Make sure to check out the final installment of my History of Lever Guns series over at Glibertarians!
Meanwhile: Sacramento just never runs out of stuff to tax. Excerpt:
But in California under Democrats, it’s tax, tax, tax — a drip and a drop, nickel and a dime — all the time. That’s not a political statement. It’s a fact.
Not all taxes are evil. Some are justified. But many are unwarranted. And others are eye-rollers.
One of the more controversial and annoying taxes currently being proposed is a state levy on sugary soft drinks. More on that later.
Here’s an eye-roller: A bill that would authorize San Francisco to turn its crooked Lombard Street — a tourist attraction after so many movie appearances — into a toll road, maybe even requiring reservations. Think they have a traffic jam now on weekends? Wait until cars are lined up behind a tollgate.
There are a whole bunch of taxing ideas in the Capitol: on new tires, firearms, water, prescription painkillers, lawyers, car batteries, corporations based on their CEO pay, estates worth more than $3.5 million, oil and gas extraction. The list goes on.
The oil and gas extraction tax is long overdue. We’re the only major oil-producing state without one. It would raise an estimated $1.5 billion a year.
The California Tax Foundation has counted more than $6.2 billion worth of tax increase proposals pending in the Legislature. It expects the figure to grow substantially as bills are amended with details.
Now I have serious issues with taxation in principle. To my thinking, it’s theft. “But Animal,” some folks have argued with me, “taxation is part of the social contract we all live under. It’s part of being a member of a society.”
To which my reply is: “Bullshit. A contract is a binding agreement, codified in writing, into which all parties enter voluntarily. I have not entered into this ‘social contract’ voluntarily. I was dragooned into it by force, and if you doubt that, bear in mind that if I attempt to renege on what government claims is my part of the ‘contract,’ they will send men with guns out to compel my obedience.”
That’s not a contract. That’s robbery.
And in California, you’re seeing exactly where a system that allows that sort of robbery will inevitably end up.
