Hello Liberty Lovers of Riverside County!
In the News: The Taxman Cometh!
The raindance exists across multiple cultures, and has for a very long time. Once upon a time, in various times and places throughout history, someone decided to implore the gods for rain. A festival was held, perhaps with a sacrifice of an animal or other food item, and music and dancing were employed to beseech the heavens for rain. At some point, it coincidentally rained. Everyone cheered, convinced that their raindance had worked. The rains cometh! Good harvests and good living are assured!
Human society has never recovered. Raindancing has never stopped.
If you don’t think we still raindance in our wiser, enlightened, educated, trust-the-Science, better-than-that, modern society today, turn your attention to the last couple of years. Remember everybody who stood in line for COVID tests and vaccines? Remember all the performative masking and social distancing? We still dance for rain. We still engage in public performance dedicated to invoking some power we only dimly comprehend, can’t really define, and have absolutely no control over.
But enough about COVID theater for now; let us be more timely. It’s April, so this is a good time to consider what is arguably the greatest raindance in American history: paying your taxes. Is there any activity more performative AND more useless? What is any of it accomplishing? It’s the price we pay for civil society? It’s how we fund social services? Neither of those things are true. Government at every level just makes it up. Money gets printed nonstop, and gets spent willy-nilly with no real sense of how much there really is, where any of it is going, or what limits might exist on it.
Your taxes don’t actually pay for anything. They provide a fig leaf of legitimacy for a bottomless pit of debt. You can’t credibly claim to pay a cop’s salary, because the money being used to pay the cops is invented from thin air (and their union knows it). Even at the local level, if your School Board or City Council “exhausts their funding” they can appeal for “grants” from the State, and by extension the Feds, who ultimately just raise the debt ceiling and tell us all to pretend more money now exists. There is only one reason you pay taxes:
The whole system is performative nonsense in service to tyranny, almost literally dancing for the amusement of our self-appointed civic gods. Finding the forms, compiling your information, hiring help, filing by the deadline, hoping for a “refund,” it’s all an exercise in blind faith. If you do it wrong (or worse, refuse to dance), you will suffer the wrath of the gods. By contrast, we are assured that if “we” perform the raindance properly, government will be “funded” and the civic gods will bless us with abundance: the ambulances will still run, schools will stay open, roads will get maintained, and the lights will still come on (most of the time, this being California). You can pretend your money goes to that. You can pretend you’re doing your part. But the government just lights it all on fire, expects to be thanked for providing you with warmth, and then does whatever it wants anyway.
Paying your taxes isn’t socially responsible. It’s not patriotic. It’s superstition.
Calendar Notes
15 April is the traditional tax day, and we’re going to get together for lunch. You’re invited to join us! The Libertarian Party of Riverside County will be holding our quarterly Central Committee meeting at Cactus Cantina in Riverside. Lunch is at noon, and we’ll start the meeting at 1:00pm. Check rclp.us for more details. Bring a friend!
Suggested Reading This Month
A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, by Jacob Siegel. Published at Tablet, this is long (it will take you a couple of sittings to read and digest) but worth it. Siegel breaks down the rising Disinformation-Industrial Complex and how it has become a horror (incidentally enabled by the fact that it’s being financed with completely made-up money). From the article:
It would be nice to call what has taken place a tragedy, but an audience is meant to learn something from a tragedy. As a nation, America not only has learned nothing, it has been deliberately prevented from learning anything while being made to chase after shadows. This is not because Americans are stupid; it’s because what has taken place is not a tragedy but something closer to a crime. Disinformation is both the name of the crime and the means of covering it up; a weapon that doubles as a disguise.
Closing Thoughts from the Chair
In line with this month’s theme of “nothing about income taxes is good,” consider this. On 9 March, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before a congressional committee about their work on the Twitter Files, exposing massive government intrusions into Twitter’s algorithmic policies. I’ll quote Nellie Bowles (from The Free Press) on what happened next:
The day journalist Matt Taibbi testified in Congress about his ongoing work with the Twitter Files, something strange happened back at his home: The IRS showed up. Yes, the exact day. And yes, they showed up in person at his door. What was the IRS doing there? They said they had “concerns over identity theft.” What a farce. There’s nothing nastier than the White House using the IRS as a political tool (Trump had them audit James Comey and Andrew McCabe during Russiagate). And now it seems the IRS is coming for anyone who personally annoys Biden’s staff. This week, that was Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi and Shellenberger (and Bowles) have large presences on Substack, which is now also the home of the RCLP Liberty Letter. I’m proud we are sharing the platform with them, however distantly. As we face the taxman’s pinch this month, let us be righteously indignant about the very existence of the IRS, and let’s be real about what it really is: the American Stasi.
Come hang out with us on the 15th and let’s share one another’s pain. I’d love to shake your hand.
-Loren Dean
Find the Libertarian Party of Riverside County on the web at https://rclp.us