Samizdata

Buzzflash have produced a great long list of why people are not paying too much tax to the state. Not surprisingly whilst I agree with many of the points they raise, it is because I think their list actually proves quite the opposite.

– Don’t drive on paved streets or highways.

Highways, like all property, should be private property… and so I would rather pay tolls that taxes.

– Don’t call 911.

My neighbourhood is so dissatisfied with the Police Service we are hiring a local security to patrol the area, funded by subscription. Better yet, acquire a gun.

– Don’t flush your toilet.

Why not? Water utilities are private, not state operations in many parts of the world. The state is not the only way.

– Don’t bring your garbage to the curb.

I don’t have to, the private garbage collectors we use come to our back door and collect it.

– Don’t fly in an airplane that uses air-traffic controllers.

Privatise, privatise, privatise!

– Don’t use the court system.

Correct… use arbitrators and law merchants if the state lets you.

– Don’t call the police when you get robbed.

Quite so, carry a gun and shoot the fucker dead yourself.

– Don’t use the US Post Office. Send all your letters via FedEx or UPS.

Yes, that is a splendid idea.

– Don’t ask for a farm subsidy for not growing crops.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t ask for a taxpayer subsidy to do business in a city or state.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t buy a sports franchise and ask the taxpayers to build your stadium.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t send your children to public schools.

Quite so… the state has no business ‘educating’ children in the first place and certainly not at my expense.

– Don’t attend a state university.

Quite so… see above, though given that the state may have stolen your money to fund the place anyway regardless of your wishes, don’t feel too bad if you do.

– Don’t expect a social security payment.

Quite so, start building up a private pension!

– Don’t let Medicare pay your bills if you are over 65 or disabled.

Quite so… buy insurance and set money aside for eventualities and old age… and if you don’t, don’t expect me to fund your irresponsible behaviour or bad luck.

– Don’t look for a government contract to bolster your defense industry business.

Hmmm… as a minarchist I see this as one of the few legitimate roles of the state, but certainly quite a lot of defense roles could be taken up by Protection Agencies and Private Military Organisations like Sandline. The reality is the weapons have to come from somewhere.

– Don’t look for a government.

Okay, if you insist.

– Don’t look for a lucrative government consultant contract.

Okay.

– Don’t run for political office where your salary is paid for by the taxpayers.

Damn straight!

– Don’t accept government research findings that subsidize research for your industry.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t be an airlines and expect the government to bail you out.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t be a car company and expect the government to bail you out.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t be a steel company and expect the government to bail you out.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t be a company that pollutes and expect the taxpayer to bail you out.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare.

– Don’t climb to the top of the Washington Monument, which is maintained at taxpayer expense.

Yes, it should be private property.

– Don’t make use of police services.

You are repeating yourself guys… see earlier about dialling ‘911’

– Don’t be rescued by fire department paramedic team.

In many places these guys are private organisations and not an arm of the state. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) for example shows how a national emergency service can be run independently of both the states control and its funding.

– Don’t call the fire department.

See previous.

– Don’t expect federal assistance if a natural disaster destroys your home or business.

Quite so… buy insurance for Christ’s sake and if you insist on living on a flood plain, consider moving somewhere more sensible!

– Don’t expect the military to defend your country.

Again, it is one of the very few areas for the state to actually have a function… but Protection Agencies and Private Military Organisations can do much of the work.

– Don’t visit national parks or hike in national forests.

Privatise them.

– Don’t eat USDA inspected meat, cheese, eggs or produce.

Better yet, abolish the USDA.

– Don’t take any medications tested and approved by the FDA.

Better yet, abolish the FDA.

– Don’t drink, bath or otherwise use the water from municipal water systems.

Privatise it, if it is not already so, which in many places is indeed the case.

– Don’t look at or relay a weather report.

There are just as likely to be privately provided services.

– Don’t look at a NASA generated picture.

Better still, abolish NASA.

– Don’t expect a unit of measure like a gallon of gas to be a full gallon.

Why not? There are many non-state centred ways to achieve that.

– Don’t expect an elevator to work correctly or not fall.

Ludicrous. I expect the owner of the elevator to not want to get sued and that can be achieved without idiotic ‘health and safety’ regulations.

– Don’t expect a red light to work.

See above.

– Don’t be the Minority Senate Leader Named Trent Lott and expect American taxpayers to subsidize the building of private industry cruiseliner ships in your home state.

Better yet abolish the Senate…or failing that, abolish Trent Lott.

– Don’t accept government money to help develop a product which you then personally patent or copyright and sell for your own profit.

Quite so… just say no to corporate welfare and reject all stolen ‘government’ money.

– Don’t use the services of a doctor who is licensed through the state.

Better yet, abolish state regulation and leave it to private competitive rating agencies and insurance companies.

– Don’t expect research into medical problems such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, aging, prostrate, menopause, etc.

You must be joking! The main driver for that R&D is the profit motive!

– Don’t use the public library.

Yes, abolish them.

– Don’t go to a state university affiliated hospital.

