Tax-time whining

A link can be drawn between the disintegration of a sense of community and the routine whining that comes every year at tax time. Something that is evidence to the breakdown of society is that peoples’ perception of taxes has radically changed.

People once saw taxes as a necessary evil, the trade-off for living in a society that tries to guarantee security. This attitude goes back to the feudal age, when peasants paid Knights taxes for the privilege of protection from bandits and barbarians. Now, though, taxes are considered a method of bleeding the people dry: the Government growing its coffers with the toil of the working class ‘battlers’.

What is forgotten is that living in a society provides one with greater security than, say, living alone in the bush. For a society to effectively function, it must have money. It is the duty of each person, as a citizen and beneficiary of the State, to donate a nominal amount of money. Without tax money the State cannot take practical steps to provide us with the security we’ve come to expect from it. What results is a kind of Catch-22 where citizens want all the benefits of society without having to contribute towards it.

We can also equate tax selfishness with the crash-burn of community values: many people hate taxes because they pay thousands of dollars a year without seeing it have an effect on their own lives. They are selfish because they care more about how other people’s money can benefit them, rather than remembering that the money they contribute goes towards supporting others who are unable to support themselves.

This culture of selfishness spills over into the whinge media when tabloid and sensationalist ‘reporters’ bitch and moan about taxpayers’ dollars being put to waste. They don’t complain because the money could be put to better infrastructure—they complain because simple people like them think that they wouldn’t have to pay so much tax if such miscarriages didn’t occur.

It is impossible to police the spending of tax money. It is unavoidable in a society comprising millions of people that a person will receive money they don’t deserve.

Tax money is, to all intents and purposes, State money, and can be put to any use the State finds for it provided that these uses are for the good of society.

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