VOLUNTARY TAXATION - THE ROAD TO REAL PROSPERITY

"Government should NEVER be able to do anything YOU can't do."

---Ron Paul---

Voluntary taxation is an alien idea to most. The idea is so alien and so blatantly opposed to our way of ingrained thinking that most would feel outright scandalized. Voluntary taxation means that you pay taxes only if you want to and no one will pressurize you or threaten you if you choose to not pay.

We all have been living in a system where taxation is not only compulsory but is considered criminal if one does not pay it. Do we ever question the validity of this kind of taxation? Why is it that this idea is so prevalent and why is it that our taxes perpetually keep on increasing? Why does it never happen ever in history that one day we wake up and the government tells us that our taxes will be reduced now onwards? We need to ask the question whether all this taxation through the centuries has helped us get really prosperous as we should or could we have done better? What is the real equation of taxation? This article will unravel the crux of this matter and explain how our prosperity and happiness are connected to something such as taxation. 

Human needs include not just food, water and air but many other things and the greatest among those needs is ‘happiness’. All human action directly or indirectly is aimed towards a single endeavor – The achievement of happiness. But there are so many of us here each having infinite desires but we live in a world of limited resources. What is the best system under which we can make the most of what we have and none of human labor or wealth goes to waste or in the hands of those who have not rightfully earned it? 

Let us try to understand how it works by imagining a little story which is as follows;

Imagine that you are renovating your house and you intend to get it done in the best possible way and in the least possible time and cost so that you can start to live better and enjoy the wonderful newly renovated ambience of your home. Well, first of all you would need to hire a competent interior designer and an equally competent workman like the carpenter, the painter, the electrician etc. When each of them do their respective jobs properly and in mutual sync then the house will get renovated efficiently and quickly. 

Now suppose you have a society watchman whose job is no more than to provide security and who suddenly forces you and takes over the job of interior designer. This watchman being illiterate and absolutely new to the field of interior aesthetics and has no expertise whatsoever. Just imagine how the renovation work will proceed. Well, he begins his work as a designer and in his ignorance and arrogance, he first designs badly and has no work plan so he overrides your wishes and also disregards the pleas of the workmen and rejects all their advice. He forces the carpenter to do the painting work and the painter to do the electrical work and the electrician to do the carpenter’s work. What do you think happens as a result? What you get is total disaster and your house interiors in a messy state.Would you like to hire an able and expert man of your choice to do the work or would you like to be bullied by someone like the watchman in this instance into hiring him despite his lack of expertise to renovate a house. The answer is obvious! 

This seemingly fanciful example has a stark parallel to the reality we live in. We all live in this world together which has limited resources and we all desire to achieve the maximum prosperity and growth for each of us. For this we need to use our resources with maximum efficiency and we cannot hire the watchman in the above story to do the job. We are constantly renovating the world and our lives through the resources we have at hand. But today by slow process of inaction and inability to challenge validity of the accepted idea of compulsory taxation we have unfortunately given the reigns of renovation to the watchman who in character is same as the government. In real world the situation is even worse than that of the story above because here the government not only has taken over the renovation but has started to dictate things and intrude in our lives beyond its moral eligibility.

Money is an objective equivalent of the wealth that we create. When your money is taken away forcefully by a third party in the form of taxes on the pretext that your money will be used in your favor then be assured that it won’t be used as promised. The widely accepted idea of compulsory taxation in truth is an affront to the idea of democracy and is immoral. To forcefully tax people and use that money not according to their wants is taking power away from the people. Voluntary taxation is an idea exactly opposite of this. Under voluntary taxation, people hold total power and money is not wasted because it allows people to use their money to sort out their problems as they wish and no outsider can understand the problems of the people better than the people themselves.


