Wait, isn’t that backwards?
Didn’t Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously say that ‘Taxes are the price we pay for civilization’?
He did, but he had it backwards.
Taxes are, as Tommy Shelby said of politics in general, a way of deliberately making things better for some people by deliberately making them worse for others.
That is, taxes are some people using other people the way farmers use barnyard animals — as resources to be exploited. That sounds kind of like the opposite of civilization, doesn’t it? It’s a variation on ‘might makes right’, which is the kind of thing we expect from mobs, and gangs, and dictators.
It’s the kind of thing Vladimir Putin would say.
Which, by modern journalistic standards, makes Holmes an agent of Putin¹.
We were promised, in the Declaration of Independence, that America would have a government whose purpose is the protection of rights, and whose legitimate powers are derived from the consent of the people.
Rights and consent. That’s what civilization looks like.
But in one of the biggest bait-and-switch scams ever, we substituted majority rule for consent.
This means that when enough people decide that they want to use government as a tool to implement agendas that go far beyond the protection of rights — often requiring the active suppression of rights — they can use taxes to do that.
But to collect taxes, you have to ignore rights. (Your rights to property and privacy are incompatible with the very idea of a tax.)
To collect taxes, you have to ignore consent. (Consent, in the end, is the ability to say no. This is incompatible with the very idea of a tax.)
So to have taxes, we have to give up rights and consent. Which is to say, to have taxes, we have to give up civilization.
Ergo, civilization is the price we pay for having taxes.
¹ We must leave it to historians and psychics to work out just how Holmes (who died in 1932) could have known about Putin (who wasn’t born until 1952).
