The US Capitol building in Washington. (photo: EPA)
29 August 12
Reader Supported News | Perspective
By Carl Gibson
id
you hear the one about the guy who became a millionaire without
anyone's help? The guy who oversaw his own birth, who hunted, grew and
gathered all of his own food since he was a baby? The guy who found
teachers to teach him, and paid for them from his own pocket? The guy
who went to work every day on roads he paved all alone, burning oil that
he drilled and refined on his own, in a car that he built with his own
hands?
You haven't heard of that guy? I haven't either.
Here in New Hampshire, a lot of the "free staters" who
quote Ayn Rand novels say
they don't need government, equate taxation
with theft, and believe they carry enough guns and ammo to defend their
home from intruders to not have to pay taxes for police salaries. They
even talk about mixing their own concrete and fixing the potholes on
their own street instead of paying taxes for road repair.
A society like that exists already: Somalia.
Somalia is a libertarian paradise where nobody pays taxes because there are no national institutions
or national infrastructure. Since there's no police protection or gun
regulation, guns are cheap and plentiful. There have been 14 different governments in a mere 18 years. According to UN data tables,
Somalia's average life expectancy is just 50.8 years, with only 1.8
years of school on average for each child. Famine has plagued the nation
ever since Al-Shabab decided to block all humanitarian aid. In January 2010,
instability in Somalia led to an outbreak of violence that killed 260,
wounded another 250, and left 80,000 others displaced. But hey, I'm sure
Somalis are looking on the bright side - there's no big, bad government
to steal tax money from them.
What the most selfish Americans don't realize is that
there is nothing stopping a large band of raiders from taking their
property, other than groups of armed men and women paid for with their
tax dollars, ready to respond with a phone call. They don't realize the
taxes that they consider theft already pay for prisons that would jail
those bandits under charges of armed robbery, thanks to laws put in
places by lawmakers who were paid for with the help of other people's
tax dollars.
In America, we all need each other. CEOs aren't making 231 times as much
as their lowest-paid employees because they work 231 times harder than
those employees. The only reason the guys in suits have their jobs and
their salaries is because ordinary people like us are patronizing that
CEO's business, giving him the money s/he needs to pay and train
employees and buy raw materials.
Selfishly proclaiming "I built this" without
acknowledging the vast network of people and infrastructure that helped
make your success possible is both selfish and ignorant. The first step
to America restoring her place in the world and pulling herself up by
her bootstraps is Americans realizing that we all need each other to
make that happen.
Carl Gibson, 25, is co-founder of US Uncut,
a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of
thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts
in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and
other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Manchester, New Hampshire. You can contact Carl at
carl@rsnorg.org, and listen to his online radio talk show, Swag The Dog, at blogtalkradio.com/swag-the-dog.
2 comments:
Nice straw man article, kid.
You can spin it any way you want. But we all know exactly what he meant.
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