Suppose you want to make a piece of furniture, like say a chair and you give your money to the milkman to do the job instead of the carpenter then not only will the quality of work be compromised but also your time and money will be wasted and would result in diminished productivity because the milkman has no skill in the making of a chair and he cannot make it as efficiently as the carpenter and of equivalent quality. The same thing the government does… it taxes away your money and re-allocates a miniscule amount not according to the actual free market need of the people but according to the whims and fancies of the central planners . The remaining major chunk of tax money just disappears somewhere. The next year the government again taxes you but the tax must be higher this time because of inflation and because the government has opened newer departments and started other schemes supposedly to help you so it needs more funds. So eventually the people have to give larger and larger shares of their earnings as taxes and hence they have to work more and more for less and less, thus leading to a kind of financial bondage. Just ask a farmer who is forced to commit suicide if he is interested to send a spaceship on the moon or if he is interested in Commonwealth Games, while his family is dying of hunger. This system never helps people in reality and it has never alleviated poverty because it is a system that reduces investment money and thus reduces growth and constricts the economy and thus diminishes the prosperity of the people.

Voluntary taxation would work like a super voting machine and the only reason that people will be incentivized to pay taxes voluntarily would be if they see that it will actually benefit them and if their ‘self interest’ is served. If there is garbage and water stagnation in your locality and if it hurts you enough then out of your own self interest you would want to get it cleaned and you would offer to pay for it. Voluntary taxation will empower the people with true power as it should be in a real democracy. People vote not merely with their ballot but also with their money. Whatever people will want, their money will flow towards it to make it happen. A central government cannot know what the problems of the people are and how to best solve them. Today the governments are very large and they are increasingly interfering with different aspects of our lives. To fund all its activities, the government needs to tax people more and more and must force them increasingly. This tax money does not come from the people’s consumption capital but from their savings, i.e; their investment capital. When this investment capital is diminished and taxed away, that would simply mean less money for investment which in turn would mean lesser productive enterprises and lesser job opportunities and lesser growth. This creates a huge economic distortion of such epic proportions that to maintain it becomes increasingly difficult and more and more laws are enforced on the people and their taxes must keep on increasing and at the same time majority of people become poorer.

The biggest question that comes to mind whenever the idea of voluntary taxation is brought up is that who will build the public utilities and who will support the military and where will the money come from. It is generally thought that if voluntary taxation is implemented and if no one pays taxes how will the government carry out its activities. The answer to that is that the people will build the roads, hospitals and schools etc. People can do this by forming small local groups and collecting money for such purposes. When people start building like this from funds collected with voluntary consent then money and resources get used with maximum efficiency as you cut out the watchman completely out of the picture and thus a lot of money can be saved. When you ask the watchman to do the same work, he will not only deliver a very poor quality of performance but will siphon off huge amounts from your funds for his personal benefit.


Under voluntary taxation, one of the greatest fear is that what if people won’t pay any tax or pay very less tax. The first thing to understand is that under such a system the size of the government as compared to what it is today would be extremely small. The government job would roughly include no more than to maintain the army, the judicial system and the police system to ensure its enforcement to maintain law and order and apart from that the government will not be allowed to interfere in anything. The amount of money needed to maintain this would be extremely miniscule, thus leaving people with a lot of surplus savings. A tiny portion of these savings, people can use to build and maintain public utilities, social welfare, military etc. Even after all this, people would still be left with huge surplus savings which will get reinvested in new enterprises and create greater growth and job opportunities. No one would want to put their money into offshore tax havens such as the Swiss Banks any more because their money is safe here, so all that money will stay within the country and fuel further economic growth of the nation.

Why would people pay voluntarily? For the same reason that people pay voluntarily for Mediclaim, insurance, the maid, the sweeper, the tailor, the garbage collector, the milkman, the doctor etc.; because it is in their ‘self interest.’ A frugal government that does not step outside its justifiable bounds and which does not stifle economic activity by unjustifiable interference and which gets no incentive to siphon off people’s money will be a government in every one’s interest and benefit. Such a government will only be possible under a system of voluntary taxation where the true power at all times is vested in the hands of the people. Under such a system, there will be a great outburst of economic activity and innovation, that will change the course of the nation and the people’s lives in a positive and dramatic way. A nation of people who can utilize their resources with maximum efficiency and who can keep their earnings as they wish and who no more live under fear of their wealth being confiscated will be a nation of people who are on the road that leads to true prosperity.

Voluntary taxation is a system that has far reaching implications. It is the only system that can achieve the greatest efficiency in utilization of resources and thus achieve greatest real growth. It is the only system that truly empowers people in all respects by enabling people to vote with their money. It is a system that will check the massive corruption that goes on in our country. It is a system where people can work and keep their earnings and have freedom to achieve their highest potentials. It is a system that can spark a new era of great economic activity benefiting people from all walks of life. It is a system that will truly set people on the road to freedom and prosperity. It is a system of the future, if mankind ever wants to live free.

