I love taxes and regulations!

Printed in the Reader Weekly, 2013-10-31 and found at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2013/10/31/2364_party_of_one-3.

I submitted it as follows; I did remove from this copy the missing section in last week's Reader Weekly.

Well, not all that much.  What I like is all the benefits that taxes and regulations bring me and many other people.

Like many, I find paying taxes a chore.  I have to set aside money twice a year for property taxes.  I have to keep lots of records and fill out detailed forms to calculate how much federal and state income tax I owe.  And because I don’t have withholding on all of my income, I have to estimate these taxes quarterly and pay a portion of the presumed shortfall.

A few years ago I had a sore chest, extreme sweating, and nausea.  Was this a heart attack?  Don’t hesitate; call 9-1-1!  Within five minutes a fire truck with four fire fighters/emergency medical technicians arrived.  Without going into all the details, I was hospitalized but it was determined that I did not have a heart attack.  My taxes, your taxes, and the taxes of many others paid for this quick response.

Was this an entitlement?

One of the ER doctors I saw lived in our house a few years before we bought it.  He was a graduate of the UMD medical school.  State taxes paid some of the cost of operating UMD.  Would there be as many doctors and nurses if they or their parents had to pay the full cost of their education, starting with elementary school?

Is this an entitlement?

Keep in mind George Washington’s farewell address, which contained among much other ignored advice:

“[I]t is essential that you should practically bear in mind, that towards the payment of debts there must be Revenue; that to have Revenue there must be taxes; that no taxes can be devised, which are not more or less inconvenient and unpleasant…”

Most of us drive regularly on streets and our commerce depends on the roads.  They cost a lot more than the streets of George Washington’s time.  And city streets like George Washington rode his horse on still existed in my lifetime.  See “11 Traveled Dirt Streets to Be Hard Surfaced at No Cost to Property”, Kansas City Star, 1944-04-06.

Are hard-surfaced streets an entitlement?

Red lights are a bothersome regulation.  Why should I wait while somebody comes by on the cross street?  Well, when I’m driving on the cross street, I appreciate that the other traffic will stop periodically so that I may drive into the intersection safely.

Requiring auto insurance is a bothersome regulation.  But it sure is nice when another person is at fault for banging my car that their insurance will pay for the damage.  I think it was in Michigan that a driver came out from a parking lot and put a dent in the side of our car.  He didn’t stop, and so I made a U-turn and followed him a block or two before he stopped.  We pleasantly exchanged information and we went on our way.  But after a few blocks we saw his insurance agency.  We stopped in and related the incident.  Oh, but he buys the insurance and cancels within a week or so.  Off we went to the police station and told our story again.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody followed these “burdensome” regulations?

Among my allergies is quaternium-15, an ingredient in many lotions.  Imagine my surprise when a hypoallergenic lotion contained quaternium-15.  If regulations didn’t require a list of ingredients, would I wind up having an allergic reaction and not know why?

My wife has to stay away from soy lecithin.  Dark chocolate is a healthy treat.  Many dark chocolate bars contain soy lecithin.  If regulations didn’t require the labeling of ingredients, what would happen to her if she ingested soy lecithin unknowingly?

When all the nutrition information was mandated on foods, I pooh poohed it.  Come on, you know a candy bar has lots of calories; so stay away from candy bars if you have a weight problem.  I recently had a colonoscopy and was told not to take iron before the procedure.  Chocolate was one of the OK foods.  But, dark chocolate contains 6 to 35 percent of the daily value of iron.  If I had that much iron would it have changed the diagnosis?  I stayed away from chocolate and I had a negative result.  Without the regulated nutritional information I might have had a false positive result.

Many corporations regard regulations against air and water pollution as burdensome and anti-free market.  Many studies have shown that many of the chemicals in our environment are causing brain impairment in children and that they don’t perform well in school.  Oh, poor school performance is not caused by pollution, it’s the “greedy teachers’ unions”!

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. supposedly said he liked taxes, “They buy civilization.”  I would add without regulation, we would not have civilization.

"Free marketers" once again prevent free markets

Well, Proposition 37, requiring labeling of GMO foods in California, was defeated by the overwhelming resources of self-interested corporations.  Free markets mean all necessary information.  By hiding the contents of their products, agribusinesses are denying free markets to the consumer.  See "Letter about GMO foods".

You might also consider the words of Adam Smith in "Wealth of Nations":

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." - pages 142-143

I included the above in "The Invisible Adam Smith".

I hope you're not allergic to any foods that have been spliced into other foods.