Imagine if a bully (the State) in school collects everyone’s lunches (income tax) in order to redistribute the lunches to those who are most loyal to him and most dependent on him for lunches. You must give him a portion of your lunch by the time the lunch bell rings.
He’s a fair bully by not taking 100% of your lunch, because if he did, there would be no point in bringing a lunch to school in the first place. This behavior fluctuation is called the Laffer Curve.
So on the bus ride to school in the morning, you estimate how much lunch should be set aside (W-4 withholding) for the lunch bully, but it can only be a rough estimate, because the bully is unpredictable and always making new rules. This unpredictability is a control tactic of his.
When lunch time comes (April 15th), the bully hands out this long list of arbitrary criteria (1040 forms, etc.) that determine how much lunch you must give to him.
He forces you do the cumbersome calculations, but he also has his crew (IRS) calculate the amount of lunch you must give, just in case you’re trying to pull a fast one on him. He punishes you big time if you screw up knowingly or not.
If your calculations show that you must give more lunch than you originally set aside on the morning bus ride, you must dig into your lunch bag and pull out more lunch to give. This is what I end up doing.
If your calculations show that you set aside more on the bus ride than what he will be stealing from you at lunch time, then you get to take back a portion of what you set aside that morning (tax return).
So, basically a “tax return” is when you know your money (property) is going to be stolen from you, but you just don’t know how much will be stolen from you, so you set aside a chunk in preparation. If you have set aside more than the amount that got stolen at the deadline, the remainder that is left over gets returned to you.
Many folks claim that the bully has a moral right to take everyone’s lunch, because he transfers that lunch to those who are dependent on him for it. They assume that if the bully doesn’t organize the transfers, then things wouldn’t organize at all, and it would be chaos and mayhem.
There are some folks, myself included, who don’t support any forced transfer of wealth enforced by violence, whether it be via a bully at school or a politician in the concept called government. To us, that is the chaos and mayhem.
If you see this theft as immoral and don’t consent to it, and continually but peacefully refuse to have your money stolen from you, the State agents point guns at you and make you go in a cage. If you refuse to go in the cage, the heavily armed gang shoots you and takes your stuff.
Our obedience masks the violent relationship for what it is.
I hope you are enjoying the land of the free.
