Tax Day Forces Us to Cough Up Our Fair Share For the 'Public Good'

Ah... it's that time of year again. *stretch* It's time to pony up your share for the public good.

In light of this festive occassion, I've decided to show you some of the "public good" your tax dollars paid for last year:

Arresting business owners for selling raw milk. Arresting citizens for shingling their own home. Arresting citizens for distributing pamphlets. Fining children for operating lemonade stands. Beating and arresting citizens for dancing in public. Arresting citizens for farting in public. And of course, multiple foreign wars of aggression, multi-trillion dollar international bailouts of private commercial banks, hundred million dollar solar energy boondoggles, 45 million people on food stamps (only 300 million people live here), and free cell phones.

I can't wait to see what government bureaucrats are going to spend my money on next! Of all the worthless junk government wastes money on, why can't they waste it on something good for once!  Like 20 million hours of internet porn and 500 billion tons of beer, to be distributed free of charge to the great unwashed via half naked charioteers in loin cloths.

Oh, what's that? You don't agree? You don't like MY idea of what constitutes a "public good?"

What if I don't like YOUR idea?

What if I was able to demonstrate that all taxes are a direct tax on labor? Because they are. Often it is assumed that corporate taxes or sales taxes are passed on to the consumer. However, this is not the case. If we consider that all goods are already being sold at the maximum price a retailer can sell them for, any increase on sales tax will have to be born by the business doing the selling. From the consumers perspective, if they have decided that they will not pay more than $100 in total for a cell phone, any sales tax increase on cell phones that raises a particular cell phone's price above that $100 total will cause the consumer not to buy it.

Who gets hurt by this? The consumer, because now he doesn't have a cell phone, along with the retailer who doesn't make a potential sale as an opportunity cost. So labor is directly impacted by this through the lost business revenue. But let us not forget what happens to the tax money after it has been taken from the retailer! Now that tax money is going to fund the above mentioned nonsense. The great black pit of resource destruction called state spending. I'll guarantee that you will not like what the state purchases with that money more than what the retailer would have spent that money on.

Oh one more thing, inflation is a tax as well. It is a pure function of government created fiat money. The more money in circulation, the less valuable it becomes; which is the same as you taking a pay cut.  So in addition to the taxes the state took from you this year, throw another 10% tax on for the loss of value in the dollar (according to the way government calculated the CPI in 1980).

If those philosophic points on taxation have piqued your interest, listen to historian/economist Tom DiLorenzo explain more about the Rothbardian theory of taxation: