MIC IOU

I was having a hard time deciding what to blog for tax day.

In Charlottesville (and I suspect throughout the country) Libertarian Party activists gather outside the US Post Office every April 15th hoping to recruit disgruntled taxpayers.

This used to bother the heck out of me. As a then-member of the LP, it seemed to me this gave the message that libertarianism was about cash-in-hand, about selfishness, about dollars and cents. I recognized the ethical illegitimacy of taxation, but thought it was the wrong focus.



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Why weren't the LP folks making as much noise when the local brothel was shut down? Why didn't they gather outside the courthouses and distribute pamphlets for the Fully-Informed Jury Association? Why all this focus on money?



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Obviously, I hadn't yet studied any economics or history. My libertarianism was very abstract and my background was civil-libertarian leftist. My libertarian activism was limited to belonging to both the ACLU and the NRA, maybe occasionally handing out WSPQ cards and discussing them with people.



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Now I know better. Taxation feeds Leviathan. Taxation eats our productivity. Taxation makes us all worse off -- well, makes productive people worse off. The net tax eaters are temporarily benefited by being on the receiving end of taxation. (And no, I'm not picking on the most visible welfare recipients -- those who are already victims of statism in myriad other ways, such as minimum wage laws, the "war on drugs", licensure laws, etc. The biggest tax eaters are politicians, civil servants, political capitalists -- the entire military-industrial complex. This is why it's the red states that are the biggest tax consumers, not the blue states!)



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Obviously, I was planning to go with a comic-strip theme. Not very inspiring.

Then Wally Conger came to the rescue! How smart to quote You Can't Take It With You.

I read the play back in high school. I loved it.

One of the earliest posts I did on this blog was about You Can't Take It With You, prompted by Tom Ender's review of the Frank Capra film version.

I finished the post with this:

Just the other day I was describing the play to someone as a libertarian story in all but name. It's not merely individualist -- in that ideologically inconsistent way that much of the political Left can be -- it's anarchic: Grandpa refuses to pay taxes!

Which is exactly the scene Conger quotes:

IRS Agent: "Our records show that you have never paid an income tax."

Grandpa Vanderhoff (Lionel Barrymore): "That's right."

IRS Agent: "Why not?"

Grandpa Vanderhoff: "I don't believe in it. ... What do I get for my money? ... I wouldn't mind paying for something sensible."

IRS Agent: "Something sensible. What about Congress and the Supreme Court and the President? We gotta pay them, don't we?"

Grandpa Vanderhoff: "Not with my money."

Go Grandpa!