A great many Americans are angry about the taxes. There are endless calls to reduce them, almost always a good idea. But why settle for half-measures. Why not just do away with taxes altogether?
The simple fact is that everything the government now does can be abolished, done better by private enterprises, or funded by foreign countries that still retain their own tax systems. A quick catalog of current U.S. government activities illustrates this clearly.
Take education. As public schools deteriorate, an increasing number of parents are sending their children to private academies. Though government vouchers help offset costs for some of these people, it would make far more sense not only to privatize education completely, but give parents total choice over their children’s education—including the option to forsake paying for it altogether if a kid doesn’t seem worth the expense, which frankly, is often the case.
Elder care has become so much a government responsibility over the years that most people have forgotten who used to do the job and who should be doing it again—an old person’s own children. In an economy where scads of college grads are today coming home to live with their folks, it’s simple equity for these same parents to come and live with these same children down the road. A mere 1.8 taxpaying strangers will soon be supporting every Social Security recipient. Why not have two related parties do the same job and get the old geezers off the public dole in the process? Think family values here.
Tax paid health care is another area where our society has gone off the rails. Just look at the fuss recently passed health care reform kicked up. Churches used to provide this care much more cheaply because of low labor costs and a healthy emphasis on preparing the sickly for heaven, rather than keeping them in this expensive vale of tears. Heck, we’re all going to croak one day anyway. So why should healthy taxpayers continue to put off the inevitable for the weak and unproductive?
All levels of government have been on an infrastructure privatizing binge for decades. It’s time to go all the way. There isn’t a public highway or street in America that wouldn’t be better maintained if we had toll booths on every highway exit and street corner. Vehicle repair savings alone would make such tolling popular.
‘But what about the military,’ you say? Surely it must be paid for with taxes. ‘No, sir,’ I reply. Again, let history be our guide. Until relatively recently most armies were self-funded, paying their way by working as mercenaries or with out-and-out plunder. We pursued the former route during the first Gulf War, when the Saudis and Kuwaitis came up with the cash to close the deal. In the future we should make it clear upfront that if we can’t make a buck invading a country, we won’t do it. A tax-free society owes that kind of honesty to its neighbors.
One other cavil might be raised against pursuing the goal of total tax abolition—servicing the national debt. How can we do this without taxing?
The answer is that we’re already mostly doing it without tax money. If you look beyond all the convoluted, hypocritical, deliberately deceptive bookkeeping canards the government employs to hide the truth about its finances, you’ll see that we’ve long been paying most interest and principal on government debt with freshly minted money or new loans from Chinese lenders. Why not finally be honest and stop kicking this impossibly large and inherently unsustainable debt load down the road, admit it will never be paid off and just cancel it? We could call this ‘The Jubilee Initiative’, say God told us to do it, and label critics of the move atheists. In a country where a majority of people believe in angels, this approach can’t miss.
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that taxes are the price we pay for civilization. But who’s kidding who? Contemporary America? Civilization? Please. Any fair-minded person can see that the taxes we’re paying to underwrite this burger and Buffy civilization are way out of line with the value received in return.
The more you look, the more obvious it becomes that taxes are not a necessary evil. They are just evil. We can do better. You want real change? THIS is real change.
You can read more financial satire (some in verse) by this author at http://www.wallstreetpoet.com