Is the purpose of income taxes for funding the government - or something more nefarious?
The original regime surveillance apparatus is not what you think.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
by framersqool:
According to Merriam-Webster, the term 'surveillance' is defined as follows:
close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective)
For the purposes of the argument I mean to present here, take note of a few things first: that the above definition is not from a dictionary in the bound-volume sense, but rather from a dictionary-dot-com, copied just moments ago in The Year Of Our Tech-Overlords 2023; that I do not use Wikipedia as a source instead because Wikipedia is, well, what it is, and not the most authoritative or unbiased source much of the time; and that this dot-com-sourced definition of 'surveillance' makes no mention of technology at all, whether digital or analog.
So bearing all that in mind, bear with this thesis if you will:
The original regime surveillance apparatus, at least in the United States of America, is not a device of technology at all, but rather a piece of paper, signed by you in the performance of what most of you are content to believe is your duty and obligation, at the top of which is a simple number:
1040
Think about it: while you are focused mostly on how convincing the claims you are making are, in order to get away with paying the least amount of tax possible on your very livelihood, or preferably none at all, what are you disclosing as a matter of routine to the authorities who will examine this document?
Along with where and how you live, and by what financial methods you came to secure your domicile, you also ('voluntarily', I'm told) go right ahead and disclose: how you earn your daily bread, by doing business with whom and to what precise extent of remuneration down to the penny, what you go on and spend your income on to some intricate degree of detail and divided into categories dictated to you by the organizational template of the document, how much of this was for 'business' and how much 'personal'....
And a whole lot more, as I recall. It's been so long since I surrendered my personal agency to the ritual act of filling out one of these, that I can't remember exactly what other information had been demanded of me.
I do remember that, owing to a peculiar point of view which seems to have begun when I sustained a childhood brain injury while under the care of abusive and negligent official authority, which had never been recognized by anyone as a matter of any consequence at all, every time I did force myself to undergo this surveillance it set off an anxiety attack for days before and days afterward, which tended to result in a lot of bad behavior on my part, which those closest to me mostly just read as.... a bad attitude, and a lack of personal maturity.
Maybe they were right: if this 'adulthood' under this form of continual surveillance all our lives is to be defined as going along to get along lest one rock the boat and thus invite official displeasure of unknown but apparently dreadful proportions, then to the charge of not being the 'adult' I'm expected to be, I can only answer,
guilty as charged.
'But It's The Law....'
'Everyone has to do it, Not Everything Is About You....'
'If you don't, They Might Throw You In Jail....'
And my personal favorite:
'This is just how we pay for Everything The Government Does For Us....'
(???)
This latter point, I'm given to understand, is why Americans traditionally do everything they can think of to get out of paying taxes and get away with it, right there on that piece of paper, every year of their working lives. It must explain why American voters will reject one candidate or endorse another, on the sole basis of what that one line on that one piece of paper ends up saying (what was it again?): The Amount of Tax You Owe.
(Or whatever, it's been so long...)
It must have something to do with how for generations the business of the American home has been managed not as a place to raise families and grow old in peace and comfort, but rather as an investment instrument, a game piece in a perennial contest against indifferent bureaucracy to pay less taxes to it, an expendable and replaceable device of fiscal advantage-seeking, a marketable commodity defined not by the joys and achievements of family life under a roof together, but rather by how much 'capital gains' one might be obligated to pay if one does not replace it in short order with another one of similar value on the market.
And the entire way of life in my own country, along with every detail of how every business enterprise is organized and managed, has been built around jumping in inauthentic, grudging obedience through the hoops of this invasive obscenity, for longer than anyone can remember.
The local grocery store in my very small rural town was once a sole proprietorship, years before I arrived here in 2009. According to local legend, the place was owned by one man for years, it was packed with shoppers and filled with an impressive selection of goods, and fed an entire region along with providing everything from party favors for schoolteachers to flowers and gift-baskets for every occasion, a place for dozens of youngsters to file in every school day and enjoy fresh pizzas and sandwiches together, and have their photos taken in all their gowned and tuxed adolescent splendor on prom night. It was a vital social hub for a community as much as it was a supplier of retail goods.
