"Send it in!"

I love this story. I love this effort.

One of the things that's happened over the years is that the government class has come to look upon the citizens as chattel, much as the old feudal masters looked on their, well, chattel. But it has always maintained the fiction that it believed in "citizens" and doing what was best for them. All usurpations of power and authority were done "for the children" or "for the elderly" or "for public safety" or "for the common good." And always done in service of the fiction that the government was doing things by and for and in the name of "the people."

So I love that someone's actually proposed, in a proposal that's now gone public, something that strips away all the veneer.
UK Proposes All Paychecks Go to the State First

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

The proposal by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stresses the need for employers to provide real-time information to the government so that it can monitor all payments and make a better assessment of whether the correct tax is being paid.

Currently employers withhold tax and pay the government, providing information at the end of the year, a system know as Pay as You Earn (PAYE). There is no option for those employees to refuse withholding and individually file a tax return at the end of the year.

If the real-time information plan works, it further proposes that employers hand over employee salaries to the government first.

Hey, you know that they already look at it as their money, because they talk about how some of you have already "made enough money," and about how tax cuts "cost the government money." Let's be up-front about it - the government gets everything, and you get some back by sufferance, if they feel like it. There's an old joke version of the income tax form which has two lines:

1. How much money did you make?
2. Send it in!

Someone in the UK has taken it seriously.

In any event, this is the kind of thing that might awaken even the most well-intentioned of well-intentioned non-hard-left "I'm-liberal-because-conservatives-are-mean-to-people-and-I'm-not-mean" compatriots from his slumber. So I love it.

Quote chain

I've got little to add to this...

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

- George Orwell

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

- John Derbyshire

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

- Thomas Friedman

Of course, we all remember those Friedman columns longing for the party in power to be able to unilaterally impose its "politically difficult by critically important policies" during the Bush administration.

Oh, you don't remember those?

Hmm... Come to think of it, neither do I. Well, when the space ants come, I'm sure that Thomas will welcome our new insect overlords, and be happy to help them round up others to toil in their underground sugar caves. As long as they're Democrats. Or Communists. Or at least not Republicans...



(The Friedman column also contains this howler: "Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist." Yes, a centrist who has taken over the banking and auto industries and is gunning for the health care system. A centrist who has appointed 31 different czars to Cabinet-level duties in such a way that they don't need Congressional approval, including avowed Communist and 911 "Truther" Van Jones. A centrist whose first major piece of legislation was a $750 Billion grab-bag for leftist special interest groups which has provided no stimulus whatsoever to the economy. A centrist who wants to redistribute the wealth, who jokingly threatened to have a college audited, and less-jokingly threatened to allow mobs to attack bankers. That kind of centrist. It's no wonder the people at the Times think that moderates are arch-conservatives if they think that Obama's a centrist.)

UPDATE: Thanks, Jonah, for linking. Welcome newcomers - feel free to take a look around. I've got a bunch of Obama stuff, a lot of linking but some original analysis. I write a lot about the Boston Red Sox, as well, and whatever happens to come up that inspires me...