Fund Government Like We Fund Apple

Why is the Revolution important? Because love and freedom are the foundation for civil society, and coercion -- including coercive funding of programs -- harms BOTH love and freedom. Below, an excerpt from a column that expands on that point.

http://www.strike-the-root.com/81/allport/allport10.html

Fund Government Like We Fund Apple
by Glen Allport

Among the most common objections to a non-coercive, civil society is the funding question: "Where would money for X or Y come from, without taxes?" The obvious answer is that the money would come from the same place it comes from now: the people. There is no magic "funding fairy" to supply government with money; all government money comes from the people, one way or another. Some of this money comes from user fees, but most of it is obtained in ways that are serious crimes – except when the government does them.

The first of those crime-like ways is coercive taxation, including the income tax, sales taxes, and many other taxes, all of which come down to: "Give us your money, or else. We'll use the money as we decide, and you have to pay even if you are appalled at what we do with the cash." The second major funding method for the U.S. government is counterfeiting: printing up money from thin air, mostly by the government- chartered monopoly of the Federal Reserve (video; an excellent and recent Ron Paul interview on Fox News about the Fed; 8 min 48 sec). Each new dollar-from-nothing reduces the value of every existing dollar. The extent of this theft-via-inflation is seen in the staggering rise in prices since the Fed's creation in 1913 – when twenty dollars bought roughly an ounce of gold and bread was a nickel a loaf.*

Massive wealth has been siphoned from the American people – mostly from the poor and the middle class – to the power elite and their favored corporations, banks, supporters, and friends using the income taxation and counterfeiting methods of government funding since 1913. This coercively-obtained ocean of money has funded not only those few things that most people think "government should be doing" (roads, for example) but many things that neither government nor any other group should be allowed to do, such as torture and aggressive war. Only coercive methods of funding could pry the cash for such things from the hands of American citizens.

[Click link above for the full column.]