I’m not going to say anything new at all in this post, which won’t come as much of a shock to anyone who’s read much of what I write here. But recent news has given me an excuse to pull a few things together and to rant about the picture you can see at the top of this post. Mar Carlin is/was a popular comedian and commentator or so I’m informed, certainly quotes attributed to him appear all over the internet attached to random pictures (often of a very similar looking man who I assume is Mr Carlin). This particular quote really annoys me as it only works if you accept the assumption that everything you own and earn is in fact the property of the state, which an awful lot of occupy types and the left and other right on political types seem to do. The problem arises because it equates tax breaks/lower tax rates as giving something to people rather than just taking less from them, which only makes sense if (as previously observed) you assume that everything belongs to the state. Letting people keep more of what they earn surely encourages them to earn more, no matter how much or little they earn – I’d note that none of our recent governments have been terribly keen on letting the less well off just keep more of their money (apparently according to some people would feel disenfranchised and insulted if not taxed). If you happen to think that the state doesn’t own everything then you might restate the above quote as something like:
“Conservatives say if you stop taking money off people they invest more, but if you give people too much money they’ll have no incentive to work”
Not quite as catchy I’ll admit but this confusion is what leads us to having people demanding that individuals and companies acting perfectly legally and using the system as it was designed are somehow doing something wrong and should “pay their fair share”. No one has yet decided what that fair share is that I’ve seen neither as an absolute sum nor as a percentage, it just seems to be “I don’t like company/person X, they have money they should pay more” which isn’t really a good basis for law or running anything (Except a protection racket maybe). Ignoring for the moment, that the idea of companies paying tax is a bit of a fallacy if we want them to pay more we should change the laws so that they do (which we can’t do whilst part of the EU). Personally I’d have thought that flat taxes would mean everyone was paying their share (assuming they were implemented such that everyone actually paid them).
I think this underlying assumption that everything actually belongs to the state, may in part explain why there has been such a muted reaction to the NSA/PRISM/GCHQ revelations. For obvious reasons most of the establishment will have statist tendencies as they do rather well from their being a large state, and we’ve all been sold the lie that the state is there to protect us for so long that shaking it off is an effort – but that’s for another day.
This presumed state ownership of everything is in clear evidence in the recent welsh decision to make organ donation opt out. Apart from a few blogs this decision that we no longer own our own bodies seems to have garnered scant coverage. The practical problems are obvious, but when has that stopped a politician? In many ways it is just an extension of the apparently widely accepted idea that our children aren’t our responsibility, but it’s still really quite a significant extension.
It would seem that for sound economic reasons we’re moving away from owning property opting instead to rent what we need, paying the state as well as the renting company for the privilege (which to my mind makes it quite different from borrowing from friends and neighbors). Even the stuff we think we’ve bought it turns out we frequently don’t actually own and again this lack of ownership is being facilitated by the state.
So if the state and corporations lay claim to:
1) Most of what we think we own
2) An increasing amount of what we use
3) Everything we earn
4) Our privacy (PRISM)
5) Our children
6) Our bodies
What is there left? And how does this significantly differ from either slavery or communism (as practiced in Soviet Russia and other such regimes) both of which I’d rather got the impression were ever so out dated ideas that had widely been abandoned and declared to have been bad things(tm)? I’m sure I must have missed something crucial and we’re not actually heading towards such a state of affairs by slow and sleepy steps.