BLACK MONEY - A DECEPTIVE IDEA

The words ‘Black Money’ catch almost everyone's attention instantaneously and arouse curiosity as to the story behind it and about those involved. If someone’s name gets connected with hoarding black money, we tend to look at them with disdain as if the person has committed a big crime. The general thinking is that black money is bad.

The intent of this article is to present a contrary view on the very idea of black money and to prove and affirm that Black Money is not actually so black and tainted as many people are led to believe. In this article, we will find out how the idea of labeling unaccounted money as black is deceptive, what constitutes this deception and who stands to profit or to lose from it.

What is Black money?
There are many prevailing definitions of black money, among them, the most common is that black money is money that is earned illegally and not disclosed for taxation. The general perception among people is that illegal is always wrong but in truth it is not so.

To understand black money, we must first understand what is illegal. Illegal is not necessarily something that is wrong but it is something that is done outside the government set laws. Hence, the illegally earned money does not necessarily mean that the money has been earned by dishonest means but rather that it is the money which has just not been disclosed to the government. Hence, a reasonable definition of black money would be, ‘The money which is unaccounted to the government is called 'Black Money.'

Who is it that wants so desperately to label the unaccounted money as 'black' and make it sound so ominous and dishonest? Who stands to gain the most by labeling unaccounted money as black money? Surely, it is not the people who stand to gain but in fact it is the government which profits by labeling unaccounted money as black money. The government wants huge amounts of money to function for which it must tax people to the maximum and therefore it requires an account of all their earnings. However, the important question one must ask is whether the government itself, in reality, ever gives a fair accounting of the amount it collects as taxes. There is no such accounting.
 

It is stated that the idea of black money is most needed to indict criminals who make huge sums of money by unscrupulous means; but then why penalize the entire population for the misdeeds of a few?! The idea of black money is in actuality a means to facilitate more taxation of people’s earnings.

Money is money and most of the money is usually earned by honest trade among people. The idea of black money is a flawed idea. It is put into place in order to deceive everyone into thinking that black money is necessarily dishonest money and people who have this kind of money are definitely dishonest too. If the government lets people keep what they earn then the people will not be forced to hoard money in order to escape excessive taxation. On the contrary, they will invest freely in new enterprises, thus creating even greater and more sustainable growth. It is wrong to think that the government can do a better job at utilizing the tax money than the people themselves. History demonstrates that the governments have never been able to utilize tax money more efficiently than its free willed citizens. It is precisely because of the government's inefficiency and lack of accountability, that results in a perpetual rise in taxes, leaving lesser money in our pockets. The idea of projecting black money as always necessarily being bad is nothing but a cheap gimmick to tax everyone at an ever increasing rate.
 

If only people could keep and utilize their earnings as they wish, there would be without doubt great prosperity for all but this can never happen until the idea of black money is exposed and rejected, thus paving the way for a free economic system where one can unhesitatingly unleash one's productive abilities without fear of anyone taking away their rightfully deserved earnings.

ON THE STATE OF THE WORLD (PART-I) : THE ASSAULT ON THE MIND

The story of man

‘Uncertainty plunges men into such darkness from which only the very rare emerge.’

The world is a great place, great in every imaginable sense and the story of man has been a heroic one, but this story has been blotched with occasional dark periods. What are these dark periods? What caused these dark periods when men suffered and became victims of the intellectual brigade of their times and before? Can we avoid this and if so, how? What exactly is going on in the world? One must ask these vital questions so that one may learn right lessons from them and prevent unwanted suffering and disillusionment.

We humans are making tremendous progress in science and technology, real visible unparalleled progress but our cultural and philosophical state remains not only stunted, but also is getting worsened, our morality is being corrupted, our truthfulness being depleted, our reason being slowly destroyed. What is causing this? Those who propagate false ideas have waged a war on the mind and have made innocent people their victims and it is not happening by default but happening deliberately at the behest of a handful and they are assaulting the mind with wrong ideas. It is happening in religion, art, schools, colleges, politics, economics, culture etc. This article is an attempt at revealing the true state of what exactly is happening, why it is happening and how to correct it.   

