I regret that I cannot publish comments in Chinese

I'm not an English-only fascist, but despite my best efforts, I cannot read Chinese, and I don't want to publish comments when I don't know what they say. Write in Spanish, and I might have a fighting chance!

Imagine there's no government ...

It's very easy to listen to government advocates tell you what they're going to provide for you and just believe it. They paint a picture, and you don't have to use your imagination at all. This is especially appealing if you've been raised by television and school, and actually have no imagination.

Schools for everyone - health care for everyone - roads and bridges and dams - national parks and clean water - protection from criminals, and so on. You just obey, and cough up a lot of money, and a bunch of people called "government" will provide all of these good things for you. It takes a bit of imagination to picture what could be there if these people called "government" didn't take your money, didn't demand your obedience, didn't provide anything - and instead left us in freedom to use our own resources and come up with our own solutions. Why do so many people assume that we'd have nothing -- that we'd just sit on our hands, lamenting that we have no education, no doctors, and no roads to drive on? The assumption is that problems can't be solved unless someone is holding a gun to someone else's head - either to get the funding for something or to make sure that the something gets done.

Why so much faith in the power of violence? Why so little faith in the power of cooperation?

Should we put God back in Schools?

This post is in response to a Facebook conversation resulting from the question: Should we put God back in Schools?

Okay, since people seem determined to address this question seriously, I will try to be serious myself, instead of just poking fun at the question itself.

It can be very hard to say which particular moves are better or worse within a political system as screwed up as this one is. Ideally, there would be no public schools, no taxes, no guys with guns taking kids away from their parents if they didn't send them to school, and so on. As always, it's impossible to predict the spontaneous order that would result from the free actions of millions of individuals, so I won't even try to describe my own imaginings of what might come to be. Let's just assume that parents would choose the education they thought best for their children (or children would choose...) within the means of their unexploited income. They would obviously choose to educate their children according to what they believe is true: their own worldview and their own values. To do otherwise is insane (unless you're living under a regime so oppressive that it will kill you if you express unapproved beliefs).

Some people have world views that are based - however imperfectly - on scientific thinking: i.e., reasoning logically from the available evidence. Others believe in other epistemological methods in addition to that, such as faith and divine revelation. Many have secular moral views that are held with as much religious fervor and as little evidential grounding as those of religious people. But none of us perceives the world perfectly, and the best we can do for our children and students is to teach them what we believe to be true, and how we believe truth is acquired.

When people start picking up guns (making laws) to force their own world views on others or on others' children, oppression and strife results. I think this is the inevitable result of a national, tax-funded, mandatory educational system. People are forced to fund it, children are forced to go there, and bitter strife over what should be taught follows as inevitably as night follows day. The strife over how all our children should be educated results from the nationalistic assumption that all children living under the control of a specific "government" within some political boundary can and should be educated the same way. Everyone has ideas about it, and everyone believes that their ideas should be forced on everyone else.

A vague question like: should we put God back into schools? entails so many undefined assumptions that it really can't be answered. Distinctions must be made between schools that are freely chosen and those that are forced on people. Also, "God" certainly must be defined if the question is to be answered.

I bring whatever divinity I possess wherever I go. I try to bring love, and a profound respect for the humanity of others wherever I go. I try to seek the truth with an open mind. I would say that if you think God needs to be in a school or anywhere else, you must take him (or it) there yourself: you must take your own conception of him (or it) inside of yourself. Don't try to make laws about it. Leave others in freedom to pray or not pray to whomever they please. Leave others in freedom to seek truth the way they think best, and to speak what they believe to be true. Beliefs, values, and world views cannot be changed by force. But if you live your own conception of God, others may be drawn to that conception.

Of course, these are just my ideas, based on my values ...

Free Health Care or Health Care Freedom?

I've been wanting to write a follow-up to my first post about health care, and here it is. I believe that we do have a right to "free" health care, but not in the sense of having a right to goods and services that someone else has produced without having to pay for them. What we do have a right to is the freedom to take care of our bodies as we see fit. We have a right to be unmolested in the area of health care as much as we have this right in every other area of life. We also have a right to health care services that cost what they would cost in a voluntary market, free from government intervention. I think that most people vastly underestimate the effect of more than a century of government intervention on the prices in the health care market.

