Originally Posted by barbrolie
Don't misunderstand. I am in no way saying that all legal control is bad. No matter how much I may hate to admit it, it's both a combination of self control, and knowledge of the law that are keeping me from going next door and beating the hell out of my neighbor, because I have to listen to his child crying on a near perpetual basis. I don't know the reason, I don't care what the reason is, I am just sick of it.
That being said, Somalia is a far cry from all first world countries in more ways than just it's lack of government oversight. We could start with it's economy, availability of paying work, etc. While some may call this the fault of it's government, I call it the fault of it's citizenry. Would YOU open a business or branch in a place with a reputation like that?
Yes, it was intended to be a humorous analogy. I was hoping you wouldn't take that literally, and I am glad that you didn't. However, it's not entirely inaccurate. Government in general, like evolution, has a nasty habit of taking on a life of it's own, especially over long periods of time. We are seeing that a lot now.
What's more important is that we, in the United States, are seeing a lot more 'blind' voting being performed on major bills by our Congress. The Patriot Act and PPCA are two of the more notorious examples. Neither of which have made the American people very happy, when you look at the broad scale of things. This just proves that government, even when started with noble intentions, eventually becomes a corrupt monstrosity. It only gets worse down the line.
I perhaps misspoke when I placed VAT onto electricity. That would be more of a 'usage' tax, and here, is primarily handled by locales and private companies anyway...even Co-ops in many areas. There is little to no Federal involvement in this area to begin with.
As for needing a bureaucracy to handle said taxes...not in the least. If the government actually ran an efficiency check across all of it's systems right now, I am sure it would find that at LEAST 60% of the people it already employs could be let go.
For example, I work for a contractor that works for the state Department of Transportation. On any given day, we have three state workers hanging around, who's only jobs are to collect asphalt tickets, take brief looks at the quality of work, and then do paperwork at the end of the day. That's three salaries of roughly $45,000 per year, three state vehicle burning fuel paid for by taxes, three retirement packages funded by taxes, etc. This job could VERY easily (and was very easily) performed by one person per job site for decades.
My problem with it is now, and will always be that it is forced. It should not be my, nor anyone else's responsibility to cover the living expenses of those who did not have either the means or foresight to save money. It just falls under 'not my ****ing problem'. They had the same amount of time to make something of their life as everyone else, considering that they lived to be old enough to collect.
Not to mention, the fact that it relies on death without collection, in order to be sustained makes it a flawed system. Honestly, if Social Security worked as a 'collection' account, much like a bank, where they take my money, make more money off of it, then give it back to be in dollar for dollar amounts at a later time, I would be fine with that. If I died before I could collect, the money would have to be given to my family, not rolled back into the system.
However, if you compare the pay in versus the pay out of the average person who is now collecting a check from it, you would see that they are, in essence, living off of the modern generation. They have become social parasites, and rather unattractive ones at that. I don't care if Elsie May has to die behind a cash register, or with a wrench in her hand at age 90 because she didn't save money. Again, not my problem.
As I've said before, I am the 'if you don't work you don't eat' guy in the room, and that extends to everyone. If you cannot save money, or did not do something with your life that was of enough value to a capitalist society to get wealthy, then keep working, or starve.
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