What your ‘tax return’ says about you
By: Ron Collins
Tags: Defundthepolice, Income Tax Return, Civil Rights

Whether you mean to be or not, the following is what you are telling the regime, every time you ‘file your taxes’, over your own signature, and made binding upon you with your own consent:

Dear Government:

My life and liberty do not belong to me, but to you.

I don’t trouble myself over whether this is how it ought to be, in a nation which prides itself on being ‘the land of the free’; in fact, all the hypnotic cues I have been subjected to over my lifetime which make Paying My Taxes feel like some kind of patriotic duty sufficient to the task of purchasing from you whatever liberties you choose to grant me, cause it to be too scary to even contemplate that there might be anything horribly wrong about this arrangement.

Thankfully, so many of my fellow citizens have been subjected to the same indoctrinations and with such thorough effect on their own concepts of reality and definitions of freedom, that if I ever do mention these thoughts about spending a substantial portion of my working life working for you, they are gracious enough to become very discomfited and change the subject. Some are even kind enough to advise me to seek mental-health counseling, or to stop being angry about my childhood, or something.

But I am sending you this money and personal information about where I got it and how I spend it, to try and reassure you once again that it’s all good: how I earn my livelihood and what I do with it is, and always has been, your business to manage for me.

Honest: I am more than happy herein to continue updating your permanent dossier on every detail of my working life.

I assume herein that, should you ever choose to use any of this information I provide against me in a court of law, this will suffice as due process of that law, in order for you to enact punishment on me, in the manner of your choosing.

That I don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever prevailing over you in such a case… well, everybody knows that, good grief.

Though it remains unclear exactly what it is I may ever receive in return for the portion of my earnings I herein consent to your seizing out of my pocket, or what you may have ever done to help me earn it, here is the full amount you have demanded of me.

If it is not quite enough, please, please, forgive me, and allow me time to further re-arrange the management of my affairs and my business and my household, which I have already accepted as an unending obligation to administer in your behalf in perpetuity, so I can come up with the rest before you begin to take things away from me at gunpoint.

Even though most of these funds will go into covering the expenses of maintaining a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the collecting of it and the continual monitoring of the details of my private life, and whatever is left over into making interest payments on your bad debts you never intend to pay off in full but rather to continue increasing them in whatever manner and for whatever purpose you choose, and borrowing vast sums from whatever foreign or even hostile power is willing to extend further credit to you on whatever terms regarding the future of my country it may please, this is all right with me.

Because you have threatened to indict and prosecute and probably convict and incarcerate me and take away everything I own (correction: ‘rent from you’) if I do not comply with your demands, this is reason enough for me to comply with them without the least effort at upholding my own civil liberties. I mean, heck, even the American Civil Liberties Union informs me that this arrangement between us has nothing to do with civil liberties, so don’t worry about my ever seeking to defend them from you.

After all, my life, my property, my children, my earnings, and my very freedom to live other than behind bars, all belong to you, not to me.

Thank you for the patriotic privilege to continue, for one more year, renting space and ransoming my birthright liberties to live in my own country from you, and to keep whatever remaining portion of an honest living you are graciously willing to leave to me. If this is not quite enough for me to pursue a decent debt-free life, that is my problem, not yours. Even if I have to take out a second mortgage on my house or sell off equipment I use to earn a living or forgo my next vacation or my child’s health care expenses, I want you to have what according to you is coming to you.

It may turn out that, in your unending and omniscient magnanimity, Dear Government, that this one year I have sent you a little more than you demanded of me.

My bad.

If it would not be too much trouble for you, and if I have dutifully filled out every last line-item on the enclosed documents to your satisfaction, please send this amount back to me. I will be so grateful to get this token percentage of my own money back that I will treat this ‘refund’ as a windfall and use it to buy stuff for myself, maybe even take a vacation or something, so pleased with myself for doing your obligatory paperwork for you correctly that I will forget all about the fact that you had seized it from me in the first place.

(Honestly, it feels a little weird to get some money and not just by reflex start figuring out what portion of it I have to give to you, so when I get this ‘tax refund’ I will be so intoxicated by this guilty pleasure that I might just go out and buy rounds for the house at my favorite bar, until it’s gone, or something equally frivolous. I’ll still wake up the next morning worried about spending money on myself without reporting to you about it, but I’ll end up feeling a lot safer once I get back to making my everyday affairs accountable to you…)

If, in the event that I did not fill out even one line-item in the manner you find satisfactory, even if this is the result of your unionized functionaries giving me legal advice over the phone to which they will never be held accountable, assume as a given that this would have been my fault, not yours.

And please, feel free (more free than I am, and that’s okay by me) to contact me any time and inform me as to whatever further demands you may choose to make of me.

I am, always have been and fully intend to remain,

Your Obedient Servant,

The Subjugated Citizen