Yes, abolish them.

– Don’t go to a state university.

Yes, abolish them.

– Don’t watch state college sports.

I don’t.

– Don’t apply for government grants.

Yes, abolish all grants, which are just redistributed stolen property.

– Don’t use your state’s Convention Centers.

Yes, burn them down and build something useful rather than have places for mass political rallies.

– Don’t go to a state, city or municipal-run airport.

Yes, privatise them.

– Don’t ask for rural electrification.

I didn’t!

– Don’t ask for FEC regulations that protect us from crooked financial planners.

I didn’t!

– Don’t ask to keep the airwaves free so your right-wing psycho radio talk show host can lie to you.

Huh?

– Don’t ask for a business loan from the small business administration.

Yes, abolish the SBA.

– Don’t ask to use the G.I. bill to go to college.

Quite so.

– Don’t allow Al Gore to sponsor legislation to turn a military computer network (DARPANet/ARPANet) into the public-accessed ‘Internet’.

Er… it was rather more complex than that.

– Don’t drive a car that benefits from government safety regulations.

‘Benefit’ my arse. I am not given the option unfortunately or I would indeed rip out much of the mandated crap in cars these days.

– Don’t use electricity generated by TVA or some government-owned and maintained dam or facility.

Quite so, privatise them and return the stolen land they are built on.

– Don’t use currency printed by the US Treasury.

Quite so, lets return to non-national private currencies.

– Don’t use a bank or credit union that insures your deposits through the FDIC.

Yes, abolish the FDIC and end all the moral hazard it leads to.

– Don’t buy or build a house that requires the efforts of county deed offices or needs building permits and inspections.

Abolish the immoral permits that make a nonsense of the whole notion of several property.

– Don’t get married, have children or die and expect the government to keep track of all the certificates.

I do not want the state to know anything about my families private affairs!

– Don’t expect the government to keep an eye on cemeteries, crematories and funeral homes so you won’t get dug up and thrown in a swamp. And ask George Bush why he lied about his involvement with a company that did just that.

I don’t expect the state to do much of anything really!

– Don’t run for an elected office, because the local, state and federal election commissions could be involved.

I agree. The whole democratic system is little more than proxy mugging.

– Don’t go to a beach kept clean by the state.

They usually don’t.

– Don’t use public transportation.

I agree… privatise it.

– Don’t visit public museums.

Privatise them.

– Don’t go hunting, fishing, or camping on government property.

There should not even be ‘government property’.

– Don’t cross a bridge.

Private toll bridges are splendid things!

– Don’t use truckstops or public restrooms.

Why not? Most are privately owned!

And finally . . .
– Don’t complain to us about how much you pay in taxes because we think taxes can be a good thing and WE DON’T WANT TO HEAR YOUR WHINING ANYMORE!

As you can see, I reject the entire premise these ‘self evident’ remarks are based on. Government can take its ‘essential state services’ and… well, use your imagination. There are other ways to do things. As the brilliant French pamphleteer Fréd&eacuteric Bastiat said:

Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all

I am reading about the late 19th century French anarchists, especially the bomb thrower Emile Henry. He would definitely have blown up his local McDonald’s. Since the Soviet Union was founded, the dominant leftist ideology has been Marxism-Leninism, with a theory of the state, foreign policy and a theory of tactical support for nationalist or radical movements around the world.

What we see today is the non-Marxist-Leninist left, the people who agree with the ‘anarcho-communist’ critique of the Soviet Union, but support a mixed bag of causes united only by a hatred of government-corporate business interests. The anti-globalisation campaigns of the 1890s resemble the current crop, except that they had more guts and were more likely to be literate. Other interest groups are attempting to cash in: the trade unions and public sector welfare interests. This gives an incoherent feel to the protests: e.g. simultaneously demanding an end to money and increases in the minimum wage.

The strategy for combating Marxism-Leninism isn’t necessarily the right one for opposing “non-Marxism-Leninism”. Cruise missile bases in South East England won’t help. Spook operations contracted out by a consortium of big business and security agencies to pro-capitalist radicals are probably worth reactivating

In a recent post, Stephen “VodkaPundit” Green managed to assign an innovative moniker to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Mr. Green objected to Kristof’s claim that domestic terrorists like the militias are just as much a threat as foreign terrorists such as al-Qaeda. After carefully weighing the evidence, Green dismissed the notion as the ramblings of a f—tard.

Kristof’s latest offering will do nothing to help him live down his new nickname. He is asking us to believe that the US is complicit in Islamic nations’ institutionalized abuse of women by refusing to sign the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, a document that is now 22 years old but which Kristof finds fit to recycle as cutting edge news.

The CEDAW treaty, according to Kristof, “simply helps third-world women gain their barest human rights. In Pakistan, for example, women who become pregnant after being raped are often prosecuted for adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. But this treaty has helped them escape execution.” See? Pakistan has to tone down the misogyny because they signed the treaty. Since the US has not ratified the treaty, US judges are free to sentence adultresses to death by stoning. Clearly, the problem here is with the US, not with Pakistan and the others who signed the treaty, right? Well, actually, it isn’t America’s fault, says Kristof. It is John Ashcroft’s fault.

