In an editorial in the New York TImes, Richard Conniff suggests we should change "taxes" to "dues" to make it easier for liberals to argue that the government should steal more money from us. Well, that was the gist of his argument, anyway.
What makes him think that our money is due to the government? Last I heard, if you didn't pay your dues at places where you pay dues, you just didn't get to join the club -- the club didn't threaten to imprison or murder you if you didn't pay. There is nothing voluntary about living under a government -- so "dues" will never be voluntary, as club dues are. All the name change will do is give "dues" a bad name.
I do love how Conniff stole this idea from George Lakoff without attribution. I find that to be quite appropriate in an article that advocates theft and the changing of the term for that form of theft from taxes to another term. When will liberals learn that, contra their Nazi philosopher mentor Heidegger's views on the matter, that language doesn't change reality. Theft is theft, whether the gang is the Crips, the Bloods, the government of the State of Texas, or the government of the United States of America.
A toilet, commode, loo, and crapper are all the same entity with the same function.
2 comments:
A few years ago, the IRS requested that taxpayers' checks now be made payable to "U.S. Treasury" instead of IRS. It was discovered that taxpayers feel less angry about writing checks to the Treasury than to the IRS. A crapper is still a toilet as you say.
Such changes work over the short term, until people figure out, "Hey! This is the same thing as it was earlier!"
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