Looks like I’m being forced out of retirement!

Well, okay, not really retirement per se, just the excessively long pauses between posts on TCL due to my deep nasal entombment in the CypherPoker project. (BTW, I recommend that you check it out — it’s gotten almost universally positive and enthusiastic feedback and I think it’ll be a literal game changer, despite the cliché)

However, Heather Mallick’s op-ed piece in the Toronto Star earlier this week about why she loves taxes (and so should you), really got me riled up. This is not her first op-ed extolling the virtues of going down on the taxman within the last year, no even her second.

The collection of Mallick’s statist* bullshit, hypocrisy, and blathering gibberish is liberally smeared with idiotic catchphrases, insidious moral relativism, and a litany of self-contradictions. I’m going to break it down piece by piece to demonstrate not only how deeply deluded Mallick is on the topic of taxes but also to expose the hypocrisy and immorality of her brand of vile authoritarianism-by-proxy.

First, let’s get something straight: taxation is theft

This is really quite simple. If someone takes something of yours without your consent it’s theft. I didn’t consent to have taxes seized from every paycheque and from everything I buy, and neither did a great many people in this country. The fact that government seizes this money using threats makes it extortion, and it’s practiced even on children. Give your kid a buck to go buy a $0.99 snack and then explain why it’s not enough.

In fact, explain to them why it’s so wrong to mislead customers on advertised prices and then why it’s perfectly fine for government to demand exactly this along with threats against store owners who would dare to include taxes on advertised prices. Explain to your kids why customers absolutely and under any circumstance shouldn’t be allowed to know exactly what they’ll be paying at the cash register because a bureaucrat said so.

Continuing on, statist “logic” dictates that if I don’t check that voting box it means that I haven’t granted the rights to government that it universally claims. Right? Isn’t that how government is granted rights — because we grant them those rights by voting?

So can I exercise the right to tax others if I don’t vote, or did I never have that right which I ostensibly granted the government through elections? And if I never had that right to begin with, how exactly did I grant it to government by voting? And how is this all considered a legally binding contract for an entire nation of people when the very same courts who so brazenly defend it would laugh at it if you or I attempted it?

Probably because we don’t have sufficient weapons, threats, and violence to back our “authority”. Possibly because we don’t own the court house, pay the judges and opposition lawyers, write the laws, and seize money from our challengers to use against them in the “fair and unbiased” court system.

Taxes are simply immoral and wrong and are considered criminal if anyone but government collected them. So why is this magical entity called government excluded from morality and justice?

I can hear the retorts now:

But aren’t taxes necessary to build and maintain infrastructure? Aren’t people who are against taxes just being greedy and selfish? Wouldn’t society simply crumble if we didn’t pay up?

Nope, nope, and nope. Utter and absolute hogwash.

I won’t get into a broad dissertation on the topic since Mallick’s own, near-sighted writing will do just fine so let’s peel open this rotten onion and get at the full, eye-watering stench of these arguments.

She bolts out of the gate with this stinker:

What Revenue Canada wants, Revenue Canada gets. Good for them.

Mallick displays a zealously servile ignorance of the fact that 100 years ago the government imposed a 4% income tax on Canadians which was apparently not only enough to carry the entire bureaucracy but enough to fund the war effort. And wars are expensive. Even 50 years ago the average income tax rate was around 14% to 16%, something I personally gleaned by looking through historical records.

Now the state is seizing more than 50% of Canadians’ money and is barely able to fix the pothole in front of your house let alone provide any decent — and necessary — services like mass transportation. Despite pouring ridiculous sums of money into transit there’s little to show for it, yet government somehow manages to find the money for things like Kafkaesque mass surveillance programs that instill fear and obedience into Canadians.

Good for them.

Only unaccountable monopolies with the ability to seize ever more money in order to continue operating could possibly exist when repeated failure is piled on failure. If it had to compete in the real world, government would have shriveled up and died long ago; it is inefficient, bloated, and full of promises it can’t keep.

At this rate, in another hundred years the state will be seizing 100% of everyone’s income while neo-Mallick propagandists will proclaim how wonderful and efficient government is and how it’s keeping us all safe.

Mallick goes on to provide an example of “a service Torontonians never dreamed was needed but now are cheering.”

At 4 on Wednesday morning, a young woman was seen downtown clinging to a block hanging by wires from a tall crane. It was not clear if she was suicidal, drugged, a rooftopper, or a crime victim. But 12 storeys up, one slip of her arm would have had her broken, bloody and pasted to the ground.

