Taxes and Death
Taxes and Death, or Your Work Ethic Is Killing Us All
This started as a rant while I was writing to my accountant about something stupid. I kept it in the form of a monologue directed at him because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ why not. Apologies to folks who find finance and accounting fascinating - I think your skills could be used for good, it’s just a matter of recovery.
Honestly I don’t mind paying taxes AT ALL, it’s all this attention demanding bullshit and subterfuge that no-one (who doesn’t want to) should ever waste precious time and consciousness on. It is the sheer entitlement of institutions like the CRA that make me hate them viscerally. I would much rather just pay directly to the treasury and overpay each year just for the ability to tell them to fuck off whenever they come knocking.
Like, why can’t you and I just work together to figure out how much I owe, then I pay that plus 5% or something to the treasury, and there’s an entire small country’s worth of emissions we just cancelled (i.e. the CRA). Is this a dual power opportunity? I would go to prison for this, and I am not joking.
We are destroying our planet literally because the people with guns to our heads don’t trust us. Imagine the amount of carbon that would be in the ground still if the people who administered all the stupid friction just stayed at home. What is it that we value so much about this suicide pact of nation states that we’re unwilling to erase the abstraction?
I mean, imagine if it was illegal to do promotional packaging or orthogonally structured plans for cellular phones. In practical terms it’s a wholly worthless thing to do and exists only to obstruct competitive price comparison. Entire business models are predicated on this idea, and entire strata of corporations the size of small towns are dedicated to escalating such extraction programs - to the point that the software systems are no longer able to work properly, and when you try to make a change, you spend an hour on the phone listening to someone apologize. Imagine if they all just stayed home and switched off their office lights and computers. The correct solution is not to make the stupid illegal - there will always be people who find ways to do stupid if there’s profit in it - but rather to seize control of the machinery and operate it correctly. The people at the top of this extraction pyramid should not exist.
It’s so frustrating, because every attempt to think about surviving the next century stalls before it can internalize the idea that we literally have to stop doing this shit or we’re going to die. I guess we all want to die.
If there is some way you can think of that I can break the law without underpaying or losing the moral high ground here, I’m ready. No-one else gives a shit, so I’d be doing it 100% for the rage. It would be a good, artful response to the absurdity of the pandemic.