One of the subtler – and most vicious – ways the government renders us more dependent on it is by rendering us less able to help ourselves and one another.
I just got the second of my twice-yearly bills from the government demanding about $1,000 in rent – it is styled “property tax” – on what is absurdly styled “my” house, in order to be allowed to continue living in it (hence rent, notwithstanding I am technically the “owner” of my house, having paid the former owner in full for it many years ago).
It’s a lot of money for me – and for most people.
It’s also just about the same amount of money a family member needs to cover rent they can’t pay this month.
I would like to help – and would, were it not for the fact that I haven’t got the means to pay both my “rent” and the family member’s rent. So the family member will have to figure something out. Because if I don’t pay the government the “rent” it says I owe, I will be evicted from “my” house just as surely – and probably sooner and faster – than my family member will be evicted from her apartment for failing to pay hers.
But it’s subtler – and more vicious than just that.
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I have lived in my house – the current house – for 16 years. My total annual “rent” is about $2,000. Punch that into a calculator times 16 and you get $32,000 dollars. That amount of money would be more than enough money to turn a little outbuilding I have into a nice little cottage my family member could live in – and pay rent to no one (thereby decreasing her dependence without increasing mine).
But that money is gone, too.
Plus the 15 percent off the top of every dollar I earn as a “self-employed” person, which goes to retirement checks for people I have never met who need them because they, in their turn, had vast sums stolen from them over the course of their working lives to fund the retirement of the oldsters before them – and so on.
The common denominator being we’re all made dependent on the government.
Most of us could not only take care of ourselves absent the government, we would be able to take care of those within our circle of friends and family who cannot care for themselves. This capacity to be charitable – and act on our best impulses – is also stolen from us by government, which reduces us to the status of jealously protecting what we’re allowed to keep.
Instead of goodwill toward men, wariness and resentment toward men – who we come to correctly view as potential claimants without limit on our industry and frugality. If we are careful with money but someone else isn’t, the person who isn’t can use the government to put his hands in our pockets.
