"So pretty soon it will be April 15th, and the people in your neighborhood are going to have to send in their income taxes. The way they’re going to look at it, and the way they’ve been trained to look at it is that there is some alien force, like maybe from Mars, that is stealing our hard earned money from us and giving it to the government. Okay, well, that would be true in a totalitarian state, but if you had a democratic society you’d look at it the other way around You’d say "great, it's April 15th, we’re all going to contribute to implement the plans that we jointly decided on for the benefit of all of us." But that idea is even more frightening than Social Security. It means that we would have a functioning democracy, and no center of concentrated power is ever going to want that, for perfectly obvious reasons. So yes there are efforts, and pretty successful efforts to get people to fear the government as their enemy, not to regard it as the collective population acting in terms of common goals that we’ve decided on which would be what have to happen in a democracy."This is my first Noam Chomsky post on this blog. Chomsky has been an heroic figure to me for many years. In fact i look out for his perspective often. This bit i found on Wikinews with a few other recent choice clips from an interview he did on March 13th here.
*recycled old post (4/7/09) while i'm in Dublin, I should be live again tomorrow - thanks.
In my (short) lifetime, I have not seen any government actually act in the way its constituents actually want, therefore people should fear paying taxes until there is an actual public servant in control of that money, which is never going to happen.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this post. I think many Americans fear truly being a democracy. In my talks with people so many repel National Health and a strong public school system (things that we should want our taxes to pay for) but then I have to remember this country was taken from one group of people and another group were enslaved to create the wealth. We have a beautiful constitution and bill of rights, I'm hoping we as a nation will grow into them.
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