How Taxes Make Us Selfish

When people who are forced to pay taxes object to being forced to pay taxes, they are often told they are selfish. This is both vicious (something like tsk tsk’ing the man who just got mugged who complained he just got mugged) as well as ironic – because it is the taxes that foster necessary selfishness. Because when your own situation is precarious, you must necessarily prioritize your own situation over that of others.

How much less “selfish” would you be if you had the money to be more generous?

If you weren’t forced to hand over several thousand dollars every year to the county/city in order to avoid being evicted from the home you don’t really own (and never will, because of property taxes you will always have to pay in order to avoid eviction) giving that sad-looking homeless old guy $100 would be as nothing and you’d probably want to help, because you could afford to. Imagine how unselfish you could be if you were not forced to hand over about a fourth of every dollar you earn to the federal/state/local government. You could probably comfortably live on a modest income and provide not just for yourself, but also for family – with plenty left to make it possible for you to help people you knew of who you wanted to help.

Aye, there’s the rub. Well, one of them.

One of the points of all this taxing and “helping” being to make people helpless over who gets helped. A permanent class of wealth redistributors is one of the people most helped by taxes, in terms of both money and power. In my county, there is an office of full-time fraus who collect a steady paycheck collecting checks. These checks – the property taxes people are forced to pay – are then used to “help” a permanent class of parasites, who are permanent because it is effectively impossible to ever cut them off. Some of these parasites – the teachers at government schools, for instance – are quite well off.

Contrast this with helping your neighbor, who can’t work right now because he had an accident and hurt himself. You know he’s not a bad man; he’s your neighbor and he fell on hard times – so you choose to help him out. He would probably do the same for you, too. Both of you (and most everyone else) would be in a financial position to do that, too, were it not for having been bled worse than George Washington was just before he died.

I italicize choice for an important reason. You would decide – choose – who to help; more finely stated, you would choose who deserves your help and could choose to stop helping when your help was being taken advantage of. Your neighbor decides he prefers your help to going back to work. So you stop helping and he has to go back to work. Oh, the humanity!

The meanness and cruelty!

When the government – its fraus (both females and males) is doing the “helping” with your money, you no longer have a say over this “help.” Exactly. It is not just the “helped” that is reduced to a state of helplessness. Resentment ensues – all around. The person who is forced to “help” naturally resents this. It destroys the natural human instinct to help when you are forced to help, in part because of the forcing but also because the “helping” may be and often is objectionable as such. Thomas Jefferson articulated this nicely when he said it is tyrannical to compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disagrees with or abhors. More than just ideas. How about “the schools”? Those government warehouses that exist to stunt the reasoning ability of children and transform them into what George Carlin insightfully referred to as obedient workers. Who do not question being forced to “help” – and get angry when anyone who can reason dares to question being forced to “help.”

Home-schooling kids cost much less than having to pay for “the schools” – and the government workers who populate these institutions. A normally intelligent child can be taught to read, write and reason by the age of eight if not before. This business of keeping them in “school” for 12 years is just an excuse to keep them under control – and everyone paying for it.

Social Security is not a program that assures people too old to work have a subsistence income. It is a means by which to render them dependent upon a subsistence income. The average full-time worker is forced to “contribute” thousands annually to this so-called program (a banal term that makes it sound like something people are free to sign up for, if they want to) over the course of the entirety of his working life. The money he is forced to “contribute” is promptly spent by the government on others things. Imagine if instead people had that money – decades before they grew too old to work – and could have saved it and invested it. Most people would then not need a subsistence income – a dole – from the government (that is, extracted from other people) in their old age.

Generosity is to a great extent a function of being in a position to be generous. When you are forced to “help” – at every turn, even to the extent of buying a can of soda (which includes a tax) it becomes more difficult to be generous; more necessary to be selfish for the sake of self-preservation. This is the moral horror of being forced to “help.” It creates smallness and meanness where it would otherwise not exist. It makes neighbors who would probably be friends – if they were simpatico – into wary adversaries. It makes you not want to “help” since after all, you’ve already been forced to.

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