There shouldn’t be any taxes. What right does the government have in taking away my money. (Hard earned or otherwise)

If I take resources out of public land (mines, quarries etc.), or use public resources (water, electricity, etc.) let the government charge me a fee. I don’t mind paying that. But how can the government take away half my revenues in the form of taxes?

Taxes normally come with the condition of no quid pro quo being there.

Why do you need taxes? That is a long story.

Most long term investments (roads, electricity, coal etc) depends on economies of scale, which in turn depends on the ability of companies/govt to sell them at such a low price, not to mention the investment they need.

No taxes = no money for the govt = no investment.

And trust me, you would not want to pay directly for being able to use electricity that comes from a power project, or coal from a coal mine.

And armed forces, the size of which we have, are not quite a profitable enterprise.

It sounds quite old school and so on, I know, but I have not seen a feasible alternative till date.

Flawed maybe, but it works.

Is that really you? I thought we lost you. :)

Ravages, we need some taxes, but I have written a lonnng essay on why personal income tax should be abolished.

Why the hell do I have to pay to keep up an incompetent, inefficient person who doesn’t have the motivation to even take care of his own life?

How long would I then have to keep on paying for his sorry life?
If you ask me (not many do, but…) to hell with taxes and charges and duties and the government even.

Yes, I have been sort of lost trying to see light from where I am these days, but certainly not gone for good.

I think I have read that looooong essay when you had published it.

Ravages: Shoot me after you answer it, but pray tell me how would you fund welfare otherwise?

It is not just businesses that use social resources, normal people do too. Some of them do not have the ability to pay for it. What would you have them do, go kill themselves or get them killed by someone?

Why the hell do I have to pay to keep up an incompetent, inefficient person who doesn’t have the motivation to even take care of his own life?

How long would I then have to keep on paying for his sorry life?

Ouch! And I thought the Third Reich was a thing of the past.

To try another perspective, you travel daily from city X to city Y and no one else does. Would you bear the entire cost of building that road?

Again, I agree it is not perfect, but give me an alternative that can actually work.

Caste is a major issue across the board, in the more as well as less developed parts of the country. But it is a very big issue in the Hindi belt today. Something I noticed was the Kamaraj was the first non-Brahmin to become CM of TN in 1954, whereas the first non-upper caste CM of Bihar was Laloo in 1990, and it is only in 1993 that UP got its first Dalit CM Mayawati.

This ofcourse could attest to the intrinsic problems of reservations, but today most of the OBCs (44% of population according to Mandal Comission) and SC/STs (17%), see reservations, or political intervention as a real solution to fixing millenia of social repression. Us city slickers can sit here and call it “vote bank” politics, but that does not prevent Laloo, Mulayam, Mayawati and Paswan from winning votes on this issue.

What is the liberal alternative? And how do we sell it?

Again, this is a rant, of a tortured soul. Discount it.

Sorry for not following you closely, but I think I will have another go at this.

It is great to hear that you would survive, even if the safety net was taken off. I guess so would many others on this blog.

But there are millions out there who cannot do the same, like the disabled or even people who have not had the good fortune of having a decent education like you or me. And please, not everyone one out there has the wherewithal to be a potential ‘rags-to-riches’ story.

To extend your argument, would you even take out the safety net that you might be providing to your aging folks, if they were to fall ill? They’ve had their chances in life, so they should fend for themselves, right? Or is it that being humane is too unfashionable these days?

I’d love to discount what you have said as a rant and etc, but the problem is too many people get away with lots of fancy impossible ideas without even imagining what it actually would entail.

All it takes is for three others who hear it to think of it as ‘oh-so-cool’ and voilà, we have a brilliant new solution to every problem on earth!

It falls in the same slot as the people who argue for a military dictatorship or going on a war to flatten everyone and anyone who irritates us.

The point being, most of us don’t even know what is life like without the freedom that we enjoy and the hardship that most of us have ever faced in life is having to live without net connectivity for a day or a week.

Gautam,

Would not know/think/care if I am a libertarian. My two paisa, regardless.

1) ‘No taxes’ won’t work in India. We are still way too varied in all possible ways for a solution like that.

2) Reservations should go. It was a bad idea in the first place. It only introduces another form of discrimination in an already unequal society. But it is so embedded and misused in our system right now that I do not honestly see how it will go away.

Most “city slickers” I know (including my mother who has multiple masters in social sciences) still vote based on what the caste leader asks them to.

Even among the educated and aware, votes are cast largely based on considerations other than performance. Look at the number of total idiots who get sent back to the Parliament from the cities.

3) Which brings me to the last point that we suffer from the AIDS paradigm when it comes to the problems in the country. It is always “It could not happen to me” or “It could not have happened because of me,” while the problems are very much amongst us too.

It is just more comfortable to point fingers at someone else, who in most cases do not have half the awareness or abilities that you or I have.