Interventions are rarely initiated by government itself, much less by popular demand, but by business interests seeking government protection from the ruthless demands of the voluntary market. Those most able to pay the admission price to the government's boudoir can buy government guns to protect their interests from the free will of health care customers and providers.

The AMA became a national organization in 1847. Its publicly stated goals were to raise the quality of health care, and protect people from "quacks." And its not-publicly-stated goals included: to protect and increase the income and status of white male doctors within the profession; to restrict the practices of other professionals and other schools of thought in medicine; to control medical schools to restrict the supply of doctors; and to punish price competition among doctors. Of special note was the Flexner Report of 1910, which resulted in legislation further restricting entry into the profession, especially for women, blacks, and Jews. Jews were often able to acquire their education abroad; many medical schools especially for blacks were shut down.

The AMA recently apologized for its racist policies of the past. But at the time, the AMA was just doing its thing as a trade union for white male doctors; it was government enforcement that allowed them to succeed. And the gains of any trade union, monopoly, or cartel always come at the expense of other workers and businesses. The free market is the ever-present enemy of established business. Once you're on top, it's just "good business" to pay the government to protect your position there. You disseminate propaganda to the effect that the upstarts and alternatives are a danger to consumers, and must be regulated out of existence, or kept in a very small pen. Then the government will come to the consumers' "rescue" by limiting their freedom of choice.

For many decades, the AMA and the government have been "protecting" us from black, Jewish, and female doctors; "protecting" us from being served by other professionals such as midwives, osteopaths, homeopaths, pharmacists, and chiropractors; "protecting" us from cooperative medical plans; and so on. In general, for more than a century they've been "protecting" us from less expensive alternatives, and from our own freedom of choice.

It doesn't take too many brain cells to realize that when cheaper alternatives are outlawed, the prices of the restricted supply of the approved good will rise. Thus for a long time, doctors and drugs have become increasingly expensive relative to other goods, over and above the effect of the government's currency inflation, which affects all goods in the market.

With no alternate universe available, it's impossible to say what would have happened over the same period of time in a voluntary market. The government and the medical establishment can claim credit for everything good that has happened in medicine for the last 150 years, and blame all problems on the tattered vestiges of freedom that still remain, and there is no way we can prove them wrong. All we can do is point to economic theories that the average person does not understand.

Mid-20th century, the government interfered in the market with wage and price controls, and employers began offering hospital insurance to employees in lieu of higher wages. Over a decade or two, hospital insurance and then general outpatient health care insurance became the norm. As people got used to third-party payment, they lost touch with the actual price of medical care. And with employers providing insurance, they were shielded from the price of their insurance premiums also. Thus patients were left on the demand side of medical transactions, with very little awareness of the cost of what they were demanding.

This situation was a perfect opportunity for the established medical profession to push their prices up and up, and to sell more and more procedures, office visits, or drugs. When insurance is paying, patients will generally do whatever their doctors suggest, and price is no object. People want to get as much out of their insurance as they can. Thus insurance increases demand and causes prices to skyrocket.

This effect was exacerbated by the policies of Blue Cross/Blue Shield. These major insurers paid "cost-plus," which created an incentive for hospitals and doctors to increase costs, while The Blues generally paid the claims with no questions asked.

The system happily relieved doctors of any concern about their patients' pocketbooks. They could bill insurance companies for much more than they would demand from their patients face tofface. With hospitals, doctors, and drug companies all on the insurance bandwagon, the costs of healthcare rose dramatically; the incomes of doctors, hospitals, and drug companies rose dramatically; and the insurance premiums paid by employers rose dramatically along with them.

When insurance premiums began to rise beyond the means of small businesses and individuals, people began talking about cost control. This took the form of HMOs that attempted to control demand by restricting patients' choices. But the time was also ripe for government to step in and save the day by becoming the insurance company of last resort, first just for the poor and elderly, and later on for everyone.

The government is the ultimate insurance company, because they can extort all the money they want from helpless taxpayers with the help of their gun-toting thugs, and when they don't feel like doing that, they can just create money. Inflationary monetary policy is more palatable to people than gun-toting thugs, because people don't understand that value is being stolen from the money that's still in their hands.

