Episode 28

Thanks for the feedback!

First and foremost -- I agree. Ben Savard is one of the most cool, collected, thoughtful young people I've spoken to in a very long time. I hope we can have him on the show again soon.

You bring up two points in your post. Both are quite common misconceptions, and I welcome the opportunity to clarify.

1) "Taxes are payment for services" / "taxes are the toll for living in the USA"

There are several problems with this position.
First, what taxes are we talking about? I am happy to pay that portion of my local property taxes that go toward services I actually use: police protection, fire department, local street maintenance.

Federal taxes are an entirely different matter.

I do not believe there is *any* product or service that I want from the Federal government. Their military is creating as many terrorists as it eliminates. Their pointless bureaucracies, such as the FDA, do not in fact keep me safe (remember Vioxx?), their DEA is destroying the US Constitution with its unwinnable "war on drugs". Their Education bureaucracy gave us the boondoggle known as "No Child Left Behind". And so on.

More to the point, payment for these "services" is demanded whether or not I wanted the service!

Suppose I am waiting in my car at a stoplight. A man with a squeegee approaches, and without a word from me, he cleans my windshield. He then demands that I pay him $5.

Do I *really* owe him the money? What if I thought my windshield was just fine, thank you very much? What if he succeeded only in smearing the bug guts all over my windshield with his crummy squeegee?

This is of course exactly the situation we have with the Federal government -- except that the squeegee man is armed, and he will take my car away if I don't pay up.

2) "If you don't like it here, leave!"

America was the freest nation on earth about 50 years ago. We've been slipping, quickly, both in therms of economic and personal freedoms. A number of think-tanks publish such rankings; check freedomhouse.org for one example (there are others).

I've lived in other countries, and I still prefer America over any other - by a long shot. But that doesn't mean it's perfect. I believe the Founders of the American Republic would be ashamed at what has become of their country -- an Income Tax? These men were willing to kill and die over the Stamp Tax, which amounted to a few cents, in today's terms, on legal documents and playing cards. Paying 20% or more of every dollar they earn, to a Federal government many hundreds of miles away? They would surely have had a revolution first. Indeed, they did.

My government is willing to take my neighbor's children away from him, if he doesn't educate them according to government standards. My government is willing to imprison my neighbor for a full year for possessing just one seed of hemp, to monitor his every phone call in the event he might be a terrorist, to devalue the money in his wallet by simply printing more of it, and to imprison him if he should attempt to trim my hair or nails without government-approved 'papers'. My government runs so-called border patrol checkpoints ... fully 50 miles from any national border.

So. People are supposed to leave "the land of the free" because they feel they are oppressed by its government? Does that mean those people are simply malcontents? We should be grateful for the 1st amendment, and not notice that we've partially lost the 2nd, and completely lost the 4th, 9th, and 10th amendments?

Or does it mean that, just perhaps, this land is not so free as it once was?