Government: The End of Basic Human Decency

Would you consider me a good neighbor if I were to come into your house and tell you that you had 105 days to account for every dollar you had had anything to do with for the last year or I would break into your house in the middle of the night and haul you off to a cage?

Under what conditions would you want me asking you how much money you made last year and what you did with it?

Yet this is how government funds its activities every January first: forcing its agents into others’ private lives the way no good neighbor would think of doing, demanding answers that will be checked by April 15.

What good could government possibly do that would make up for this breach of human decency? And if the end could never justify this means, what would?

How does treating one’s neighbor this way differ from enslaving him? How much of my tangible assets and my privacy and my freedom do I have to lose before I am a slave? If someone else decides where the line is, am I not thereby already his slave?

Now we have our tax money—money the government extorts from us after asking us questions no decent person would ask us—going to have our rulers watch absolutely everything we do. As one commenter put it, if this is what they tell us they’re doing, what are they doing that they’re not telling us about? How long before we are being watched in the shower?

I have a hard enough time understanding how people who resent the idea that a supreme being would watch everything they do would be OK with fellow mortals doing the same thing. I find it incomprehensible that Christians would support these violations of human decency in the name of him who commands us to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.