But it made too much profit, to fit that one man's preferred 'taxable-income' profile, apparently.
So in due course he sold it to a statewide chain of convenience stores, which didn't know its ass from a hole in the ground about running a community grocery store, and gave himself in the deal the added taxable-income advantage of creating a new position as 'district manager' for himself, as an employee of the new owners. The apparent agreement between the chain and its new local boss, the guy who still ran the place but didn't have to answer for it in ownership terms on his 1040s any more, was to spend the next several years running the place into the ground, losing more and more money every quarter even as by all appearances the establishment continued to thrive, in order to provide a 'shelter' for the chain's other highly lucrative locations which also were cursed by that peculiarly American dilemma, of Making Too Much Money.
Eventually, of course, the shelf life of the caper played out to its own logical conclusion, and the place went out of business and boarded up, having been just as packed with eager and loyal shoppers until the final day. The scheme of creating the pretense of 'losing money' had worked beautifully: the real loss was to the community, while the co-conspirators who had sabotaged its once-thriving local market into nonexistence no doubt walked away with stacks of perfectly-explainable riches.
'As Long As It Looks Good On Paper' would be a much more honest conclusion to any Pledge of Allegiance to such a regime, than 'liberty and justice for all.'
Over the next couple of years, a splendid and well-run chain truck stop opened right up the highway, and a chain dollar store right across from the hulk of the old grocery store began to be a daily fixture for local shoppers, who'd been left with no retail supplier of everyday goods at all.
And in due course, after these two brand-new establishments had each in their own way become integral to community life but not really any part of it other than as an indifferent and distant employer, some activity began to be observed at the old grocery store. It was plain to see that the former attraction, of a convenient place to buy both fuel and food at reasonable prices, and meet up with neighbors over food and drink, would never work the same way again.
But months and months, and more months, dragged on into well over a year, as crews knocked and banged and drilled and sawed and spent no doubt a small fortune on construction and renovation and new fixtures.
This new avalanche of makework performatism was what is traditionally known in the United States of Ten-Forty as 'business expenses'.
(Business expenses, I'm told, are good. Making Too Much Money is, I gather, very, very bad.)
Everyone in town knew exactly what was happening over there, and by logical extension what to expect when Grand Opening Day arrived at long last. It was summed up in local gossip again and again for months, with two all-too-familiar words in American life:
Tax Shelter
Nobody was fooled by this obvious shell-game being played before the entire community by a wealthy local clan who'd made Too Much Money in the cattle business.
And worse, no one seemed to object to it on principle. Nobody seems to mind overmuch that the new store in the same building as the old one, for all its shiny newness, is a joke, a scam, a place of poor selections and appalling prices and a sleepwalking staff, with never more than two or three cars parked out front. I even get the sense that many admire the new owners for pulling such a clever stunt, and just go shopping instead miles away and never mourn this irreplaceable loss to the community itself, from which the community has never recovered and probably won't.
After all, to be an American is not to be a citizen of a democratic republic, or a participant in representative local self-governance, or a sovereign individual with sacrosanct birthrights protected scrupulously by constitutional rule of law, nor even a member of any community at all if one doesn't care to be.
No. To be an American, I've been reminded to my extreme annoyance all my life, is to be...
A Taxpayer.
'I Pay My Taxes! I Know My Rights!' (Rights paid for, on a lease-but-never-to-own basis, by means of taxes?)
Apparently, and I do acknowledge this as a personal condition unique to my own life and how I have sought to live it, the brain injury I endured at age six did not deprive me of any intellectual capacity, as I hope readers might observe and grant here.
But all the behavioral issues I began from that day onward to exhibit, now looking back over a span of more than half a century at the preponderance of that evidence, added up to what seems to be a single disability I have lived with ever since:
I have no capacity to coexist with bullshit.