Once the government becomes the insurer of last resort, prices can go through the roof with no visible effect on the average medical consumer. But this game can't go on forever. Eventually the economy begins to show the strain as the demands of 300 million medical consumers are met with more and more expensive products and services. There is really no escape from the laws of economics; rising taxes and rising inflation will eventually wreck the economy.

People become accustomed to the idea that medical care is something you can't possibly pay for without help. What they don't understand is that they are paying for it in many, many indirect ways, but they don't make the connection between economic malaise and the impossibly high cost of the medical care to which everyone has a "right." In fact, we're paying much, much more for it in all these indirect ways than we would if each of us just paid for it directly.

When the economy begins to crumble and crash, politicians must scramble to get the whole mess under control before disaster makes them politically vulnerable. By now, people are thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that they have a "right" to all the health care they want. And since they've been trained to believe that more government is the answer to every problem, there is nothing for the politicians to do but engineer a government takeover of the entire medical economy.

Now that people are getting desperate about cutting medical costs, it's funny how they're suggesting many of the very things that were outlawed and restricted--by the government, at the AMA's request--so long ago. All through the 20th century, M.D.s were marking out the territory they wanted, and paying people in government to protect the territory of their restricted cartel. They made sure that only M.D.s would be legally allowed to do many procedures and services that could easily have been done by less educated, less expensive professionals. The purpose of the AMA was always to raise the incomes of the doctors that belonged to it. And they succeeded in doing this at the expense of all the people who would have been doctors, all the patients those doctors would have served, all the patients who would have been served by other professionals, as well as those who would have been served by alternative therapies that were suppressed or not allowed to develop.

A friend of mine recently opined that we need a nationalized medical system because (for one thing) nobody can afford the cost of cancer treatment on their own. I did a little research on cancer treatment specifically. The cost of cancer treatment has risen astronomically, mostly due to the almost unbelievable prices of new anti-cancer drugs. It's gotten so bad that people are being bankrupted just by the small slice of the total cost that their insurance companies require them to pay.

Why do these drugs cost so much? I've talked here about the AMA, the insurance effect, and the government, but the Federal Drug Administration is also an important part of the cost picture. The FDA makes it tremendously expensive to get a drug approved, and the patent only lasts for a few years, so the drug companies have to recoup huge expenses and make all the money they want to make on that drug in just a few years' time.

In addition to this reality, they price the drugs high because they can - because insurance companies and/or government will pay for it. And also because the demand for life-saving drugs is pretty inflexible, as evidenced by people going bankrupt to pay for them.

Now imagine that we took insurance and government out of this picture. All that's left is the companies who make the drugs and the patients who need them. Who thinks that the drug companies would price their products so high that nobody could pay for them? Even when people are willing to impoverish themselves and their children to pay for life-saving drugs, there is ultimately a limit to their resources. Another lesson of basic economics is that you can't make money by pricing your product so high that nobody can buy it.

In a voluntary market, medical goods and services would be forced to compete for people's dollars with all the other things that people need and want. People would control their own demand, and spend their own money as judiciously as possible. The medical industry would have to bring its prices within the reach of ordinary people's budgets. And of course, more reasonable forms of insurance, as well as charity, would fill in the gaps between personal budgets and medical costs.

This freedom of choice, this personal autonomy, is what we have a right to. The freedom to take care of our own bodies the way we think best. The freedom to choose our own practitioners, our own medical philosophies, and pay for our own care in a voluntary market.

As yet, I haven't touched on the issue of controlled substances. Throughout most of the 20th century, the government has assumed the power to prohibit or allow citizens to use various chemical substances for medical or recreational purposes. If we grant the government the power to allow or prohibit what drugs and medicines we take, we have surrendered our sovereignty over our own bodies. How anyone can still believe he is free after surrendering control of his own body is beyond me.

If we grant the government the power to control what we're allowed and not allowed to ingest, then this power is up for grabs to the highest bidder. The law enforcement/prison industry wants more drugs in the criminal category, and wants the power to draw the line between recreational and medical uses. Doctors want drugs in the prescription category, so that people have to pay for office visits in order to get drugs. Governments want to declare substances unhealthy so that they can collect "sin taxes" on them.

We have a right to freedom in health care as much as we have a right to freedom in everything else. We have a right to choose our own foods, poisons, and medicines without the interference of busybodies and gun-toting thugs. Our need for health care is being used against us by opportunistic politicians and rapacious business interests. It's being used to impoverish and control us. The problem is not that we can't afford decent health care; it's that we can't afford this lack of freedom.

