If your insurer gave too much of your money to charity and then raised your rates in order to make up for the deficit, you’d find another insurer. You likely need the service that the insurer provides, but when there exist other insurers with lower rates—and who don’t make such foolish decisions—your sustained loyalty would make no economic sense. Thank goodness for options. But contrast that scenario with the way in which your money is handled by the government. We have no actual options. Our only option is to flee the country, as not paying tribute to the state might land one in jail. The “stationary bandit” takes our money and gives it to others—some of whom aren’t American citizens—but we have no recourse. To argue over how the loot is spent is to miss the point. Adding insult to injury, the loot doesn’t actually insure us against the risk of anything.
With insurance, we get what we pay for, but with the state, we have neither a say about what we’re ‘buying’ nor any benefit from what is bought. Again, the minute your insurer demands that you buy certain things, you find another insurer. But we all paid for the COVID vaccines, and then many were coerced into using them. Other than to the national debt and to the tax-fed, to where do our tax dollars flow? Just one of the many foreign destinations is Ukraine—a country whose government is about as corrupt as Russia’s. Why is our government choosing to pick one corrupt side over the other when it can ignore both and focus on its own ‘customers’? On the 25th of April, “the top American officials announced an additional $322 million in military aid for Ukraine,” and on the 28th of April, “Biden called on Congress to approve an additional $33 billion to fund weapons and provide economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.” What brought on that rapid escalation? Political science, no accountability, and other people’s money.
My new job is the best I’ve ever had; however, I can’t help but notice the following discrepancy. 7.4% of my salary pays for my insurance, which includes auto, rental, property, medical, and dental insurance, and it also includes my children’s medical insurance. But 13.6% of my salary is stolen from me, and what the plunder pays for isn’t entirely clear. If one is concerned about, say, our national debt or Ukraine, one can donate to either, but the state’s agents feel entitled to others’ money and claim that taking it is for our own good. One can travel to Ukraine to help in whichever way one chooses, whether that’s as a medic or a mercenary, but the state claims that we must be coerced into doing the ‘right’ thing. “You must wear a mask” isn’t too different from “You must pay for ‘our’ cause, ‘our democracy,’ our salaries,” etc. For how much longer can the state sustain this charade?
When Bill Maher openly discusses the “unbridled kleptocracy” that is our state, I’m more hopeful. Taxes are nothing but coerced insurance payments made to a bankrupt insurer. “We can’t fix your damaged home, but keep paying us—or else” is what our national ‘insurer’ tells us every year. Walter Williams—seemingly baffled by why the following opinion isn’t more widely held today—often wrote about James Madison: “Madison, the father of our constitution, irate over a $15,000 congressional appropriation to assist some French refugees, said, ‘I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.’” Madison said, “Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government,” but today’s government is nothing but charity that flows to everywhere but “objects of benevolence.” And the people whom the parasites claim to be helping are worse off because of it. Can an insurance claim make one worse off? And in response to the disaster that it created, our national ‘insurer’ blames Vladimir Putin and expects us to believe it.
Saifedean Ammous has said that if those who care about the planet more than about their neighbors were sincere, they’d commit suicide. Similarly, if our nation’s politicians and bureaucrats were sincere, they’d acknowledge that they created the current mess and then promptly resign. But we’re not ruled by honest people. Instead of paying for two insurers but half of the benefits, imagine how much better off we’d all be if “taxes” no longer appeared on a paystub. For fans of a universal basic income, the absence of taxes would mean a massive, universal raise for the employed. And a tax-free income seems far more sustainable than a work-free income—but not for our national ‘insurer.’ Unlike insurance, which, through voluntary exchange provides benefits for the insurer and the insured, taxes benefit one at the expense of another—a ‘service’ devoid of mutual gain. But it’s worse than just the absence of mutual gain. Frank Chodorov explained, in 1959:
This article originally appeared on UncleNap.com.
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