from The Military-Industrial Man
by Chalmers Johnson
Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → corrupt legislature
Thanks to this month’s Carnival of Philosophy for plugging The Picket Line.
I would have posted this but you would have thought I was fooling.
Harry Reid is the U.S. Senate Majority Leader. Essentially, the Senate’s counterpart of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, except for that Constitutional provision that makes the Vice President the official gavel-pounder of the Senate.
You can see a clip from an interview with Reid in which the topic turns to taxes. You really should see it, because you won’t believe it from the transcript alone:
Jan Helfeld: …if the government is in the business of forcefully taking money from some people in order to provide welfare benefits to others, how will the people whose money is being taken feel about the government?
Harry Reid: Well, I don’t accept your phraseology. I don’t think we “force” people…
Helfeld: Taxation is not forceful?
Reid: Well, no.
Helfeld: It’s voluntary?
Reid: In fact, quite to the contrary. Our system of government is a voluntary tax system.
Helfeld: Oh… if you don’t want to pay your taxes, you don’t have to?
Reid: Of course you have to pay your taxes, but…
Helfeld: The government will force you to pay, or they’ll fine you or imprison you. Won’t they?
Reid: We have a voluntary system. The fact of the matter is, that if when you pay your taxes — you see, in many other countries, it’s not voluntary. For example, in many countries, the government makes sure that your employer takes out every penny. Many countries don’t file income tax returns. Why?
Helfeld: We have withholding here too, don’t we?
Reid: Pardon me?
Helfeld: Withholding.
Reid: With some program, yes. But I’m talking about in some countries, European countries as an example, there… you don’t file an income tax return. There is no need to, because your employer takes all the money out. That’s the difference between a voluntary and an involuntary system.
Helfeld: But can…? Can…?
Reid: You can choose to not pay your taxes, but I don’t accept your phraseology, that you forcibly take money from somebody else and give it to others. You know, that’s the way it is on any program. I mean…
Helfeld: Can the taxpayer…?
Reid: …highway program is the same. We…
Helfeld: Excuse me.
Reid: We take money, we “forcibly” take money in your phraseology, but…
Helfeld: But can…? Let me ask you something.
Reid: …build highways with it, put people in the Army.
Helfeld: Can the taxpayer decide not to pay his taxes if he wants?
Reid: He can… He can not pay his taxes if he wants.
Helfeld: What will be the…? What will happen?
Reid: He’ll be subject to civil and criminal penalties.
Helfeld: They’ll put him in jail — they’ll use force against him. He pays… everybody pays taxes under threat of jail or fines: on the threat of force. In other words, you are forced to pay your taxes. Whether you fill out your form voluntarily or whether its withheld by your employer, you don’t have a choice on whether you can pay taxes that are going to be used for welfare programs — you can’t make that choice.
Reid: Well, but the reason our system is called a voluntary tax system — and I recognize, you know, that ultimately you can’t cheat your taxes, but our… We have many provisions in the law they don’t have in most countries: we have deductibility for home interest on mortgage payment, they don’t have that in most countries, we have deductibility for certain excessive expenses as relates to health — doctors, hospitals — we have all kinds of tax — some people call them “loopholes” but others would call them “incentives for people to do business” — and that’s why… You know, you’re not “forced” to pay certain taxes. There are ways… if you decide to buy a home and…
Helfeld: You can decide not to pay taxes? In the United States?
Reid: I mean, I really don’t understand what you’re trying to get at. If you’re… What… the point of the matter is…
Helfeld: Because you objected to my phraseology. You said that… you say that the government isn’t forcefully taking money from some people to provide welfare benefits to others, and, in fact, that’s what it’s doing, because all taxation is forceful. It’s backed up by physical force. If you don’t pay your taxes, the government will intervene with you forcefully. So you don’t have a choice. It’s not voluntary. You can’t decide not to pay and not suffer consequences. If you don’t pay, you’ll go to jail. So: you’re forced to pay.
Reid: You don’t… you don’t go to jail. Some people go to jail. There are all kind of civil penalties if you don’t pay your taxes: you pay interest and you pay penalties. The fact of the matter is, our system is a voluntary system.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
- Extracting money from the IRS by filing fraudulent tax returns is becoming something of a mania in some parts of the country — reportedly amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in the Tampa area alone, for instance. The IRS seems unable to do anything to stop the fraud, and law enforcement is unable to cope with its extent. U.S. Attorney Robert O’Neill says, “You cannot prosecute your way out of a case like this if the numbers of violators are as large as law enforcement believes they are. It would just really, really pull at the seams of the system. So… something has to be put in place to prevent it from happening on such a massive scale.”
- Tax and customs officials in Greece have gone on strike to protest the usual taxpayer bailouts of international lenders at the expense of social services. “The strike underlines the risks to a tax collection drive demanded by the EU and IMF inspectors as workers who will themselves suffer from the austerity measures resist implementing the new laws. Disgruntled electricity workers have already threatened to boycott a planned property tax, designed to be collected through electricity bills as a means of bypassing the notoriously inefficient tax authority.”
- Another of Tolstoy’s didactic dialogues, this one written in but hidden by censorship until after his death, called “The Traveler and the Peasant,” hopes to show us that the problems of the Russian peasantry (the “99%” of their day) are of their own making and the solutions to those problems are in their hands. If only they would stop doing the bidding of (and paying taxes to) those who oppress them and steal from them, and instead devote their energies to true Christian brotherhood, Tolstoy (disguised as the Traveler) suggests, there would be no need for griping or for revolution.
- Mr. Money Mustache has an interesting post on the true cost of commuting that tries to do the math on just how much you are giving up when you take a job that requires you to commute (especially by car). People choosing a job or a home would do well to read this over and do some back-of-the-envelope calculations.
- The Early Retirement Extreme blog now has its own wiki at which the proprietor and his merry collaborators plan to document how “you could retire much sooner than most think… and never need to work for money in your life again.”
- America’s free market system strikes again: A stock market index that picks the 50 companies in the S&P 500 that do the most government lobbying “has outperformed the broader market since its creation in ; data going back to show that it has done better over the longer term, too.… In aggregate the results have been stunning, comparable to the returns of the most blistering hedge fund. The index has outperformed the S&P500 by 11% a year …”
