynes (and how could he object: from each according to his ability, to each according to his political pull, as Karl Marx might have said if he'd been more honest) taxation is a barbarous relic of the ancient past.
It almost certainly began 10,000 years ago, when our ancestors made the mistake of giving up the hunter-gatherer life, and settled down to farming. The wandering bands of bullies and thieves they were accustomed to running away from, or fighting off with their hunting tools, could stop wandering, too. They settled down right beside their victims who, stuck on the farm, were no longer free to run away. Nor did the bullies and thieves have to worry any more about facing folks armed with hunting weapons. Farm implements are lousy for self-defense and with agriculture (unlike hunting) there's never any spare time or other resources to make a second set of tools or keep in practice with them.
In due course, the bullies and thieves declared themselves to be kings, princes, barons, lords, supreme gazooties, and so forth; their Productive Class victims became lowly subjects and made to feel they owed this phony-baloney "nobility" everything, including a farmer's bride on their wedding day, or the occasional virgin daughter. Taxes are what we still pay to this day to keep the thieves and bullies (now they mostly call themselves presidents, senators, and congressmen) from stealing everything. Molesting children became the purview of the Church.
The next time you see Betty Battenberg, the Monarch of Airstrip One, or her genetically-depleted halfwit offspring being grandly celebrated on television, remember that she's the Queen only because her ancestors bashed in more heads, and intimidated more helpless, unarmed peasants, than anybody else around. That's all there is to royalty; that's all there ever was. The guillotine was too good for them.
But as usual, I have digressed.
Once upon a time, I ran for the state legislature, entering the race late, against the six-term Speaker of the House. I spent a total of eight dollars on my campaign and got fifteen percent of the vote, a third-party record that stood for at least a decade. My campaign consisted, almost entirely, of reading to audiences from the grocery shopping ads in every Wednesday's newspaper, dividing all the prices by eight, which is what things would cost in an unregulated, untaxed economy.
You should try it. It's educational and lots of fun.
Everybody seemed to love it. In the midst of droning three-minute speeches mumbled by candidates for dogcatcher or tax assessor, what I told them made people sit up, listen, laugh, cheer, even boo and hiss while most of them were transported, if only for a few moments, to a place where the future was brighter and more colorful than they'd ever known. In those moments, my first novel, The Probability Broach was born.
It should be the openly-stated goal of any organization that calls itself libertarian, or claims that it values freedom above all things, to rid civilization of this barbarous relic and abolish all taxes for all time. It will prove difficult, and it may take a long while. But the anti-slavery movement, which finally succeeded in the nineteenth century, was actually started four hundred years earlier by Queen Isabella of Spain in the 1490s, when she was horrified to see the miserable, frightened captives Columbus brought back from the New World.
However long it takes in the end, the economic, scientific, and humanitarian advances that will be engendered, simply by restoring to ourselves the missing seven eighths of what we have earned, will be absolutely staggering. The possibilities certainly stagger me. Our species will never be the same. Humans with thousand-year lifespans -- our children, our grandchildren, our great grandchildren, but possibly you and I, ourselves -- will leap for the stars and we will never look back.
We might even get our visiphones and flying cars.
In the short run, ridding ourselves of taxation and regulation will restore the personal and business privacy that the Republicans profess not to believe in, but which is the unquestionable birthright of every American -- indeed, of every single individual on the planet. The only political question we'll have left to answer is whether the former employees of the IRS, the EPA, the BATFE, and OSHA should be sentenced to a special prison built for them on Alcatraz, or to a trillion hours of public service, as allowed under the Thirteenth Amendment.
A final thing, for libertarian campaigners and platform writers: when a ravenous carnivore has its claws sunk into your body and its foul predatory breath is blasting hot on your throat, it is not your obligation to find the beast something else -- or somebody else -- to devour.
The media always want to know what a libertarian tax program would consist of. The one rational and acceptable libertarian tax program is to get rid of every tax we can find enough political power to get rid of, with the ultimate and inexorable objective of ending taxation altogether.
Period.
http://www.down-with-power.com/taxation.html
