Mike Steven wrote:
> Extract from http://www.harrybrowne.org/ (US libertarian presidential
> candidate):
>
> "Today (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) federal, state, and local taxes
> take 47% of the national income."
>
> i.e. those in the "land of the free" spend close to 50% of their working
> lives (minus market value of those public services they actually wanted) as
> government owned slaves.
>
> NB I don't think the situation is much better in Britain - I hope the figure
> isn't as high as that, but it wouldn't suprise me if it was. (In the most
> recent budget here there were a lot of "stealth" tax increases which don't
> show up in simple income tax calculations). My point is that both sides of
> this mini US v UK tax debate seem to be seriously underestimating the amount
> stolen by their respective governments.
Oh, this is understood. The fact you have the VAT and atrociously high gas
taxes, taxes on every TV and closet should be indicative though. The 47% figure
quoted above for the US includes the portion of our consumer expenditures that
pay for corporate profit and income taxes, , which do act as a bit of a VAT in
an indirect way, though they are applied only to the net revinues of the
corporations producing the products we buy, rather than to the gross. There are
also sales taxes, gas taxes, communications taxes, etc... I'd be interested in
seeing a similar calculation done on Britain. I doubt you'd see one though, its
probably covered under the Official Secrets Act.
> And as for Martin Ling's comments:
>
> "It's not stealing if those people have agreed to pay. Which, technically,
> they have. By remaining in the country, and by
> upholding the government and its taxation policies."
>
> I'm sorry, but this is ludicrous. The fact that I haven't emigrated is in
> no way an endorsement of government theft of my money. I didn't vote for
> them and the only reason I "agree to pay" (to use your terminology) is
> because if I don't, my property itself will be stolen or I'll be imprisoned.
>
> By your logic, there's nothing wrong with protection rackets run by
> organised crminals - because after all, their victims have "agreed to pay"
> (if only to prevent their property from being torched), and of course, they
> could always move to a different part of the country.
At its heart, there is little difference between governments and protection
rackets. The only difference is one tries to make the silly assertion that the
input of the individual has any real bearing on what is done to him by that
protection racket.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:11:33 MDT