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From: chrisr@hcrvax.UUCP (Chris Retterath)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: Governments don't create wealth, eh?
Message-ID: <980@hcrvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Aug-84 19:23:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: hcrvax.980
Posted: Tue Aug 14 19:23:59 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 15-Aug-84 02:12:40 EDT
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In reply to Dave Sherman's reply to Henry Spencer:

Taxation IS legalized theft, if you think about it a little, as
Henry Spencer obviously has. It is theft backed up with violence,
an issue I want to raise here. The important distinction between
a market transaction and a government transaction is that the
latter is always applied under a threat of violence, wereas the former
is only entered under mutual aggreement and benefit.

	Proof: do not pay your taxes this year. You will be threatened
	with fines and/or prison. If you persist, you will be fined;
	if you refuse to pay you will be sent to prison and be
	forcibly denied physical freedom. Other parties who owe you money
	may be ordered to hand over that money to the government. 
	On the other hand, no one can FORCE you to pay for things you
	do not want in a free market. Think about that when next you
	pick over the sale items in your local supermarket.

If you think about the services which you indirectly receive for your
tax dollars, you will realize that they are of very poor value.
I have sometimes wondered about the value of a "free" education,
when illiteracy and truancy are discussed. If a parent was to pay
up-front costs for his/her childrens education, I doubt very much
whether that parent would condone truancy, and I am sure that much
more attention would be paid to the childs progress. I believe that this
whole issue of seperate versus public school funding would go away, if
only a voucher system was set up so that a child could be placed in any
school, public or private, and only the SUCCESSFUL schools were allowed
to be open.

If you do not beleive that every dollar you earn is yours, then
why would you want to work? There is no inducement to work harder
unless the effort is rewarded in some way. In a trade union or work
guild you work to get "seniority", a meaningless measure of value.
Can you really imagine a guild worker working extra hard for NO reward?
Given this argument, it is not hard to see that the more that is taxed
away, the greater the disencentive to work, or, conversely, the
greater the incentive to hide those earnings. I collect a "baby bonus"
that is effectively taxed back to the government -- there is obviously
little value to this "benefit" to me because I keep very little of it
after tax, and on the other hand there is a large cost for the government
to pay the salaries of the staff running the baby bonus program,
and purchase the equipment used to run off and mail those monthly cheques.
And yet this is one of those fine universal social programs that I
am supposed to be so happy for, and that politicians tell us all
citizens want!

To do, as Dave suggests, and work within the system is of course an
exercise in futility. How many people do you have to convince? Thousands
of Canadians would have to agree to this change. What would it cost to
make this effort? It would not be cheap. If you did this and had the
offending legislation struck down, how long would it be before another
"for the greater good of all" politician re-enacted similiar laws.
No, you may as well save your energy and time and enjoy what you have
now, instead of tilting at windmills!

Dave says:
~| Theft? Only if you feel that you really earned every dollar you're
~| paid. Didn't you get some help from government in the form of
~| education? In the form of government support to the university
~| which pays your salary to support its research? Put yourself on
~| a desert island, with no taxes, and you wouldn't have your job.

No man is an island and this argument is specious. Place a goodly
number on a desert island with some natural resources,
and watch the desert flower! I think the point that Henry raised in his
earlier article about the power of money organized in a bank without
any government involvment is well worth refining:
	-- Groups of people can come together to get large projects
completed on a collective basis, without the "benefit" of a government.

There are many examples. Shopping malls. The CN tower. Apartment complexes.
Factories. Oil refineries. Visit one some day.


-- 
		Chris Retterath
		{decvax,utcsrgv,utzoo}!hcr!hcrvax!chrisr