I don't mind paying taxes as long as I receive some service or see some benefit for the common good but all I see is some bureaucrat convincing me I am obligated to support other people who would gladly confiscate everything I have for the common good. There is no real practical benefit for the common good under the present regime so why support the tools of your own destruction.
"... There may be something to be said – not much, but something – for taking from those who have inherited wealth a certain proportion of that wealth for the service of the State and the benefit of the poor and needy; and those who by their own ability, brains, industry, and exertion have earned money may reasonably be invited to surrender a small portion of it towards the maintenance of those public services by which they benefit, to wit, the Police, the Navy, the Army, the public sewers, and so forth.
But to compel such individuals to bestow a large part of their earnings upon other individuals, who prosper by way of pensions, unemployment grants, or education allowances, is manifestly barbarous and indefensible. Yet this is the law. The original and only official basis of taxation was that individual citizens, in return for their money, received collectively some services from the State, the defense of their property and persons, the care of their health or the education of their children. All that has now gone. Citizen A, who has earned money, is commanded simply to give it to Citizens B, C, and D, who have not, and by force of habit this has come to be regarded as a normal and proper proceeding, whatever the comparative industry or merits of Citizens A, B, C, and D. To be alive has become a virtue, and the mere capacity to inflate the lungs entitles Citizen B to a substantial share in the laborious earnings of Citizen A."
A. P. Herbert |
