Tax is Theft!!
. . . Is a common refrain that we could hear at any Tea Party meeting. There is the obvious way in which taking taxes from someone is similar to theft such as the Sheriff of Nottingham taking the crops from the people of Sherwood Forest. But there is a deeper and more insidious way that taxation is theft. It is not as direct as the sheriff with the club demanding your produce, but it is just as damaging to our society.
People often will accept paying high taxes because they believe the taxes go to do “good.” Those same people believe they have done enough “good” because they have paid those high taxes.
When Scrooge was asked to donate to the poor he said he had already done enough because his taxes paid for orphanages and poor houses. The ghost of Scrooge’s partner howls a warning: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business.”
Since Dickens’ time there are more government programs to help people, but we can see they have only a few successes and many failures. Executives of the VA are given hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money in bonuses for good performance, while our brave veterans wait, and wither, and die for lack of care. In our Commonwealth, Auditor Bump has published lists of how poorly the DCF has served the families of at risk children. But when confronted by the hard facts, politicians and bureaucrats insist that the problem is that you don’t pay enough in taxes.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing,
over and over again, and expecting a different result.”
Citizens of the Eurozone handed over more of their income to their governments and they have given up their responsibility for taking care of their neighbors. They have also suspended their belief in their own judgment and ability to do so. Conversely, the citizens of the United States not only give more to charity than those European governments, we do so voluntarily; unlike Europe that takes so much more of their citizen’s wealth and give so little in return.
Wealth and prosperity begets charity,
not coercion and politicization . . . i.e. taxes.
One of the reasons why Americans give more money to charities than people in Europe is because in the United States we feel a personal responsibility to help our neighbors and we also have a healthy skepticism of the positive effects of big government.
Our world is rich with people who are pursuing their passion to serve their fellow man, but time after time governments get in the way. Good men and women are crafting new ways to help us all advance into a prosperous and peaceful future. Mindless bureaucrats will arrest good Samaritans for giving sandwiches to the homeless without a license. Big Government requires individuals to make themselves smaller. When we shrink governments, we return power to individuals. Only with truly limited government can we have truly unlimited individuals empowered to do good.
In Liberty,
Matt O’Brien
President
Worcester Tea Party
