I had an interesting conversation this week with another businessman who has had enough.
The topic came up when he learned that I am business attorney, and he started to talk to me about the never-ending stream of regulations and taxes, and how he wondered if government didn’t do some of it just to find out how much we would let it get away with. I smiled, I nodded, and then I told him about my recent odyssey with the Census Bureau. We both got a laugh out of that, especially when we talked about how long the survey was, and how they just presumed that I would be willing to surrender that time to the government without a peep. This lead to a discussion about how it doesn’t take very many agencies, bureaus, and offices making “insignificant” demands on you time, and on your earnings before it really starts to add up. And of course, none of them ever take into consideration that their “insignificant” demands are coming along with all the other “insignificant” demands…not that it would matter, of course, since their demands are important, and must be responded to.
Then he said “I’ll go you one better. A few years back, I got one of those forms where they wanted me to pretty much inventory EVERY item in my business, then compute the tax and send it to them.”
“Ok…” I said.
“Yeah. I thought about it for a minute, realized how many HOURS that would take to do, hours that I wouldn’t be using to earn money, and so I looked at the form, and saw that it was a $40.00 fine to not fill out the form and send it back. I wrote on it “I’m not going to take the HOURS necessary to do this. Bill me for your fine.” And I never heard anything more. They send a new form every couple of years, I answer the same way. And I’ve never been contacted by anyone looking for their fine.”
We both laughed. And for a few minutes, I was glad. It makes me happy to see even small acts of defiance against an out of control government.
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I was introduced to a new song last night. And it made me very, very happy to know that there are people willing to be the nail that stands up, at a time when so many allow themselves to be intimidated by a tyranny of political correctness, and small-minded thugs who keep finding new ways to take what doesn’t belong to them.
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A friend of mine let loose today with a good rant on Facebook today on the chronic misuse of the word “tolerance” and how the ones who use it most clearly don’t understand it based on their intolerance of those they disagree with. I’m proud to count her, and others like her, as friends.
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As our President continues to hamfistedly attempt to gaslight the nation about his blatant lies, and as he sets the tone from the top down of a government culture that pays lip service to accountability, yet remains blissfully consequence-free in light of its mendacity and failure, there is a rising anger that will eventually remind our public “servants” that service and employment both come with accountability, and that we will not let those who serve us continue to enjoy good fortune at our expense, and a cushy sinecure that none of us could ever hope to dream of. The fact that they continue to let this attitude build, while flaunting their disrespect and lack of self-awareness in our faces demonstrates the kind of bad judgement that converts dismay due to lack of respect to a desire to instill fear. I don’t think it will be pretty, but I do think it will be instructive, and occasionally, “pour l’encourage les autres” has its place.
I’m in the “Ain’t nobody got time for that!” camp as well. It worked with the Census.
What happened to that good fiction serial you had going? I was really enjoying it, and then it stopped. Please consider continuing it.
I’ve been stuck on where to take the next installment.
I was lucky enough to find out about LewRockwell.com from a poster on another forum a couple years ago. The internet is an amazing tool to wake people up to the insanity of the State as an institutional concept. The absolute absurdity of giving any organization absolute monopoly power to solve all disputes would be seen as absolutely idiotic in any other situation. If a man has a dispute with a business, should the business itself be deciding how it is resolved? Of course not. But call it “government” and nobody thinks about it. Public schools have done their job indoctrinating so many people its sad.
Fixing the government is like trying to get a lion to stop eating meat. To be stopped, it must be absolutely eliminated. And the only way to do that is through education. We need to be teaching people that government is a criminal gang, and a particularly monstrous criminal gang at that.
It was not always so. We had pretty good government until about 200 years ago,
I love seeing comments like this, because of most of the ignorant Republicans (Democrats, of course, think all is well right now) think all was well under Bush, or if not him, Reagan. Little do they know just how massive the government was even back then. Most of them are OK with it.
200 years ago was the War of 1812, the last war that we can really say was in any legitimate sense truly defensive (I understand WWII is debatable in some respects, although I think the US could have avoided that attack, and I understand that you could count the Confederate Secessionists as being “Americans” and as such you could say “America” fought a defensive war in 1861-65) and amazingly, James Madison for the most part managed to avoid destroying civil liberties during the war. I can’t prove any absolute correlation between the defensive nature of the war, and the fact that civil liberties were generally respected, but I nonetheless believe there is one.
Anyone who wants to role back our government that far is certainly on the same team as I am.
That said, while I’d honestly be quite happy to live in a country where the tax rate was below 5% and where the government didn’t really bother me at all, to me, the absolute moral ideal is no compulsory taxation at all, and any government functions whatsoever that are still deemed necessary by the marketplace be provided in the marketplace.