Why I Love Taxes
Why I Love Taxes
The statement that there are very few people who enjoy paying taxes is not likely one that will be met with any great amount of disagreement. Even the tax authorities themselves acknowledge that few people relish the task of accounting for and paying their proper share of the tax burden. As the Dutch Revenue Service puts it, “we can’t make it pleasant, just easier.” It is in a similar light of assumed negativity that we find taxation linked to mortality, another of life’s less pleasant aspects, in the expression that the only things inevitable in life are death and taxes.
However, there are very good reasons to have a much more upbeat attitude towards taxes. In a democratic state, taxes are the dues we pay for the privilege of living in a nation providing law and order, internal peace, public safety, commercial infrastructure, and all of the other accoutrements of civil society. The level of the fees can be debated as can the policy of spending, but to see the phenomenon of taxation itself as punitive is as wrongheaded as viewing the fees owed to a club as being other than the natural requirement of membership. Regardless of the scope of the state’s reach in any given society, all state’s cost money; even in the most minimal of state entities imaginable, the government apparatus requires funding to function.
Taxes can also serve an even broader purpose. In most modern industrialized nations, taxes and dues levied using similar formats to taxation are used to fund elaborate structures of insurance and national pension schemes, in addition to providing subsidies for (higher) education and a variety of other public goods that can be argued to bestow significant individual benefits. By channeling earnings towards these public goods, taxes can prevent both the profligate and the unknowledgeable from failing to provide for a financially secure future.
As reasoned and thinking individuals, we like to believe that we will be responsible and opt for the right choices on every occasion, but the future is far away until it no longer is. Taxes not only stop us from spending our money on “fun stuff” now instead of salting away wealth for our future benefit, they also compel us to do so even in the face of what we might believe to be more important, though transient, concerns in the present rather than taking proper precautions for the future. In addition, the bundling of taxation wealth can serve to provide greater surety to contributors than can a single and significantly smaller pool of reserves being managed by a non-professional. In all honesty, most of us would have to admit that we cannot be bothered to set up a comprehensive personal pension plan. By the same lights, it is easy to see how the pooled resources of public funding can be wielded to create greater stability and equity in health care than private systems catering solely to individuals in an atomized market of health care assurance and provision.
Finally, taxes bleed away social tensions. Taxation on an equitable footing creates, or should create, a sense of communal contribution. We all contribute in this fashion to the common weal and are thus all contributors to the greater enterprise that is the nation. Progressive taxation can also prevent society from tilting too far in the direction of extreme (income and wealth) inequality and can, by being used to purchase public goods benefitting the greater numbers, alleviate the strain caused by the inequality present in any free market society.
In this light, taxes can be said to be the ultimate vouchsafe of the middle class, a group often claimed to be the stabilizing factor in economically free societies. By providing funding for such public goods as education, accessible health care, transportation, and secured old-age pensions, taxes guarantee an educated and prosperous professional and mercantile class, freed from over-excessive burdens with respect to health care and retirement assurance.
As we face times where ever-greater appeals are being made for self-sufficiency and hear increasing protestations concerning the burdensomeness of taxation, it is good to remember the benefits we have reaped from a judiciously progressive system of taxes. There are certainly benefits to be had from reducing the tax burden on individuals and companies, but it should at all times be kept in mind what is being undertaken by doing so. Reductions in taxation are, by definition, reductions in the in the contribution being made to the common weal. Without alternative income, this necessitates reductions in the benefits provided by the nation to its citizens. Certainly, it is incumbent upon taxpayers to be critical of the money being demanded of them and to keep a diligent eye on how that money is spent, just as it is due diligence as the member of any club to keep an eye on its finances. But like those club members, we should not be blinded by short-term gains through fee reduction to what we are doing in paying taxes. If we are to be members of the club that is a nation, and we wish that nation to be stable, prosperous, and relatively free of internal tensions, we need to be prepared to pay our due, and in doing so in this knowledge, we should do so gladly.
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You want to compare taxes to the fee for a club? Imagine a club of which you háve to be a member, you could join another club, but you would have to move away to a place where people speak a different language and far away from your friends and family. You don’t like clubs and don’t want to be a member of a club? That’s not allowed.
So, whether or not you’re going to this club, you have to pay. The club is ran by people you did not vote for, but others did, so you have to obey them anyway. The club’s finances are out of your control, but after spending loads of money on paintings and decorations that you did not want, after providing free drinks for the people that voted the management into power, they raise your fee and if you don’t pay you get locked up in the basement of the club.
I could go on with this comparison that you started for a while, and I ask you, who would like having such a club in their neighbourhood? It’s a ridiculous comparison and a ridiculous article.
Naturally, any logically thinking human knows that all of the services mentioned in this cheerleader’s notebook scrap of an article can easily and more cheaply provided by private means. Whether or not for profit is a matter of preference for businesses and customers. Taxation is nothing more than theft, especially when progressive. In the case of the Netherlands, a country that pays lip service to equality under the law, one pays more and more and benefits less and less as one earns more income. This causes a split in civil society where the payee’s demand more and more and the payors attempt to evade by legal means or otherwise the unfair taxation foisted upon them.
Mark Vitullo, as a person fully dependent for his livelihood on theft by taxation, knows full well that all he owns, right down to the shirt on his back and all that is in his bank account, was once stolen from hardworking private citizens and companies that actually create wealth. Actually a fraction greater than 1, because the official at the Tilburg University have to be paid to administer his salary. Should the hardworking citizens object to this fleecing, the benevolent authorities will come with weapons and handcuffs to throw these citizens in a cage with rapists and murderers.
I would propose to stop thinking of citizens in a free country as wallet for the likes of Vitullo. People are perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves when they are not usurped by government. This usurpation is what causes complacency. Give the freedom and the choice, I believe citizens would make the right choices for themselves. And if they don’t? Well babies learn not to touch the radiator by touching it. Freedom means that people get to choose things you hate. This works both ways.
So let’s stop cheerleading for the elite who use law and taxation to siphon wealth from the middle and working class to themselves.