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United States News Title: Sin Taxes & Other Orwellian Methods of Compliance That Feed the Government’s Greed Taxman, the only song written by George Harrison to open one of the Beatles albums (it featured on the bands 1966 Revolver album), is a snarling, biting, angry commentary on government greed and how little control we the taxpayers have over our lives and our money. If you drive a car, Ill tax the street, If you try to sit, Ill tax your seat. If you get too cold Ill tax the heat, If you take a walk, Ill tax your feet. Dont ask me what I want it for If you dont want to pay some more Cause Im the taxman, yeah, Im the taxman. When the Beatles finally started earning enough money from their music to place them in the top tax bracket, they found the British government only-too-eager to levy a supertax on them of more than 90%. Here in America, things arent much better. More than two centuries after our ancestors went to war over their abused property rights, were once again being subjected to taxation without any real representation, all the while the government continues to do whatever it likeslevy taxes, rack up debt, spend outrageously and irresponsiblywith little concern for the plight of its citizens. Because the governments voracious appetite for money, power and domination has grown out of control, its agents have devised other means of funding its excesses and adding to its largesse through taxes disguised as fines, taxes disguised as fees, and taxes disguised as tolls, speeding tickets and penalties. And then you have all of those high-handed, outrageously manipulative government programs sold to the public as a means of forcing compliance and discouraging unhealthy behavior by way of taxes, fines, fees and programs for the better good. Surveillance cameras, government agents listening in on your phone calls, reading your emails and text messages and monitoring your spending, mandatory health care, sugary soda bans, anti-bullying laws, zero tolerance policies, political correctness: these are all outward signs of a governmenti.e., a societal elitethat believes it knows what is best for you and can do a better job of managing your life than you can. This is tyranny disguised as the better good. Indeed, this is the tyranny of the Nanny State: marketed as benevolence, enforced with armed police, and inflicted on all those who do not belong to the elite ruling class that gets to call the shots. So-called sin taxes have become a particularly popular technique used by the Nanny State to supposedly discourage the populace from engaging in activities that dont align with the governments priorities (consuming sugary drinks, smoking, drinking, etc.). Personally, I dont think the government really cares how its citizens live or die: they just want more of the taxpayers money, and they figure they can rake it in by using sin taxes to appeal to that self-righteous segment of every society that sees nothing wrong with imposing their belief systems on the rest of the populace. Examples abound. For instance, a growing number of cities and states (Washington DC, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle, among others) have adopted or considered imposing taxes on sugary drinks, as much as a dollar more for a two-liter bottle of soda, supposedly in the hopes of forcing lower-income communities that struggle with obesity and diabetes to make healthier dietary choices by making the drinks more expensive. The faulty logic behind these sin taxes seems to be that if you make it cost-prohibitive for poor people to pursue unhealthy lifestyle choices, theyll stop doing it. Except it doesnt really work out that way. Study after study shows that while sales of sugary drinks decreased sharply in cities with a soda tax, sales figures spiked at stores located outside the city. In other words, people just shopped elsewhere. You wont convince former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg of this, however. Bloomberg, a 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful, believes the government needs even greater tax powers in order to force Americansespecially poor peopleto make smarter lifestyle choices. When we raise taxes on the poor, its good because then the poor will live longer because they cant afford as many things that kill them, stated Bloomberg. Folks, this right here is everything that is wrong with the power-hungry jackals that aspire to run the government today: by hook or by crook, theyre working hard to frogmarch the citizenry into complying with their dictates, because they believe that only they know whats best for you. Unfortunately, this is what happens when you empower the government and its various agencies, agents and corporate partners to act in loco parentis for an entire nation. Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people. Yet the government can only go as far as we the people allow. Therein lies the problem: we have suspended our moral consciences in favor of the police state. The choice before us is clear, and it is a moral choice. It is the choice between tyranny and freedom, dictatorship and autonomy, peaceful slavery and dangerous freedom, and manufactured pipedreams of what America used to be versus the gritty reality of what she is today. Most of all, perhaps, the choice before us is that of being a child or a parent, of obeying blindly, never questioning, and marching in lockstep with the police state or growing up, challenging injustice, standing up to tyranny, and owning up to our responsibilities as citizens, no matter how painful, risky or uncomfortable. As author Erich Fromm warned in his book On Disobedience, At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of civilization. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you have no choice, no voice, and no real options when it comes to the governments claims on your life, your movements, your property and your money, youre not free. Personally, Id rather die a free man having lived according to my own dictates (within the bounds of reasonable laws) than live as a slave chained up in a government prison.
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