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March 30, 2004

Why I Hate Tax Day

It's that time of the year again: the time for all the Randoids and Libertarians to bitch about having to pay income taxes. "Just think what I could do with this money if I got to keep it all!" Well, the first thing you'd do is pay at least twice as much as you were paying in taxes for all the services you get for free.

Even if we were magically able to maintain services without funding them, if everybody's income went up by the amount they pay in taxes, you'd have exactly the same buying power as you do now. Money is like that. It's an artificial system for moving energy around. It doesn't have intrinsic value. I wish somebody would take the Randoids and the Libertarians and teach them some basic economic principles. Like that economic systems are complex things, not the simplistic devices that idealists like to imagine them to be.

If I put Randian economics in terms of physics, every problem would involve massless, frictionless pulleys and point masses. Real physics doesn't work that way, and you can't do much of anything with a world like that. It's a handy way to learn the concepts, but eventually you have to move on to dealing with complex systems or you are not going to be designing a 100-floor skyscraper. So when I see e-mails about how awful it is that we have to pay taxes at all in a FREE COUNTRY, all I can see is that failure of public schooling. I would willingly pay twice as much in taxes if it meant a better education in economic principles.

Personally, I don't mind paying taxes. We don't pay all that much, and now that we own the house we get a nice large writeoff on the interest, which meant a substantial refund this year (yes, I know that means we lent the government money interest-free; we're still working out withholding). We do our taxes when we get the paperwork in, then if we're getting refunds we send them in right away, and if we have to pay we send them in on April 15. In either case we're done with the process in early February.

As for the money, I would happily pay more in taxes if if meant better schooling for kids, reasonable public transit options all over the place, and universal health care. Services cost money, and I know that it makes more sense for the government to act as a consumer aggregator for some services. I've also seen damned little good come out of privatizing utilities. Phone service has not gotten better and has not gotten cheaper, nor has electricity. We have to stop pretending that everything works better when it's making a profit. (I could go off on a tear about local governments that want mass transit to be self-supporting, but I will restrain myself.)

For the next two weeks, the complaints about taxes will be unending. I, for one, plan on leaving the country to get away from it all.

Posted by ayse on 03/30/04 at 7:55 PM