Column by Scott Lazarowitz.
Exclusive to STR
As another Tax Day comes and goes, and as Congress debates which drunken-sailor spending bill to pass – the Republican drunken-sailor bill or the Democrat drunken-sailor bill – and as they debate whether or not to raise the Debt Ceiling (as though we don’t already know the answer), and as America continues on the path toward total destruction, perhaps now is the time to really question just how legitimate the current taxation scheme really is.
I hear from several people in the news and opinion media, and from Barack Obama, that some people aren’t paying their “fair share” in taxes.
Author James Bovard has this article at the Washington Times [18] on how the U.S. government spends the tax dollars it seizes from Americans. For example, the IRS enforcers are out there to make sure that you pay your “fair share” in tax dollars for:
A consultant’s study on how a state education bureaucracy can covertly lower the passing score for standardized tests to create the illusion of complying with the No Child Left Behind Act…
Bribes to two Afghan tribal leaders to sway them to publicly endorse an anti-corruption drive.
A federal grant to hire an extra policeman to write 900 speeding tickets in Boise, Idaho.
A National Endowment for Democracy grant to a Third World political party to enable its members to hire Washington consultants to teach them how better to con voters…
A Drug Enforcement Administration raid on a Los Angeles medical marijuana clinic, including the cost of handcuffing and booking 10 cancer patients.
While the items Bovard points to are factual, there may be just a bit of a lampooning aspect there. But Americans really ought to understand exactly where their tax dollars have been going, because, as generations have allowed the U.S. government to siphon their earnings with the threat of jail (i.e., legal robbery and kidnapping), the moral hazard in that legalized plunder in and of itself is greatly amplified by the immoralities having been committed by the U.S. government with the stolen loot.
Obama and the left assert that Americans are not paying their “fair share” for, what, “services”? Like national security? Through the government’s coercive taxation, Americans paid for President George H.W. Bush to invade Iraq in 1990-91, which was not a defensive war, but a war of offense, of aggression against a country that was of no threat to the U.S. In that war, the U.S. military intentionally destroyed Iraq’s civilian electrical, water and sewage treatment facilities, forcing the Iraqis to use untreated water throughout the 1990s. Bush and President Clinton’s subsequent no-fly zones and sanctions prevented the rebuilding of that infrastructure, which all led to widespread diseases such as cholera, typhoid and cancer. By 2000, at least 500,000 civilian Iraqis had been killed by these actions that Americans’ taxes paid for. The ensuing anti-Americanism caused by all this was spread throughout the Middle East, and was on Osama bin Laden’s list of reasons for his (supposedly his) September 11th, 2001 attacks.
And then Americans have been paying for a U.S. government-caused mess in Afghanistan for the subsequent decade up to now, drone bombings and other U.S. military and CIA-led aggressions spreading to Pakistan, killing more and more innocent civilians every day, leading to more anti-Americanism and more terrorists being recruited.
Americans’ taxes have also paid for a totally unnecessary U.S. invasion, occupation, and further destruction of Iraq since 2003, a war based on lies and propaganda, for oil [19] and for political [20] reasons. That unnecessary war that George W. Bush started also caused the needless deaths of 5,000 American military personnel, in addition to the deaths of hundreds of thousands more innocent Iraqis, and, needless to say, even more anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East.
Because of the incompetence of the “defense” bureaucrats, their corporatist revolving-door schemes of the military-congressional-industrial-complex, and the government-controlled monopoly of national security socialism [21], and the U.S. government’s outright provocations overseas rather than leaving others alone like they are supposed to do (morally speaking), Americans are less safe, and less secure [22]. Americans are clearly not getting what they are paying for.
You would think the “conservatives” would understand this.
And Americans’ taxes are also paying for drug socialism [23], known as the War on Drugs, in which the federal government wants to dictate to private individuals what they may or may not ingest in their own bodies. Such policies have for many years been creating black markets, causing more drug pushers and traffickers to be created, people who have been profiting at the expense of weak individuals who become dependent on chemicals. This drug socialism has corrupted many more law enforcement agents than would otherwise be corrupted, and has given police the power to commit theft at whim with “asset forfeiture,” without due process that the thieving State’s victims have a right to have.
Your taxes are literally paying these government agents to steal from innocent citizens. Do you feel that you’re getting what you’re paying for yet? And is Obama really justified in raising taxes even further, claiming that some Americans are not paying their “fair share”?
And look how well the compulsory Social Security system and Medicare schemes are doing, as funded by your tax dollars. Raise the taxes even more and try to “reform” a fraudulent scheme whose chickens have come home to roost.
What was going on in the heads of Americans who actually supported FDR’s schemes in the first place? Hmmm. Would the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression have even occurred if there were not a Federal Reserve and the 1913 income tax?
With the Federal Reserve and legal tender laws, Americans are compelled by law to use the U.S. government-issued “dollar” (devalued by 95% since 1914) as their sole medium of exchange. Americans are literally forced to use a near-worthless piece of paper – backed by nothing of actual value – for money. Further, for every instance of monetary expansion, with The Bernank’s QE money-printing schemes (or merely adding zeros to the numbers), there are further inflationary effects, which force Americans to have to purchase more expensive necessities, such as food, clothes and gas. Your tax dollars fund the process of the Fed and its money-printing and the salaries of the employees of this socialist scheme. Is it worth it?
If only more Americans actually knew that, without the Fed, without government intrusions into private economic matters, and with competing currencies backed by gold or something else of actual value, and without socialist governmental intrusions into production, employment and other business matters, and without government-protected cartels in the economy, all prices would probably come down, more people at all economic levels would be able to afford the necessities, and more people would have jobs and the economy would be booming. Any economic downturns would probably not be “serious” as long as the State kept its criminal nose out of people’s private matters. And any economic downturn would be self-correcting, because all Americans would have the freedom to act in accordance to what their individual needs would be – central planners be damned. And the business of everyday life wouldn’t be funded by coercive taxation – only by voluntary exchange and the cooperation of the society’s natural order.
And the problems in Americans’ security are caused by the government’s central planners and the federal government’s obstruction of the people’s right of self-defense. There could not possibly be a “fair share” of any individual’s income or assets stolen by bureaucrats that could make anyone actually “safer.” Compulsory monopoly, central planning, and the collectivization of security attract the real bad guys [24] to those positions of compulsory State monopolies and centralized armed force [25].
No, the economic and security problems in society are not caused by “greedy businessmen” and the rich not paying their “fair share.” The problems are caused by greedy control-freakish socialists, corporatists, government-monopolists and otherwise parasites of the State.
