People curl up like babies when they hear the word taxation, and that is because of a frequent misuse of taxation power to pork belly projects with business as usual objectives. Taxation, however, is an important instrument for redirecting an economy towards smart objectives and away from waste and corruption. We all see waste in government spending when it is not directed towards goals that favour our objectives. That is why big energy business attacks taxation because their objectives are not those of the ordinary man, which is a decent job and secure future.
Their only goal is to use the existing technology wherever they can and they don't engage in redirecting effort into shared science and better technologies. That would be competitive suicide. Only taxes and publicly funded research redirects the science towards better technologies. Witness how the big energy companies have ignored and continue to play down solar power while they can reap more profit from gas, oil and coal. Yes, they need to be taxed more heavily and their customers made to pay the 'real cost and price of buying their toxic products.
When big businesses come into an economy from outside the last thing on their mind is how to treat working people fairly and promote the objectives of working people. Instead they are gold rushers trying to pick the big nuggets without responsibility for whom ever they employ to do it. They have a strong 'army' of lawyers and business school graduates who asset strip and hunt out opportunities for easy riches, then figure out how to make a clean break. They are the modern aggressors against decency and sharing. They preach self help when they mean to help themselves, and their philosophy ends with I. The word we is not part of their limited vocabulary. Our goals are not their goals because they mean to take all our dignity away from us.
Smart taxes limit the powers of many big businesses, but these operators know about the weakest link which is the power they have to make and break a community. They come in and change the complexion of a community till it is not recognizable, siphon off the best resources and then leave with wealth having no qualms that they are the only game in town. They may even point to the losses they have to endure after they have pulled their resources out. Meanwhile, those that follow and feed off big businesses scape around for whatever is left and make do.
Not Smart Taxes
One of the major surprises of my generation is the major support of public gambling institutions which are used as forms of tax gathering. Such taxes can put leadership in the hands of those with suspicious objectives and sap those who have addiction problems and are unable in the normal way to think through appropriately the mathematics of risk.
I have studied the effects of new technology on economies for many years. Believe me when I say that one of our greatest problems may be the remarkable and unreasonable profits that the oil and gas companies have made over the past years.
Conservatives support wise taxation
At one time in the late 1970's, I worked for a major bank in the UK and the then Prime Minister Maggy Thatcher decided to tax the excessive profits of the high street banks. This was a wise move on the part of a very Conservative leader, so its not just 'liberals' that think of taxation. Taxation is a tool of the people to redirect resources towards goals and objectives where they are needed and away from resource wasters such as, and we are all guilty of this perhaps:
- big cars
- private jets
- private fuel-powered boats
What we need for leadership are statesmen that are out from under the influence of those energy practices that have been excessive and toxic. These statesmen will think of taxation as a tool for redirecting economies away from toxic practices and technologies towards clean practices and technologies.