Taxbucks

We Are Taxbucks

Wednesday, 09 April 2008
We are Taxbucks.
We say "we" because you never find one of us alone. Taxbucks always run in packs, usually in millions, often in billions, and ever more frequently in trillions.
Many of us started life in a form known as "Money." Humans like to keep us tucked away somewhere until they want to swap us for something else. This swapping is called buying and selling. It's a trade that humans do voluntarily. If there's no swindling or other trickery going on, both sides are happy because both sides get what they want.
We are happy when we are Money and we're being used by humans to make their lives better. We especially like working in a free society where coercion and intimidation and fraud are minimized to the fullest extent possible.
We're happy when we're Money.
We feel clean.
But then we get turned into Taxbucks and we're never clean again.
What happens is that a thing called "Government" ignores the libertarian principle of non-coercion and forcibly takes a bunch of us away from the humans who legitimately earned us. They pretend the stealing is okay because they've written a law called "Taxing" that condemns stealing for every human on earth except for the humans who operate this Government thing.
They pretend that taking us away from honest people and putting us into a public treasury where we "belong to all the people" is a good and noble thing. People who tell this great lie are called "Politicians."
What these Politicians really want to do is to put as many of us as possible into their own pockets. That's why the Government racket was invented.
But they can't because they lied themselves into a corner. People actually came to believe the fiction that their stolen Taxbucks "belong to all the people." In reality, we "belong to all the Politicians." While these Politicians can and will happily continue to steal us from honest humans, they don't dare steal us from one another. After all, criminal gangs that have a falling out and fight amongst themselves end up losing everything.
So they had to find a way to make us "clean" again. They had to "legitimately" get us out of their public treasury where they couldn't steal us and into some other place where they could "legitimately" steal us.
They had to launder us.
To launder us Taxbucks back into Money again they began giving us away. They created hundreds of government subdivisions called bureaucracies and departments and agencies and gave them Taxbucks. And those subdivisions gave us to other Governments such as cities and states. And all these government subdivisions gave us away to the private sector in the form of "government contracts" and "subsidies" and "funding programs" and "entitlements" and "corporate welfare" and "grants" and hundreds of other underhanded ways.
Once we got back into the private sector we were supposed to be "clean." But of course we weren't. We're just prettied up to look clean. No matter what some people say, accepting Taxbucks is accepting stolen property.
Disreputable businesspeople understood the tit-for-tat scam. After skimming their own cut, they put millions of us cleaned-up Taxbucks back into the pockets of Politicians. They accomplished this in the form of "campaign contributions" and "speaking engagements" and "political donations" and "fact-finding junkets" and hundreds of other underhanded ways.
Some humans condemn "capitalism" because they think that business corrupts government. Other humans blame government for corrupting business.
But libertarians know the truth. Businesses and governments corrupt each other for mutual gain.
All who touch Taxbucks are equally dirty.