Taxing farts

I swear that the statist morons of this world would tax our farts if only they could find a way to count them. But they can’t yet so the next best thing will be to tax all the machines and technological inventions which make our lives better.

First on the statist agenda: robots.

That’s right. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world said recently that robots that “steal” human jobs should pay their fair share of taxes. “Right now, says Bill, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, Social  Security tax, all those things… If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

Robot taxes could help fund projects like caring for the elderly or working with children in school, Bill explained. You see, as the thinking goes, when robots can be programed to do jobs that humans do, and start doing those jobs, then the humans will not only be out of work but won’t be paying any taxes. It has been estimated that as much as 50% of human jobs are vulnerable to robots, which could result in the loss of about $2.7 trillion in the U.S. alone.

Well, I have a news flash for Mr. Gates. We’ve been paying robot taxes now ever since the invention of the wheel. How many human jobs do you think the wheel “stole” over the last few millennia? You can bet that governments everywhere have found just about every way possible to tax all the benefits to mankind resulting from wheels.

And what have all the humans done in that time after their jobs were “stolen” by wheels? Well, they’ve been forced to go out and find other jobs. When automobiles were invented, for example, all the humans working in the horse & buggy business and cleaning up horse shit in the streets had to find new jobs. And what did the governments do when they found all those new jobs? It taxed them, of course; that’s what happened. And then it taxed all the automobiles too.

Almost nothing remains untaxed in this life.

But Dr. Keith Ablow, psychiatrist, resident moron, and member of the Fox News Channel Medical A-Team, still thinks that President Trump should put a stop to robots from “stealing” jobs.

“A very simple thought occurred to me while I was scanning my own merchandise and swiping my own credit card while checking out at a Home Depot in Massachusetts this past weekend,” says Ablow:  “Why does everyone seem to be okay with this? There was no human being getting paid to ring up and bag my merchandise. Nor was there a worker at several other checkout lines. And no one was raising any red flags about the fact that machines had obviously put people out of work.”

“Why,” he muses, “does our culture seem to applaud every technological advance uncritically, without considering its impact on the employment of human beings? Sure, it will be cool and convenient when Amazon starts delivering packages by drone, within 30 minutes, but it will also put many delivery personnel and, perhaps, postal workers out of work.”

Apparently the good Dr. Ablow thinks that all advances in technology – advances which make all our lives immeasurably better -- should come to a screeching halt by order of the government if it results in some people having to find other ways to make a living.  He thinks people should still have jobs cleaning up horse shit in the streets.

So Bill Gates’ software and Michael Dell’s computers should never have been permitted because of all the many thousands, perhaps millions, of jobs they “stole” from human beings. Washing machines, refrigerators -- every technological advance you can think of -- have been responsible for putting some people out of work in one way or another. What happened to those people? They found other jobs.

There will always be plenty of jobs. There will always be plenty of opportunities for the government statists to tax all the people doing those jobs.

And when the statists can come up with a way to count them, you can bet that they’ll start taxing our farts too.