The Old Blog in the Desert

There’s a kind of wisdom you can only get from sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of receipts, a calculator, and a cup of lukewarm coffee that’s long past its best hour. It’s the kind of wisdom that whispers, “You don’t really own anything, you’re just renting it from the government one tax bill at a time.”

Now, before you think I’m launching into some anti-government rant, let me assure you, this isn’t about rebellion. It’s about reflection, because the truth is, taxes have been with us since before anybody ever printed a dollar, minted a coin, or swiped a debit card.

There’s nothing new about taxes. Abraham himself paid the first one, so the story goes, written on a rock by the hand of divinity and handed to Moses atop Mount Sinai.

The flat rate was ten percent, a tithe, they called it, and the penalty for evasion wasn’t a fine or prison time; it was the wrath of God. Talk about a strict audit.

Even Joseph, the carpenter, found himself taxed into history. He didn’t head for Bethlehem because of a travel bug or a family reunion, no, he went because Caesar Augustus demanded a census, which, in plain language, meant a tax roll.

Joseph was a good man, descended from King David, but not so flush that he could afford a courier. So, though his wife was heavy with child, they trudged to Bethlehem on foot.

And when they arrived? The inns were full because everyone else had come to pay their taxes, too.

And a housing shortage, caused by bureaucratic issues, was underway. That’s why the Son of Man was born in a manger.

Human beings have been pushing back against taxes for as long as we’ve been paying them. The Magna Carta wasn’t born out of noble musings about liberty.

It was the result of people getting tired of King John dipping his hand too far into their pockets. The lords handed him the document at sword point, and though they probably didn’t know it, they were signing the first formal complaint letter about unfair taxation.

Fast forward a few centuries, and along came a bunch of colonists who dumped tea into Boston Harbor for the same reason. “No taxation without representation,” they cried.

And so America was born, with a kind of naïve optimism that maybe, just maybe, we could build a nation that wouldn’t tax its people into despair. But history has a way of repeating itself, especially when nobody’s paying attention.

When Congress passed the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, it sounded harmless enough. “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived.”

Words like a salesman’s smile. Nobody noticed that we forgot to include a limit. No ceiling, no safety valve, no “enough is enough” clause.

We gave the government a bottomless bucket and said, “Here, take what you need.”

And take it did.

We didn’t lose our property by conquest. We surrendered it voluntarily, one signature, one paycheck, one deduction at a time. There was no musket fire, no cannon roar, just the soft rustle of tax forms sliding into envelopes.

There’s a peculiar kind of genius in that. You don’t have to take freedom by force when you can convince people to pay for their own captivity.

History offers a sobering bit of arithmetic. Every great civilization, Rome, Greece, Spain, and China, had its golden age.

Each lasted about 150 years at its peak. And none were conquered from without, but rotted from within.

They taxed their citizens until initiative dried up like a puddle in August. The people grew complacent, then dependent, then resentful. The government grew large, the people small, and soon the whole system collapsed under its own weight.

A good government, paradoxically, is most dangerous when it succeeds. It produces prosperity, and prosperity breeds comfort, and comfort dulls vigilance.

The more prosperous the people, the lazier they become about guarding the gates of liberty. They start asking the government to do things they once did for themselves: feed the hungry, care for the sick, manage the schools, pave roads, regulate markets, and even think on their behalf.

And each time they asked, the government grew, never shrinking back to its previous size, expanding like a balloon that refused to deflate. At first, it seems harmless.

You say, “Well, it’d be nice if someone cleaned up the parks.”

The government nods and hires workers, but to pay them, it raises taxes. You shrug, it’s only a little more.

Then you say, “Wouldn’t it be grand if we had free healthcare?”

And the government smiles again, writes more checks, and raises more taxes. Soon, you’re asking for college, housing, safety nets, subsidies, and grants as government grows bigger, heavier, hungrier, and to feed it, you, the citizen, must grow smaller, leaner, poorer.

The trade-off is subtle but absolute: every inch of comfort purchased from government costs an inch of freedom. And you don’t notice it until one day you wake up and realize you can’t start a business, sell a home, or even die without filling out a stack of forms and writing one last check.

