Tax Producers vs Tax Consumers

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by Neville Kennard, veteran preaching and practising capitalist

If you live and work in Canberra you are almost certainly a tax consumer.

You may be a direct tax consumer (a bureaucrat or politician), being paid directly by the taxes of the tax producers in the productive private sector. Or you may be an indirect tax consumer, working for a company or firm or as a consultant or be self-employed providing goods and services to those who are the direct tax consumers. You may see yourself as being in the private sector, and you are, but you are still part of the tax consumption horde providing little that adds value to the real economy.

Real tax producers, real people working in the private sector, providing goods and services which people or companies need and choose to spend their money on, are the only ones who actually pay taxes.

Bureaucrats and politicians and secondary tax consumers would object to being called non tax payers, because they see themselves as paying taxes like everyone else, but unless they have proper outside income, from investments or from providing services to the real private sector, they are not net tax producers. They are net tax consumers; they provide little that adds real benefit to the community, the country, the economy.

As the ranks of the tax consumers grow, they see themselves, like everyone else, as needing more and more and so they tend to lend their weight, their voices and their votes to the political party that will offer opportunities to them, the tax consumers. They favour higher taxes and more regulation which will lead to more government jobs and career opportunities.

There are tax consumers in federal government, in state governments, in local governments. And there are also tax consumers in the private sector — those who get benefits from handouts and grants; and that is many, many of us now with all the “free” things the government bribes us with to give them our votes.

This is now labelled as tax churn and middle class welfare, where the government takes and then gives back, less, of course, their own costs and friction and take along the way.

The tax consumers should all be precluded from voting, because they have a conflict of interest with the real tax producers. There is an adversarial relationship between net tax payers and net tax consumers.

If only net tax producers were granted the right to vote and voting was seen as a privilege, something to be earned and cherished and available only to those who make a tangible, measurable, financial contribution, then we might find a big shift in the attitudes and respect of politicians and bureaucrats and other tax consumers towards the real tax producers, the voters.

Real tax producing voters would be asking, not what the government may be handing out to them, but more what the government will be taking from them. Politicians would then see it to be in their rational self-interest to promise tax cuts and reduced tax consumption.

Tax consumers should be seen as second class citizens, not worthy of voting, and not worthy of being shown more than the absolute minimum safe level of respect by tax producers. Wouldn’t that be a change!

(in order of appearance on Economics.org.au)

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"The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant or pine for something they can’t get, and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."
~ H.L. Mencken

"[T]he crucial question is not, as so many believe, whether property rights should be private or governmental, but rather whether the necessarily 'private' owners are legitimate owners or criminals. For ultimately, there is no entity called 'government'; there are only people forming themselves into groups called 'governments' and acting in a 'governmental' manner. All property is therefore always 'private'; the only and critical question is whether it should reside in the hands of criminals or of the proper and legitimate owners."
~ Murray Rothbard

"The most absurd public opinion polls are those on taxes. Now, if there is one thing we know about taxes, it is that people do not want to pay them. If they wanted to pay them, there would be no need for taxes. People would gladly figure out how much of their money the government deserves and send it in. And yet we routinely hear about opinion polls that reveal that the public likes the tax level as it is and might even like it higher. Next they will tell us that the public thinks the crime rate is too low, or that the American people would really like to be in more auto accidents." ~ Lew Rockwell, Speaking of Liberty, p. 281.

"A tax-funded protection agency is a contradiction in terms — an expropriating property protector — and will inevitably lead to more taxes and less protection. Even if, as some — classical liberal — statists have proposed, a government limited its activities exclusively to the protection of pre-existing private property rights, the further question of how much security to produce would arise. Motivated (like everyone else) by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but endowed with the unique power to tax, a government agent’s answer will invariably be the same: To maximize expenditures on protection — and almost all of a nation’s wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection — and at the same time to minimize the production of protection." ~ Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Economics.org.au

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