Source: Garrison Center
by Thomas L Knapp
“The message of ‘tax day’ and ‘Tax Freedom Day’ is really the same: For nearly 1/3 of the year, the government considers itself entitled to everything YOU earn or produce, and demands that YOU do the work of documenting whether it took ‘enough.’ There’s a word for that kind of claim … but we supposedly ended slavery in 1865. I guess there are reasonable arguments for using weaker terms like ‘theft’ or ‘extortion,’ but there’s no honest way of making taxation sound moral. The dishonest way is best exemplified by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s claim that ‘taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society,’ or Barney Frank’s definition of ‘government’ as ‘simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.'” (04/16/24)