Evil People and Hatred

Recently Larken and I watched the movie "The Green Mile" for the first time in many years. Having just written my last post about how people always think they're doing the right thing, it was challenging to be reminded just how unspeakably, deliberately evil some people are. Of course the movie is entirely fictional, based on a Stephen King story about characters living or working on a Death Row in a 1930s prison. But there really are people like the villains in that film: people who simply enjoy making other people suffer--which, it seems to me, is pretty much the essence of evil.

Does my premise break down when we look at the worst people on earth? How could mass murderers and child rapists possibly think they're doing the right thing? Well, I do believe that on a conscious level they usually know that what they're doing is wrong and evil, but on some deeper level, below their own awareness perhaps, they've decided that being "evil" is the right choice for them. For some reason they've decided that being "good" just doesn't work for them. It's hard--maybe impossible--for normal people to understand why someone would feel this way, but criminal psychologists keep trying to figure it out.

And why, you might think, should we even try to understand -- let alone forgive -- these horrible people? Especially those who are completely unrepentant, and will keep on doing heinous things until someone stops them with a bullet? How could such a person deserve understanding and forgiveness?

I don't think they do deserve it, and I don't think that's the point. The understanding and forgiveness is for us: because it's not good for us to be filled with hatred and anger. And it's for practice: because if we can understand and forgive the most dangerous and twisted people among us, surely we can also think kindly of good-hearted people with different points of view. It's to diffuse the power of hatred, one person at a time. It's to see everyone as a human being, even when our minds are screaming, "monster!"

One of the Death Row guards in The Green Mile is a sadistic creep who is obviously there to witness and cause suffering. Sadistic people will always be drawn toward those who are seen as less than human, where society gives tacit permission or even encouragement to sadistic abuse. Criminals are a very convenient group for this. Although it's gone out of fashion to abuse groups of people based on unchosen things like skin color or sex, we can still get lots of tacit approval for being cruel to people who have ostensibly chosen to be something that we hate: criminals, drug users, welfare recipients, rapacious capitalists, gun-toting government thugs, or whoever we personally love to hate the most. Righteousness allows us to hate people while maintaining our self-respect, because those people deserve to be hated for what they have chosen to be.

Hundreds of movies (including The Green Mile) cater to an appetite for righteous retribution - the worse the villain is, the better people can feel about enjoying his cruel end, especially with the knowledge that it's not really happening. And very rarely does a hero kill a villain in cold blood, because that would make us all uncomfortable -- the villain almost always makes himself an immediate threat just before his horrific demise.

Why do we enjoy these movies so much? If we simply enjoyed violence and mayhem for its own sake, the writers would not be so careful to make the bad guys deserve what they get. I think that in a society where few of us will ever experience real violence, we feel a need to vicariously conquer evil and danger.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. Nor would I ever suggest that understanding and forgiveness be allowed to get in the way of protecting ourselves and others from aggressors. Whether the aggressors are deranged serial killers, burglars, tax collectors, or prosecutors - we must find ways to render harmful people harmless. But it should be done as humanely as possible, without malice, anger, or hatred; not just for the sake of those aggressors, but for the sake of ourselves and the world.

I remember trying to think of prison guards as if they were rhinos or hippos - large, dangerous, stupid animals. You don't have to hate a dangerous animal; you just have to proceed with caution when you're in its territory. Some criminals are more like rabid dogs, where there's nothing to do but shoot them. But again, we don't hate rabid dogs; we feel sad that they're both incurable and dangerous. Imagining people to be animals is dehumanizing, you might say! Yes it is. But because the violence of animals is both impersonal and morally neutral, in some cases this fantasy can diffuse our righteous anger.

Normally, people dehumanize others in order to hate them more conveniently. Group identity helps us dehumanize those outside of the group. Righteousness helps us feel good about hating. And politics allows us to murder, rob, torture, and imprison those we hate indirectly, keeping the blood off our own hands.

I am proceeding here on the premise that hatred is an enemy of mankind, and that we should do whatever we can to discourage this feeling in ourselves, and to avoid that which inflames it. The idea that people are always doing what they believe is right may be hard for us to believe in some cases, but I think that if we were omniscient, we would be able to see how it's true. And the effort to see how it's true puts us in touch with the humanity of those we could otherwise easily hate.