For centuries, preachers have been preaching potato philosophy to the mindless multitudes, like cunning parasites they are, seeking to devour not the blood in the veins but seeking to kill the thinking mind. None is safe from their assault, not even those who think themselves to be outside the multitude. They are right now also carrying out this assault on your mind so be prepared and arm yourself, not with guns and ammunition but with ‘reason’ if you are to survive like a man and beat them in their own great evil game.

‘The greatest injury one can inflict on an individual is not by hurting him physically but by making the individual believe in wrong ideas.’ An individual’s thinking and philosophy affects his entire life and if this gets infiltrated with wrong ideas then it will impact each and everything adversely. This is exactly what is going on in the world today, our intellectuals, teachers, leaders, gurus etc. have been doing a dastardly job, they have conned and conned and conned the people for so very long and in so many various ways that now that the ‘wrong’ has become the new ‘right.’ Truth is being deliberately suppressed ever so more and as a result, today, falsehood, treachery and myopia are having a bull run, but the bull run cannot just go on forever hence eventually at some point in time a peak will definitely be reached. I don’t know exactly when it will happen but I do know is that when the truth has played out its course and the toxic energy of wrong ideas built over the decades and centuries starts to explode, then the people will truly start to awaken to the truth and there will be a revolution, a transforming and liberating revolution! We are moving towards it for sure and such is the state of the world I see and foresee.

Mr. Karl Marx

The intellectuals of any time always set the standards for any culture and prevalent thinking in the society because they come out with the dominant ideas and these ideas slowly seep down the hierarchy into the multitude and are absorbed and assimilated by them. When such intellectuals propound faulty ideas then imagine what would happen, the entire base all the way down the hierarchy gets affected severely. 

For example, let us look at Karl Marx, a man of formidable intellect and the most influential socialist who lived more than a century ago. He was a philosopher, economic theorist and sociologist who constructed the socio-political theory called Marxism. He wrote ’The communist Manifesto’ and ‘Das Kapital’, two most influential books in which his socialist ideas were expressed. His ideas have been widely adopted even if they have always led to disastrous results. The greatest experiment of Marxist socialism was demonstrated before in Russia via the formation of USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) by overthrowing the czarist and aristocratic rule and establishing a socialist state. The USSR however eventually broke up with drastic repercussions because Marxist ideas about economy just did not work. Marxist ideas are fundamentally flawed and that is the reason why they never work and always lead to strife, unhappiness and oppression.

Today Marxist ideology mainly ‘socialism’ is everywhere and causing damage all around. The idea gained foothold because on the surface it seems to be very benevolent and harmless hence is readily accepted. Only a deeper analysis of the idea and its nature and historical impact can make one aware beyond any doubt of how evil the ideology really is. Socialism is opposed to capitalism. In socialism, the private ownership of means of production is disallowed unlike that in capitalism where private property ownership is the key essential. Socialism advocates that production of goods and services have to be done to fulfill the needs of the people and not for any personal profit. The idea seems nice and right on the surface, but in reality it always fails to provide for all what it proposes and more than that causes extreme dissension among the people. A socialist system tries to cheat and control the free market forces by controlling every aspect of the economy and this never works and never will because nobody in the entire world is or can be smarter than the free markets. An inevitable outcome of socialism is called communism which is even worse, it is so worse that I intend to devote an entire article about it. Communism attempts to equalize forcefully all different kinds of people having different abilities into one classless social setup i.e. the beggar and the drunkard are supposed to get the same privileges as the man who works earnestly and hard to earn his living. How much more contradictory can it get! However I will deal with this in another article, as for now, I will go as far as to say that this single man called Marx has caused so much damage with his ideas in the world and on such a massive scale that the ravages of Hitler and Mao seem like a mild walk in the park.

Ayn Rand said, ‘A mixed economy is a society in the process of slow death.’  India is a mixed economy! A mixed economy is a combination of state ownership and control of business and privately owned enterprise. This therefore represents a big contradiction as opposed ideas cannot coexist and sustain. The idea of regulating and controlling an economy has always proved to be disastrous and still we cling to it and think it is right only because on the surface it looks right, this is the tragedy of our time that most of us are easily convinced by just the surface appearance. They never dig deeper to find the truth and readily accept whatever is thrown at them.