I once knew a man named Harvey who owned a small hardware store in Fallon. He worked hard, six days a week, and had a way of finding the best bolt for any odd job in town.

When I asked him how business was, he sighed and said, “I do fine, Tom, but Uncle Sam’s my business partner—and he never lifts a finger.”

I laughed, thinking he was joking, but he wasn’t smiling.

“By the time I pay my income tax, my property tax, my business license, my inventory tax, my sales tax, my fuel tax, and my payroll tax,” he said, “there’s not much left. I keep the lights on because I like people, not profit.”

I asked him, “Why not sell and retire?”

“Because,” he said, “then I’d have to pay a capital gains tax.”

There it was, the arithmetic of liberty, plain as the cash register on his counter.

Economists say that a nation begins to fail when taxes surpass 25 percent of its national income. Beyond that, people lose incentive and stop striving, stop building, stop dreaming.

We’re already past that, closer to 33 percent by some counts. And still the line keeps creeping forward, inch by inch, justified by noble causes and patriotic slogans.

“For the children,” they say. “For the roads. For the planet.”

But every time the line moves, something in the national spirit erodes, a little trust here, a little independence there. The great machine still hums along, but it’s running on fumes of past glory.

The U.S. will continue on its own momentum for a while, but sooner or later, we’ll need to refill the tank. The question is, with what?

More money or more courage?

I once read that democracy fails when people discover they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. Once that happens, elections stop being about ideas and start being about giveaways.

Candidates promise more benefits, more programs, more “relief.” And the voters, in turn, promise their support.

But relief never stays relief for long. It becomes a dependency, which breeds control.

You see, when you owe your comfort to the government, you owe your obedience as well. A hungry man is free; a fed man is on a leash.

So long as citizens are willing to trade liberty for luxury, freedom will always sell to the lowest bidder. The tragedy isn’t that the government grows big, but that we let ourselves grow small.

We talk about taxes as if they’re some natural disaster, something that happens to us. But every tax, every regulation, every law was written by the hands we elected. We willingly gave away the keys to the vault, thinking that someone else would manage our money better than we could.

We voluntarily surrendered our rights to private property, and we did it with a ballot, not a bayonet. It’s a remarkable experiment in self-government: not that tyrants rule over us, but that we employ them.

This pattern is as old as civilization itself. Good times make soft people, soft people make weak governments, a weak government makes hard times, and hard times make strong people again.

And round and round it goes.

If we’re lucky, we might be standing at the beginning of another hard time. Because hardship, though unpleasant, is the only thing that ever reawakens responsibility, forcing us to remember that freedom, like any tool, rusts when left unused.

So where does that leave us? Somewhere between Rome’s decay and America’s destiny.

We’re not doomed yet, but we’re certainly on the curve where government keeps getting bigger and the individual keeps getting smaller. And it doesn’t have to end that way.

We can still choose to balance the arithmetic of liberty by remembering that our freedom isn’t in the dollar. Taxes represent a trade-off, and we ought to be sure we’re getting value for what we give.

That means demanding accountability instead of handouts, doing more for ourselves, asking less of others, and keeping a sharper eye on the small print before signing away another piece of our freedom.

One day, each of us will face an audit that no accountant can balance. We’ll look back and ask, “What did I do with the liberty I inherited?”

Did I spend it wisely, investing in the next generation? Or did I waste it, trading it for convenience and comfort?

The truth is that freedom and taxes have always walked hand in hand. One measures the cost of the other. But if freedom becomes too expensive to maintain, then we’re not citizens anymore, we’re tenants, renting space in a nation our ancestors once owned outright.

The arithmetic is simple enough for anyone with a kitchen table and a cup of coffee to understand: When government gets bigger, the individual grows smaller, taxes get higher, initiative gets lower, and when freedom gets cheaper, tyranny gets easier.

And when people stop caring, history closes the account.

So the next time you sit down to do your taxes, don’t curse the numbers too much.

Just remember that they tell a story older than Rome and as current as your next paycheck. It’s the story of how much we’re willing to pay for the privilege of calling ourselves free.

And maybe if enough of us start reading that story again, we’ll decide the arithmetic needs revising, before the bill comes due in full.