Everyone is Doing What he Believes is Right

I propose that everyone does what he thinks is right, all the time. Even when people do something that they think is theoretically wrong, there is some reason for it that makes it right for them at that moment.

For instance: "I know it's wrong to steal, but my kids are hungry, and I just can't bring myself to beg." For this person, stealing feels wrong, yet it also feels like the best option for him at that time. Or: "I know it's wrong to cheat on my wife, but I may never feel this way again." Or, "I know it's wrong to lie in court, but these evil tax protestors could destroy our civilization."

Temptation, we could say, is a struggle between the rightness and wrongness of an action in our minds. Frequently it's a struggle between what feels right for ourselves, right now, and what feels right for others and the future.

I see this as the interminable conflict of morality - the needs of the self and the present as opposed to the needs of others and the future. It is not a conflict between good and evil, but a matter of getting the balance right. Happiness is a state of the self in the present moment, and happiness is the best thing in life. But regard for others and the future can be essential to keeping those happy moments flowing as the "now" progresses through time.

Society consists of the complex interplay of many actors trying to achieve the proper balance between self and others, and between now and the future. And morality is the attempt to codify behavior in a set of rules that achieves the best balance for everyone.

We can purge ourselves of anger and hatred toward those who hurt us if we can really see that everyone does what he believes is right all the time. Everyone, deep down, thinks that his own morality is best, and should be imposed on everyone else. Before you say, Oh no, not me! consider this: I believe that the best way to achieve happiness for all is to leave people in freedom as much as possible. I believe that one person's freedom should be restricted only by the equal freedom of others. I would impose this morality on everyone else by using deadly force if necessary to defend myself and others from aggression. That which we would impose on others by deadly force is the essential core of our morality. Above that core, we have varying degrees of tolerance, indifference, and approval. But the behavior that we would enforce or prevent by means of deadly force is the behavior that matters the most to us. And of course we are equally responsible whether we wield the gun ourselves or get "law enforcers" to do it for us.

I believe, simply, that society works best when violence is not used at all; therefore my morality approves of violence only when it's used defensively. I believe that defensive violence is good to the degree that it's necessary to counter aggressive violence.

But that's just my morality. And probably yours, too, if you're reading this. My morality flows from the value I place on the happiness of every human being, and is informed by all the knowledge I have at my disposal, whether from books, personal experience, or whatever. What is good? and how is good best achieved? The answers to these questions give shape to our personal moral codes.

If we want to understand others, it's important to realize that others have different answers to these questions, based on their own ideas about human beings and the world. And if we wish to change their ideas or present them with new ideas, we should do this with as much charity and goodwill as we can muster. We must try to get into their minds, behind their eyes, and into their shoes as much as possible, in order to understand their idea of what's good, what's bad, and when it's appropriate to pick up a gun.

Of course, we really can't see the world completely from someone else's point of view. The best we can do is to imagine. This is one of the reasons I'm an anarchist. If I cannot walk a mile in someone's shoes, I will not presume to run his life.

But many others, I well know, see things very differently. Other people whole-heartedly believe that people's lives should be run by others. They believe that the main virtue for most of humanity is obedience to authority, and that the use of deadly force by that authority to enforce their obedience is virtuous and necessary.

Perhaps your mind rebels at this. No, no! you say, No one can really, truly believe that! These people are just rationalizing their evil desire to dominate others! I think that those of us who love freedom instinctively feel this way because it's almost impossible for us to imagine not knowing what we know, and not understanding what we understand. It seems impossible that these people really, really, deep down inside, don't know any better.

It's hard to imagine the world view of people far back in history because we are aware of what has happened since their time, and they were not. We cannot expunge that awareness from our minds any more than they could magically see things the way we do. People like to feel morally superior to people who lived in the past. And perhaps we are morally superior, because morality has evolved since their time, but this is not to our credit. People do their best within the confines of their own time period, their own intelligence, their own culture, and their own knowledge.

I think that anarchistic morality, with its emphasis on maximum freedom and minimum violence, is the best morality there is. Because, duh -- of course I'm going to embrace what seems right to me. To live by what seemed wrong to me would be just insane. And because I think my moral code is best, it logically follows that I think the world would be better if everyone embraced it.