Firefighters and police arrived. Rob Wonfor, a cheerful 52-year-old firefighter who describes himself as “a bit of a monkey,” climbed the crane, along with a police negotiator who talks people down — Wonfor said the negotiator was so calming he sounded like Perry Como, who basically slept through his songs — and reached the woman.

She wrapped herself around him and he held her to him like a baby in a carrier. It was found to be unsafe to lower the block so they both rappelled down.

As it turns out, the woman had been a fierce climber since childhood and rooftopped for the joy of it. “You overlook the city. It’s really amazing, like a deep breath of euphoria,” as one rooftopping photographer has described it to the Star.

Here Mallick describes how we need the pricey services provided exclusively by the city while at the same time describing how people such as “crane girl” Marisa Lazo happily do this sort of thing for free and would most likely volunteer to help out in similar situations in exchange for a few selfies.

Your intellectual prowess is truly dizzying, Mallick … do go on!

But charming as the story is, the real story is that in Toronto, if someone’s at risk, the city can immediately deploy trained teams to make them safe and take them to hospital for free health care. That is one well-designed system.

I supposed that in government speak, waiting 2 to 3 hours for assistance is considered “immediate”. I, however, call it a sad fucking joke that imperils lives. And that “free” part is a little bit of mental fromage I’ve heard from many a rabid statist. Apparently in Mallick’s world the hospital runs on rainbows and unicorn farts — doctors get paid nothing, electricity simply appears, equipment is all generously donated, cleaning staff do it for the kicks, and the buildings rise up out of the ground by themselves.

Oh…wait…you mean all these things do need to be paid for? Through taxes? Taken from you and processed by a bloated and wasteful bureaucracy before getting to the intended target? Ah, so actually not free at all?

And people are being forced to pay for the privilege of being sidelined in all sorts of horrific ways when needing often vital medical care. Mallick herself complains that abortion pills are out of reach of most women because of government, takes umbrage with government for not dealing with “foul” doctors, and berates government for allowing for-profit blood donation centers.

What the fuck, Mallick? Don’t you even read your own pieces?

Apparently not because she regularly complains about things like how governments failed to address wholesale banking fraud, how government fails in providing basic education because “chump” parents don’t want to pay more taxes and instead want choices for their children’s schooling, how government privatization is destroying the Canadian economy — but thankfully the systemic caging of humans which, when locked up become “homemade revenue-generators”, is still government-owned — and how governments terrorize and divide citizens using the migrant crisis while conveniently neglecting to mention that these same governments rank among some of the top taxers in the world.

I’d bookmarked a bunch of Mallick’s other op-eds to show how profoundly self-contradictory she is but that’d be beating a dead horse.

The important point here is that Mallick has viewpoints on what she thinks is important and what she wants to see happen, as we all do, but she steadfastly believes in using the violent monopoly of the state to impose her views on everyone else. That’s authoritarianism veiled in a thin lie of humanitarianism.

Because she’s greedy and selfish she believes everyone else is too and so the only solution is to threaten and beat people into submission. But she doesn’t want to do the dirty work and wants the state to do it for her.

She simply can’t imagine people working together to solve profound problems or that people would help their neighbours when they’re in need and instead projects her vitriolic “me me me!” attitude onto the world around her. I doubt she’s ever experienced poverty or deprivation.

She bizarrely believes that funneling money through a middleman, even if done voluntarily, is somehow cheaper or more efficient than procuring products and services directly on a free and competitive market.

Mallick thinks that — despite the fact that the government grants monopoly powers to select healthcare providers and even goes so far as to penalize people for not buying healthcare from their rich buddies — this is somehow a free, open, and competitive market in which …

… being injured means medical bankruptcy

Here she again conveniently ignores the fact that most state tax levels are comparable to Canada’s while looking the other way on all of the unfortunate accompanying facts.

She claims that …

Canadians can have everything they want, as long as they’re willing to pay for it.

In reality it’s “Canadians will take what they’re given and they’ll pay what they’re told to pay for it.”

This is why Mallick complains that …

My Main St. bus route in Toronto is a road of rubble. Canada is short of judges. Victoria still pumps raw sewage into the ocean. We need more English classes for refugees, more hospital beds, more help for indigenous people.

If government is doing such a good job why do these problems continue to fester and grow with each year? Clearly, according to Mallick, the people who haven’t been able to solve these problems just need more money!

In Canada, tax is the price we pay for civilization.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard this bullshit I’d have less than half of the total … because taxes. No, Heather Mallick, Tax is the price civilization pays to be repressed.

If we could just move past the myopic, authoritarian ramblings of fools like Mallick, humanity would expand to the stars in the blink of an eye. I’d be more than willing to voluntarily contribute to that!

* A statist is a supporter of the state, a.k.a. government & friends