The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

We all pay for what we disapprove


Profits of your phone company go as contributions to politics you hate.

Companies you own stock in may do the same, and unions may do it with dues.

It's a safe bet your tax dollars are spent in ways you disapprove.

But only the right gets so spectacularly angry when things go that way, even branding it as tyranny, profoundly inimical to liberty and the very kind of injustice the state exists to prevent.

The state exists to prevent people violating each other's rights, and that includes property rights, they say.

And so the state exists to prevent public schools, fire departments, hospitals, highways, etc.

As well as the existence of such organized banditry as is the purpose of OSHA, the FDA, the federal reserve system, the department of labor, and the EPA.

And also food and heating subsides, subsidized schemes of health or flood insurance, public pension programs or medical insurance.

All of these are tax funded and branded "socialism" by the right.

And all of them are just peachy "until you run out of other people's money," they say, thus signaling their profound anger and their self-serving dogma that taxation for any purpose that does not in net benefit them is robbery just as surely as what Robin Hood did was robbery.

Robin Hood, of course, was not a democratic or otherwise legitimate tax authority.

It was not for him to decide, with the authority of the sword, that a certain amount, obtained in a certain way from certain subject people, needed to be spent in a certain way.

But that is exactly what governments do.

And since anarchy is imaginary it's either governments, warlords, tribal leaders, or gangsters.

Nor, by the way, was it for Robin Hood, with the authority of the sword, to decide who owns what and make it stick, as government must do and in fact does.

As for the rights and wrongs of all this, well, that's purely imaginary and illusory at best, but more commonly the most cynical propaganda deception.

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