Hey conservatives who hate taxes, whom I assume can be said for most if not all people who did the whole Tea Day rah-rah protest today, I have a modest proposal that may alleviate your all-consuming vexation from taxation.
It’s simple: You don’t have to pay taxes anymore. You can choose what level of taxes you pay and don’t pay. But in exchange, you don’t get to benefit from the services that those tax dollars would have helped pay for. This includes such supposedly “non-excludable” services like military and police, which I’m sure we can find ways to exclude from you for your particular circumstance.
So for example, you’re fed up with some level of tax and you’re not gonna pay for it anymore. Fair enough. But in exchange, you are no longer entitled to the services that those tax dollars go towards, which can include things like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. Things like military, police, and fire services, which are theoretically non-excludable (meaning that recipients of the services can’t be readily selected, and everyone in a given area will get the benefit) will be modified so it will at least be semi-excludable, and will exclude you. For example, if foreign invaders sweep into America, the military will still fight its heart out, until the invaders arrive at your property, at which point the military will let them raze your house. If your house catches on fire, nah-ah-ah – no 9/11! Put that blaze out yourself you rugged individualist. And you better stock up on M-16s and Remington 870s to defend yourself against the burglars that will be swarming towards your house, since you no longer have benefit of police protection.
It’s fair, right? You pay whatever you like, and in return you get what you paid for. If you pay more in taxes, you’ll get more in services. Let’s say you pay state and local taxes but not federal ones. If federal tax dollars fund 20 percent of your local police department’s budget, you will get 80 percent of what the police otherwise would’ve given you. So if there’s a burglary going on the police will give an 80 percent effort, which could mean that the police might tie the burglar’s hands with some loose cloth, restraining the burglar for the five or ten minutes or so that it takes for him to get out. Or the police will arrest him but take him only 80 percent of the way to the local jail, at which point they’ll release him. I don’t know; we’ll let the respective government agencies figure out how to break it down.
See, we can make it really fair. You don’t have to pay anything, and you don’t have to get anything. So you can finally be free of “another set of parents” called Social Security, just like what Joe the Plumber so badly wants. And you can use all that extra money you have to buy your own police force, your own military, your own health care, your own electricity, your own food, etc. etc. Because we all know that private businesses do things much better and cheaper than government ever has, can, or will. And you get to reap all those benefits without the oh-so-oppressive burden of taxes.
Or you can just get the hell out of this damn socialist USA altogether, and move to the Republic of Texas, where President Rick Perry will be governing like Ronald Reagan on steroids.
maverickjh 