By John W. Whitehead
“Taxman,” the only song written by George Harrison to open one of the Beatles’ albums, 1966 Revolver album, is a snarling, biting, angry commentary on government greed and how little control we the taxpayers have over our lives and our money.
If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.
Don’t ask me what I want it for
If you don’t want to pay some more
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman.
When the Beatles finally started earning enough money from their music to place them in the top tax bracket, they found the British government only-too-eager to levy a supertax on them of more than 90%.
Here in the United States, things aren’t much better.
More than two centuries after our ancestors went to war over their abused property rights, we’re once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likes, levy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsibly, with little concern for the plight of its citizens.
Because the government’s voracious appetite for money, power, and domination, has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, speeding tickets and penalties. And then you have all of those high-handed, outrageously manipulative government programs sold to the public as a means of forcing compliance and discouraging unhealthy behavior by way of taxes, fines, fees, and programs for the so-called “better” good.
Surveillance cameras, government agents listening in on your phone calls, reading your E-mail and text messages, and monitoring your spending, mandatory health care, sugar-filled soda bans, anti-bullying laws, zero tolerance policies, political correctness: These are all outward signs of a government, a societal elite, that believes it knows what is best for you and can do a better job of managing your life than you can.
It is tyranny disguised as “the better good.”
Indeed, it is the tyranny of the Nanny State: marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots.
So-called “sin taxes” have become a particularly popular technique used by the Nanny State to supposedly discourage the populace from engaging in activities that don’t align with the government’s priorities such as consuming sugar drinks, smoking, drinking.
Personally, I don’t think the government really cares how its citizens live or die: It just wants more of the taxpayers’ money, and figures it can rake it in by using sin taxes to appeal to that self-righteous segment of every society that sees nothing wrong with imposing belief systems on the rest of the populace.
Examples abound.
For instance, a growing number of cities and states, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, among others, have adopted or considered imposing taxes on sugar drinks, as much as a dollar more for a two-liter bottle of soda, supposedly in the hopes of forcing lower-income communities that struggle with obesity and diabetes to make healthier dietary choices by making the drinks more expensive.
The faulty logic behind these sin taxes seems to be that if you make it cost-prohibitive for poor people to pursue unhealthy lifestyle choices, they’ll stop doing it.
Except it doesn’t really work out that way.
Study after study shows that although sales of sugar drinks decreased sharply in cities with a soda tax, sales figures spiked at stores outside the city. In other words, they just shopped elsewhere.
You won’t convince former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg of it, however. Bloomberg, a 2020 Democratic Party presidential hopeful, believes the government needs even greater tax powers in order to force Americans, especially poor individuals, to make smarter lifestyle choices. “When we raise taxes on the poor, it’s good because then the poor will live longer because they can’t afford as many things that kill them,” stated Bloomberg.
Folks, right here is everything that is wrong with the power-hungry jackals who aspire to run the government today: By hook or by crook, they’re working hard to frogmarch the citizenry into complying with their dictates, because they believe that only they know what’s best for you.
Unfortunately, it is what happens when you empower the government and its various agencies, agents, and corporate partners to act in loco parentis for an entire nation.
Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.
Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow.
Therein lies the problem: We have suspended our moral consciences in favor of the police state.
The choice before us is clear, and it is a moral choice. It is the choice between tyranny and freedom, dictatorship and autonomy, peaceful slavery and dangerous freedom, and manufactured pipedreams of what America used to be versus the gritty reality of what she is today.
Most of all, perhaps, the choice before us is that of being a child or a parent, of obeying blindly, never questioning, and marching in lockstep with the police state or growing up, challenging injustice, standing up to tyranny, and owning up to our responsibilities as citizens, no matter how painful, risky or uncomfortable.
Author Erich Fromm warned in his book On Disobedience, “At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize, and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization.”
I make clear in my book, “Battlefield America: The War on the American People,” if you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the government’s claims on your life, your movements, your property and your money, you’re not free.
Personally, I’d rather die a free man having lived according to my own dictates, within the bounds of reasonable laws, than live as a slave chained up in a government prison.
—The Rutherford Institute