Thomas Sowell:
Despite an old saying that taxes are the price we pay for civilisation, an absolute majority of the record-breaking tax money collected by the federal government today is simply transferred by politicians from people who are not likely to vote for them to people who are more likely to vote for them.
Amen. You can frame that one. Pity more of the victims can’t figure that out.
It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that taxes were the price we pay for civilization. Whenever I rant about taxes, my leftard friends like to toss that quote at me. I respond that when Holmes made that statement, the total tax bite was 10%, so, easy for him to say. Back in medieval times, serfs in England had to give the Lord of the manor a third of all their output, and today we consider them to have been, essentially, slaves. Here in Wynnetario, the total tax bite is more like 60% – what does that make us?
“…what does that make us?” Slaves.
Slaves to the free lunch crowd, to empire building bureaucrats, to government worker unions, to crony capitalists who are friends of corrupt politicians, to socialism.
The rebel barons need to come back and rescue us.
“It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who said that taxes were the price we pay for civilization.”
He was quite right then and he still is now.
However, the political argument isn’t over the principle of taxation itself (which ought to be a given). It’s over how that principle should be put into practice.
Ken;
Exactly Ken. I am looking forward to a visit from my Ottawa civil servant sister-in-law this week. She has claimed conservative conviction over the years but talks a pretty
progressive thought process. The insularity that envelopes Ottawa is stupefying and should scare all Canadians no matter what the political stripe. ‘We know better than you’ is standard group think.
Unfortunately the vast majority of Canadians think that corruption is a small part of our society. I have realized for many years that corruption in various forms is rampant in Canada. Ottawa is invested with vermin.
Sure OWH was right – and 10% of your output would now be (as it was when he said it) a fair price for civilization. Somehow, though, I think even OWH would baulk at the notion of 60% of his output being a fair price. Also, if Shiny Pony wins, he plans to “make the rich pay”, so you can expect the cost of civilization to be going up even more. Bob Rae, back in his (thankfully) brief stint as Ontario Premier, had a similar plan, under which “rich” essentially translated into “anyone with a job.” I think that the “price of civilization” has been inflated to far more than it is worth. We pay vastly more for it but we aren’t getting more civilization. If anything, we’re getting less of it.
Holmes was wrong. The fundamental moral principle of a civilized society is that no person has the right to initiate the use of force or fraud on any other person. Taxation, which is a use of force, is therefore uncivilized.
The big question is how to get rid of taxes. No one can seriously claim it’s going to happen real soon, but we should be thinking about it, to plan for the day when we can live without them. A major part of it is to decide which government services we can lose.