The Most Complete Despotism Imaginable — Quotes from The Asylum
A new quote along with some griping about taxes.
Just off the top my head…how about all the taxes we pay? Federal tax, state tax, self-employment tax, property tax, gasoline tax, car registration and a lot more.
Even if you own your home free and clear—try not paying property tax and see what happens. Home ownership doesn’t really exist. If the government can take it from you because you didn’t pay a tax, is it really yours?
You can’t even legally have a car without paying the state. When I buy a car from someone the state wants a tax when I buy it and they want me to continue paying them to operate it. I don’t know what it’s like in other states, but here in California we even have to pay a small fee if we plan not to operate our cars on the roads.
Transcription:
By giving the government unlimited powers, the most arbitrary rule can be made legal; and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.1
— Friedrich A. Hayek
Notes
Hayek, Friedrich A., The Road to Serfdom, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1972. Originally published in Britain in 1944. pp. 82-83.
The power to tax is the power to destroy.
So right. The System is evil from top to bottom, at all levels. A couple of weeks ago someone on SubsTack, i think jim Davidson, wrote about how much US Gov spends per year on itself (its budget, more or less) including on military personnel and infrastructure, I believe. The number was a staggering 7.5 trillion dollars: over 1.5 million per person! (The total number of people in Fed Gov plus military is around 4.5 to 5 million.). I imagine one could do the same math for every level of every government and we’d see that 90 to 100 percent of taxes simply goes to paying for the government, not for ‘services’ or ‘programs’ or whatever they tell us the money is used for. The rest is simply faked by putting more zeros on a ledger somewhere; we pay extra for services and programs anyway.