Taxes Are Not A Recap

"That's what taxes are: a recap." Please. No. Just stop.

Whatever your particular position on the morality of the 16th Amendment might be, few people are willing to swallow the camel that the tax code as written is particularly efficient. Firms like TurboTax exist simply because the legislature has decided to use the tax code to remake the galaxy of private production and exchange in an image that suits its members' political or private business interests. The US tax code is an unwieldy juggernaut, and tax prep software is an industry that extracts rents from this criminal complexity.

The little Aristotelian in my foot locker is hopping mad at this grotesque commercial-et-political kayfabe. This is an expropriation of private joys to feed the maw of Congressional logrolling, institutionalized corruption, and telescopic moral engineering. You got married, you had a kid, and guess what? The maze of incentives in your IRS Form 1040 means that you too get to support corrupt farm subsidies, import tariffs, tanks the Army doesn't want, Predator drones buzzing the night sky to rain fiery death abroad, and a raucous jostling of nudge after tax-fueled nudge to individuals and firms. Save here, spend here, defer defer defer. Buy bonds, sell stocks, get yourself an IRA... no wait, don't hoard cash, we need to stimulate the ecooooonomy.

It's already maddening enough without adding syrupy insult to injury. And this sort of contemptible advertising that hocks a goober right in the eye of eudaimonia is hateful in a way that convinces me more than ever that the grotesque collaboration between the second and the third estates is the great public sin that rose from the putrid ashes of the collusion between the first and the second. It is the phoenix whose corpse must be interred in the gut of the kraken, never to rise again.

TurboTax, you and your confederates are a great, shaggy chancre on the neck of euvoluntary exchange. At least have the tact to reflect that in your advertising.

If taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society, then why should we feel comfortable paying part of that price to a house-boggart?

h/t TGP