Reader Rant: Reducing the Bite

Here’s the latest reader question, along with my reply!

Esther writes: In response to your article about tax slavery (here) the people have arisen in this country and forced lower taxes by votes. DownsizeDC.org is part of how we recover America’s greatness. Personal responsibility is the way to recover freedom. We got AOC and her idiot voters from the Public Fool System. America’s former greatness (and what’s left of it) came from another schooling system called the Lancastrian. Students were trained to be responsible citizens and leaders. Read about both systems here.

The last one-room schoolhouse, 1962, Tennessee, got 80 percent National Merit Scholars. This superiority is what will draw parents in. It must start with churches and private schools. Public schools will only adopt it when they have to in order to attract pupils and government dollars. Lancaster developed his system originally to be inexpensive enough to educate England’s lower working classes. This means it is practical for today. Libertarians, Republicans and sensible Democrats (there are some) need to learn about this and get it restarted on a small scale where they can see it. You have a wide influence. You need to see this in action. Then you can promote it and help make America truly great again.

My reply: While it is true there has been sporadic pushback against some taxes, the general trend runs to the contrary. This is because taxation itself has not been challenged sufficiently, in principle. It is not sufficient to say, “taxes are too high.” It is necessary to say,”taxation if theft.” Otherwise, you accept the morality of taxes and so are arguing about how much rather than whether. And that inevitably means more taxes.

Put another way: The purpose to which the money taken via taxes is not the thing to debate. The thing to debate is whether it is acceptable to forcibly take people’s money to finance whatever the thing at issue is. This eliminates at a stroke any debate over the purpose, which becomes an irrelevance for the same reason that what a burglar does with the proceeds of his theft doesn’t make burglary any less a crime.

And so we come to schools. These provide a service, one which those who desire it and wish to pay for it may avail themselves of – like any other service. The idea that the government – that is, the busybodies and control freaks who constitute it – should create/fund/run schools using money stolen from people generally, including those who do not have kids and so do not use the “service”(and, more fundamentally, loathe what is being taught to the kids therein) is tyrannical because it entails civil slavery. You are forced to give over your money for the benefit of others, whom you owe no such obligation to.

The solution is to end the tyranny of schools run by control freaks and busybodies, aka “the government” – and leave it to parents to educate their kids according to their wishes.

That will do much more to re-instill the virtue of personal responsibility and make America great again!

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