Wednesday, April 16, 2014

A Tax Day Fable

The inimitable Fran Porretto provides a little Tax Day fable:

Today is an appropriate day for meditating on the asymmetry between the individual American citizen and the 88,000 governments that claim some jurisdiction over his actions and his property. Let's follow our old friend Smith...well, okay, strictly speaking he's the Curmudgeon's friend, but allow me a little latitude here...through his day and see just how much his country loves him.

Smith rises at six AM, careful not to wake his wife. He immediately turns up the thermostat and hurries to the bathroom, where he showers in government-provided water. Once his house had a well, but the county made him shut it down. There might be pesticides in the water, they said. Far better to buy certifiably clean water from the government's water monopoly. 
Smith's house isn't properly warm until seven, when he gets into his car. Smith has to turn the thermostat down at night to save oil. The government has put so many obstacles in the way of petroleum and natural gas exploration that the country is at the mercy of OPEC, and OPEC is widely known to be merciless. Once, when the local electric utility proposed to build a nuclear generating plant nearby, Smith thought he might convert to electric heat, but nothing ever came of it. Permission to build a fission generator is even harder to get than permission to drill an oil well. 
Around eight AM, Smith reports to work at an employer where a string of innocent words, if said to the wrong person or at the wrong time, could get him disciplined or fired, because federal law has made assuaging the sensitivities of various aggressive grievance-mongering groups a higher priority than freedom of speech. Smith's employer also collaborates with various governments in reporting and dividing Smith's income, whether Smith has agreed to the role or not. 
Smith's children attend government-run schools where highly paid civil servants, who work less than seven hours per day and only 180 days per year and are immune from discipline for anything short of a major felony, harangue them about how America is a genocidal nation that's raping the Earth, and her military is forcing its "consumer culture" on all the other peoples of the world. 
At dinnertime, Smith contemplates the rising tide of lawsuits that seek to make just about anything that tastes good a crime to put in his mouth. It's for his own good, of course, just as it was with drugs, and alcohol, and tobacco. 
Smith's wife is a little worried. She's been run down lately. Her doctor said it's probably nothing, but he's ordered a set of tests. When she asked what she was being tested for, he wouldn't say. What with the skyrocketing taxes and costs of living, the family couldn't get by without her income. 
Smith's son has worries, too. He's about to turn eighteen, and there are some prominent legislators talking about reinstating the draft. 
Smith's elder daughter is sixteen. She's a pretty girl, has her share of friends and a boyfriend that Smith's just a little unsure about. Oh, the kid is probably decent enough; that ring in his nose is just a youth-culture fad. Still, Smith's daughter has brought home some unsettling stuff from her mandatory Sex Education class. He wonders just how much no-holds-barred experimentation is going on under the radar of these nonjudgmental educators...or with their explicit approval. There don't seem to be any limits these days, even with all the diseases. 
Smith leaves the dinner table and heads for his tiny home office to pay his bills. His mortgage payment includes taxes for all sorts of "services" he'd never asked for and wished were not offered, including some that couldn't have been designed better to ruin the quality of life in his neighborhood, by attracting loafers and parasites onto the public teat and criminals into the area. 
Smith's wife busies herself with cleaning. Fatigue or no fatigue, there's work to be done. Hire a cleaning woman to help with the house? Are you kidding? That would make Smith an employer, subject to an array of federal reporting and taxing rules that could choke an elephant. Careers have been ruined for ignoring those rules. Ask Zoe Baird or Kimba Wood. 
There some money left after the bills have been met. Smith contemplates extending the house or landscaping the grounds. But he'll need a permit granted by some unelected board of officials that answers to no one, and that can approve or deny any application for any reason, or none. They'll want to do a site inspection. God help Smith if they notice that his yard is damp a few days out of the year; he might be forbidden even to mow it, as a federally protected "wetland." Anyway, he hasn't yet filled out his tax returns, and there's no telling what surprises might lurk in them. 
Around eleven PM, after much fevered work with calculator and pencil, Smith heads for the post office with his tax returns. There's a line wrapped around it, as there is around every post office in the country tonight. Smith has no choice; he has to get his tax return postmarked so he won't be penalized for not waiving his Fourth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. 
Smith gets to bed at about half past midnight, dead tired. But before he retires, he has to set the alarm clock for four AM. He has a shuttle flight to catch tomorrow, to an important business meeting. It takes off at eight AM, but because of the new security rules, Smith has to be there no later than six, and it will take him at least an hour to get to the airport in the morning traffic. He makes a mental note to leave the silver money clip his wife gave him for his last birthday at home. Airport security workers, now federal employees, have been known to confiscate such things on any pretext. The chance of getting them back is slight.

Read the rest here.

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