If only the US Congress would ratify the treaty, Pakistani and Saudi and Iranian men would stop abusing women! Besides, everyone knows that even if these men are abusing women, it is just their way of expressing outrage over America’s support of Israel and opposition to Palestinian statehood. In fact, every evil in the world is America’s fault, even when foreigners are perpetrating the evil against America.

Kristof insists that there is no political agenda behind the CEDAW treaty, and that conservative objections to the treaty are misguided. However, the treaty openly embraces affirmative action:

Article 4.1: Adoption by States Parties of temporary special measures aimed at accelerating de facto equality between men and women shall not be considered discrimination as defined in the present Convention, but shall in no way entail as a consequence the maintenance of unequal or separate standards; these measures shall be discontinued when the objectives of equality of opportunity and treatment have been achieved.

… and asserts that a wide variety of welfare-state entitlements such as “access to health care”, paid maternity leave, free education, agricultural loans, public pensions, etc. are actually fundamental rights. Sure, no political grandstanding there.

If Kristof wants to live down his new nickname, he is going to have to do better than this. Perhaps Kristof will even join Robert Fisk in having his very name immortalized as a blogosphere synonym for, well, f—tard.

Harold Pinter is a well known British playwright, a scourge of the Tories and impassioned voice for the statist left. None of this matters one jot to me as the world is full of people declaiming incoherent left wing world views. He is also a signatory to the free Slobodan Milosevic petition, which makes him an apologist for Europe’s most prolific socialist mass murderer since Joseph Stalin. That most certainly does matter to me and to any rational non-idiotarian who views support for mass murderers as prima facie evidence of off-the-scale immorality.

So one would think that this would put Harold Pinter beyond the pale in polite society in Britain, right? I mean if telling a mildly racist joke ends your political career, then presumably showing solidarity with a man who ordered the systematic raping of Croat and Muslim women in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the slaughter of tens of thousands by government backed Serbian einstztruppen must mean there is hardly an open door in Britain for such a man.

Er, no. It means you get mentioned in the latest list of honours. This ‘non-political’ award by the British state is of course replete with political meaning. If you are a vocal left winger then standing up for a mass murderer is regarded as little more than an endearing eccentricity that in no way detracts from being ‘The Great Man of Letters’. This sort of thing is exactly what I do not dislike the British political class.

I hate them.

In a posting earlier today, Paul Marks  said some nice things about South Dakota. It’s an interesting place — wide open spaces, low taxes and few people. You might wonder why in this place of rugged individualists Democrats consistently win public office.  Perhaps the South Dakota website didn’t mention the large number of Indians (Native-Americans as they are now called) who vote a solid bloc for Democrats who continue to keep them in the bondage of federal handouts. This population has opted out of assimilation encouraged by the federal agency whose existence relies on maintaining this population literally ‘on the reservation.’

Driving through these reservations is a mind altering experience. Vast tracts of featureless landscape dotted with tiny habitations looking like a National Geographic documentary on public television depicting the deperate poverty of equatorial Africa.  It’s a disgrace and the natural result of what happens when people are encouraged to believe that they are victims and can’t be expected to be responsble for themselves.

Evelyn Palmeri

I often claim that the United States is just as bad (in its own way) as Britain (this fits in well with my “we are all doomed” view of the universe). However a couple of things over the last 24 hours have produced doubts in my mind.

Yesterday I was playing with my computer and looked up the website for South Dakota. It was not a very impressive site and it did not seem to have been created by very bright people, but I did say some things of interest. The Governor of the State casually announced the State’s balanced budget (the State has had a balanced budget every year for the last 113 years), he also mentioned (in passing) that the voters (not the politicians) had voted to get rid of the death tax (the state inheritance tax).

South Dakota does not seem to have much in the way of taxes – no income tax, no business profits tax, a sales tax that is a fraction of ours. It also seems to have little trade union power and the Governor has finished selling off all the state enterprises that were created in the early 1900’s.

The leader of the Democrats in the Senate represents South Dakota – perhaps he should look at his own State sometime. It is not just a bunch of subsidized farmers anymore.

Meanwhile back in Britain. I went to pick up an inhaler today (interesting contradiction – I claim I want to die and yet I go to absurd lengths to stay alive). I presented my prescription to the lady at the chemist shop and she said “you have not ticked any of the exemption boxes”. I explained that I was exempt – that I paid for my prescription. “No, you must tick one of the exception boxes” (said the lady). I pointed out the old saying that “someone, somewhere must pay” – “you have met him” I said “it is me”. “You have not ticked any of the exemption boxes” (said the lady).

Eventually I was able to pay for my prescription. However, I think this type of conversation is the death rattle of the Welfare State (and not in the nice sense that we are about to see free market reform). I do not think I would have this sort of conversation in South Dakota.

Paul Marks