Einstein, one of my heroes said this about socialism, "I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate (the) grave evils (of capitalism), namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow-men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society."

Einstein was and still is my hero, because I admire him for his scientific achievements greatly, but I think his socio-political ideas expressed above are absolutely wrong. I find them to be so fallacious that I fail for words to communicate in this short article the true extent of the inherent evil in this statement of his and I doubt if he himself understood fully the scope and implications of what he was saying. If the great Einstein could fall for such an ideology then what to talk of the common man and of our intellectual political leaders whom we supposedly trust so much. That is why one must question everything and dig deeper to arrive at the truth in any matter so that we can escape unscathed from the assault of wrong ideas.

Another example to note is our present system of education. The education imparted today has an overall effect of killing the passion in the individual and subduing his capacity to think critically in an objective way. The education is aimed at breeding helplessness and lethargy within the student and taming his mind in a way so that he becomes a slave to the system. What is the purpose of education? This aspect when is not clearly defined gets ignored. When it is ignored, the masses start to perceive that having a degree and passing through this education system is all that matters in life. What everyone is doing must be right and therefore unquestionable. Moreover today the education is so much overpriced and advertised as if the end of the world is near if one has not passed through the education system and acquired appropriate degrees, it is of secondary concern that if one has learnt anything of value or not.

What I want to stress here is that the education system is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. It is flawed fundamentally  because, the actual purpose of education i.e. to develop the thinking capacity of an individual is not realized but what happens is that the individual is conditioned and brainwashed to fit the system and become the bearer of wrong ideas and pass them along to the next generation just as his parents did.

The education system is incomplete because ‘philosophy’ is not included along with other subjects of study. This is the greatest drawback in education today and the impact of which is everywhere to see. The moral and cultural bankruptcy in the society today is a direct result of this. Religion, which is a crude and primitive form of philosophy, is taken for granted and deemed sufficiently complete for showing us the way to living a proper life and nothing better is thought possible or required. Hence, the idea of inclusion of proper philosophy is thought to be unnecessary for an education. The students are innocent and naive and their parents and teachers are a product of the same system and hence no worthwhile change takes place and the status quo remains as such.

Last, but not least the example of art is a very important one and hence it has to be discussed here. Literature, music, painting, sculpture etc. are all examples of art, they are different art forms but fundamentally, they serve the same purpose. Art reflects the true state of the society at any given time and even more. Today most of the artists come from the same educational establishment and are a product of the same kind of educational curriculum, and belong to similar intellectual and ideological stream of thought, which was, sown in their minds by the intellectuals whom they followed and looked up for ideological support.

Most of the art, which is being done today, is mostly lifeless and looks like drudgery. There does not seem to be clarity of thought but instead there is a hodgepodge of half-baked ideologies connected and loosely integrated together to guide the intellect of the artists in making art. The artists are confused and disillusioned and are unable to pinpoint what is wrong exactly. What is wrong is that fallacious ideas abound here in this field, and which, are usually considered and taken to be correct without even subjecting them to critical enquiry and there are not many to show the right way ahead.

The picture I have painted above certainly seems to be disconsolate and actually it is but I do not want to imply that the scenario is completely dark and no bright spots are possibly there. In fact, there are many bright spots where right ideas bloom and prosper and worthwhile progress is taking place. Science and technology are some of the bright spots because here there are clear provable ideas to deal with and no messing around with logic and reason is possible because everything is there supported with undeniable proof. People think that it is impossible to bring such clarity in field of philosophy, economics, education, art and other areas of life. But I think with certainty that it is possible and it can be accomplished by having an attitude to challenge different ideas, theories and beliefs via reason and logic, we have to find back our reason and make it the absolute standard in dealing with ideas and everything else. Only then can we be truly liberated and achieve the clarity of mind, a great life and a great future.

The world has suffered more from wrong ideas than from anything else. It is these wrong ideas we have to recognize and reject. It does not matter which field the ideas belong to or which great personality supports such ideas or how many numbers of people believe in these ideas. What matters is that people must not show support for any idea nor adopt any idea blindly without properly understanding it first. People must not hesitate to question the validity of ideas and the only way to do this is by using reason as an instrument of critical inquiry. This is the way to wither the assault of wrong ideas on the mind.

Thank You.