The corollary effect to this being that I have a heightened sensitivity to the presence of dishonest behavior, even if (which is more often than not the case) I am not really clear on what the dishonesty consists of. I can just feel it, and it causes anxieties in me, especially when that increased sensitivity is being stimulated further by an instinctive knowledge that those around me are also aware of the dishonest conditions they inhabit, but are willing to play along for their own purposes instead of ever challenging it.
To portray myself purely as a victim would be to insist I am the only honest person in a world of liars. And to be perfectly honest, I have struggled my whole life since that day, NOT to see or present myself in these terms. I am just as human and flawed, and prone to playing for advantage in The Game of Life, as anyone else.
But for my own reasons, being compelled by external forces and factions to act in dishonesty myself, and pretend this is simply the order of things and that I have no right to challenge it, is just not something I am equipped to do or even tolerate being expected to do.
I have tried.
So it is simply a matter of being honest with myself as much as with anyone else, that I have proven incapable of calling this 'income tax' vulgarity anything other than what it is:
close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective)
Or, in a word: surveillance
I know that everyone else knows as well as I do that this is precisely the truth, about why this one device holds such power over an entire civilization and its ways of living. Living with that knowledge in itself has proven one of the most colossal personal challenges of my life.
If paying taxes to pay the price of governance were a thing, and anyone really believed in it, avoiding taxes as the primary pursuit of the whole of fiscal life would not be a thing at all.
The American posture of tax-avoidance as its own reward, while pretending to rent one's liberties from a regime in exchange for paying them, is the truly adolescent, immatureposture, not my calling it what it is.
Taxpayers have never been taxpayers because they believe in being taxpayers.
They are taxpayers because....
....they are being watched, continually, and every item of economic activity is thereby reduced to an insincere and duplicitous performance, played out in front of those who are most certainly always watching. The point of the business of one's life, and to a dangerous extent life its ownself, is not to live and conduct enterprise honestly and in good faith while enjoying the honest fruits of honest endeavor, but to get away with paying less taxes.
What makes me anxious is that I try to live by a moral code, and that by its guidance it just makes no sense to me why anyone can in good conscience agree to be watched by the state all their lives, and perform like mischievous monkeys for its gratification and amusement while pulling scams on it right under its nose.
Government doesn't need a slice of your household income to pay its operating expenses.
It isn't even interested in you for that.
This entire form of government, including the preliminary template of its taxation powers, was mostly designed unilaterally by one man, name of Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the United States Treasury Department. A man who never conquered his own addiction to debt in his life, but who realized that short-term cash flow for a regime could best be served by never paying off official debts in full at all, but instead continuing to expand the powers of the state and thus its operating expenses, as an excuse to extend more and more tax obligations to the citizenry, in order to have cash on hand to pay the interest on the regime's real source of income, which was to borrow more and more from creditors who never even expected to be paid off, because this was how banks and financiers and speculators and insurers and manufacturers could maintain more power over how the nation was governed than the people themselves might ever enjoy.
The purpose of this 'income tax' has never been to fund the operations of a constitutional form of government.
It is rather to keep an eye on you, and know everything about you. Just in case what you already know, that we are governed by fraudsters and gangsters who regard the people as their enemies and the rule of law as a procedural nuisance, as much as any other nation on earth is, might come to offend you enough to do something about it.
And you know it.
I just wish you'd all be honest, and call it what it is, because what it is, and you know it, is surveillance.
No wonder this recent and accelerating avalanche of surveillance capabilities and devices, which define the ways and means of this Century of Stupid more accurately than any other factor, has been so readily accepted:
You've been trained for generations by now to let it go on in plain sight, and pretend not to notice, and assume there is nothing you or anyone can or even should do to stop it, and call that your duty, your whole life.
As Americans like to say, you get what you pay for.
Please, just take an honest look at what you've agreed to pay for all this time:
close watch kept over someone or something (as by a detective)
framersqool
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.
Taxation is theft, extortion, surveillance. It is immoral and wrong.
People: bla bla social contract, bla bla roads… bla bla tax the rich.
Me: NONE OF THE ABOVE.