Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Monday, June 09, 2008

Money: I'm Going to Stake Out an Unpopular Stance, Here

When it comes to taxation, I'm all in favor of it. I know a lot of people aren't. They're all like "it's our money, the government shouldn't be all...you know...taking our money."

But I think they're wrong on that. I think if you examine it even mildly, the truth of it should be duh-smackingly obvious to anyone: all money belongs to the government.

It's theirs. They print it. It's got their pictures on there, presidents and such - hell, if I was printing my own money with my own big smiling mug on there, then I'd say that it was my money! But it's not even legal to do that. More proof that the production and ownership of money is (essentially) a government right.

True, the government releases limited quantities of money into the private sector from time to time, as a sort of a social experiment. They want to see what we'll do with it. Later they analyze the results, to use as a basis for certain limited sorts of policy decisions. So ultimately, having money in private hands works for the public good! But we need to stop kidding ourselves as to whose money it actually is.

It would be cool to have a real smartass, pithy 1-liner to end this with; sum up the whole jist somehow. Maybe later. Come back and edit. Pretend it was there all along.

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