Taxing Times

Most people would balk at mugging someone and taking their purse or wallet or burglaring a house but they are perfectly ok with the State doing it on their behalf through the tax and welfare system. Theft by proxy -no problem! Politicians being the arch parasite's parasite are happy to oblige of course, making sure they couch this larceny and wholesale looting in euphemistic terms and coda such as 'wealth redistribution' and other Orwellianisms such as 'fairness',public good 'asking' people to contribute more. They are not 'asking', they are demanding money with menaces but this lying and deception is par for the course and the tribute vice pays to virtue but even the mafia would not stoop to such tergiversation although they do like to give children turkeys at Thanksgiving with their stolen loot of course so there is a politician in them too.

All of this is a perversion of the original rationale for taxation that most leaders going back into antiquity would invoke,namely, taxation to fight wars and maintain a standing army -bad enough and  morally insupportable in itself but at least having the semi saving grace of being delimited. Then came the ideologues who decided to co opt the tax system to pursue their egalitarian agendas and thus was born the redistribution of wealth on ideological socialist collectivist grounds. Dressed in quasi religious terms -the New Jerusalem the Welfare State was born and in the UK at least, and a wholesale takeover of private property and business was effected without a shot being fired. Why did it take a bloody revolution is Russia to achieve such ends when in England people voted in their millions for socialist servitude? That is harder to determine but it is not insignificant that both countries shared a common characteristic that made them vulnerable to the siren call of collectivism namely they  were both steeped in Christianity and no doubt this prexistent credulity pathed the way for and made it much easier to effect the desired end of statism in both countries.

The mysticism of God worship was simply transferred to the mysticism of State worship where the collective substituted for the Almghty to be genuflected to like the totem of a new religion. All the Marxist socialist votaries were fresh from the seminaries and churches, steeped in the mysticism of blind faith and obesiance to the Godhead and thus the spiritual and secular were easily interchangeable as passivity and credulity were the chief requirements in both cases.