Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I don't know what country you live in (apparently Australia, judging by your comments), but in the United States that is exceedingly rare. A friend of ours hadn't filed a tax return in fifteen years. Mrs. Fraggle kept nagging him about being a freeloader and he finally gave in and contacted the IRS. They gave him a schedule to catch up on his back taxes and then sent him home.Try not paying your income tax. The State will send you to prison.
And it wasn't like they didn't know. They had plenty of records on him. They just didn't bother. Your delinquent tax bill has to have quite a few more zeroes before they're going to come after you. And even then they'll just call your secretary, rather than breaking into your office with guns and handcuffs.
The government wants tax money. They can't collect taxes from people who aren't working. And people who are in prison aren't working. Duh?
I'm both a libertarian and a Libertarian, but I understand that if you agree to live in a country like the USA which grants you complete freedom to emigrate if you don't like it here, then if you decide to live here you have made an implicit contract to obey its laws.
I like it here well enough to put up with the few things I don't like. So I stay and I pay my taxes.
A significant amount of the services we rely on are provided by the government. Sure, the government doesn't do a very good job on most of them and it charges far too much because its structure is almost deliberately crafted to be slow and inefficient. Nonetheless we need those services. We can't just get up one morning and say, "Okay we've decided to provide our own educational, judiciary, police, infrastructural, and all the other services that we've been getting from the government." It would take fifty years to make that transition. And those fifty years would be hell. If you guys want to try it, please wait another twenty years or so until I'm gone.
If you don't like paying taxes so much that it's driving you crazy, I suggest you emigrate to a country where the government provides fewer services and collects less tax money. Maybe some place like Bangladesh.