We cannot get through to people by clubbing them over the head with how bad and wrong they are. The reason is that they don't think they're bad and wrong any more than we think we are. I've been persecuted, prosecuted, imprisoned, robbed, viciously slandered and derided, all in an effort to show me how bad and wrong I was. None of it has ever had the slightest bit of success.

I guess I can see that I'm obviously very bad and wrong from their point of view. But their bludgeoning has done nothing to convince me that their belief system and moral code is superior to the one that I hold. In fact, the bludgeoning only demonstrates that their morality hurts people, and their morality readily justifies throwing aside numerous other moral tenets in order to hurt people. That, I think, is one mark of a bad moral code.

I do not think that bludgeoning, either physical or verbal, leads people to a higher truth. I think that bludgeoning generally makes people hold defensively onto whatever they already think. I know we're all really tired of trying to be nice to people who advocate that we be shot for our beliefs, and dull-wittedly blame it on us. Their beliefs are a threat to us, and we have every right to defend ourselves from them. But understanding these people better can only help us defend ourselves. And forgiving those who persecute us can bring us more peace of mind.

Without taxes, how would we get the poor to subsidize the rich?

I frequently come up against the accusation that, because I don't approve of taxation, I don't care about the poor. In many minds, paying taxes to a ruling elite equates with helping the less fortunate and supporting society. But take a look at the U.S. Debt Clock. So far this year, this country's ruling elite has spent $500 billion on war, $300 billion on interest to the Federal Reserve; $50 billion on subsidies; and $1100 billion on big-business bailouts. Is it just me, or does this look rather like slaughtering the poor and enriching the very rich?

Let's look at a smaller example that's closer to home. A few years ago, the government stole a lot of our money and imprisoned my husband for a year because we'd had the audacity to spend our money according to our personal values (like helping the poor and creating jobs) instead of contributing it to bloody mayhem and enrichment of the already rich. Since then we've been living on very little, due to a combination of the government's past persecution and our own personal choices. While Larken devotes himself to fighting tyranny full time, I devote myself to homeschooling my daughter. Neither of these endeavors is very lucrative.

In short, we have a pitiful income. Recently, the amazingly generous people on Larken's email list sent me lots of money as an anniversary gift. I was thrilled to have money to spend on homeschooling, and I spent a sizeable chunk of this windfall on things for my daughter's education.

It occurred to me, as I was carefully spending this money, that we had recently paid our township about $2500 in school taxes for the public schools that we've never used. Now, isn't the theory behind public schools that they're supposed to guarantee that all kids - both rich and poor - have access to education? And aren't taxes supposed to kind of even things up by making the rich subsidize the poor? Since we're obviously getting nothing personally for our $2500, I became curious about the income levels of the families we were subsidizing.

I could not find any information on our specific township. And I could not find any figures that I could absolutely trust; the best information I could find was on Wikipedia. But with that caveat, what I learned was that our county ranks 67th on a list of the richest counties in America, with a per capita income of about $31,000, and a median income of about $61,000. So the average family of three in this county has an income of $93,000 a year. I also discovered that the cost of living in Pennsylvania is almost dead average, and that the poverty line of $18,000 for a family of three is the same for all 50 states, despite the fact that the cost of living can vary tremendously from state to state.

I don't know exactly what our yearly income is, because it fluctuates a lot, and I don't manage our finances. But I know it's a heck of a lot closer to $18,000 a year than it is to $93,000! In short, we (the poor) are paying $2500 a year to pay for the education of relatively rich people's children. And if we refused to pay this tax, the sheriff or somebody would take our house away from us. If we said, "Hey, we're educating our own child, so we're just going use this money to buy educational stuff for her," people with guns would show up and make us homeless. Ah, the benevolence of government!

"Now, tut, tut!" I can hear the socialists saying, "It's your choice not to use the public schools. You're paying taxes so that those schools are available to everyone, including you. If you can't afford to educate your child yourself, just send her to the school your taxes have paid for!"

Well, isn't that a little weird? There's a hair salon just down the street. What if they decide they're going to force everyone in the neighborhood to pay them a yearly "tax" -- enough to pay for hair cuts for everyone all year, and then everyone will be entitled to haircuts free of charge? After all, our whole society benefits from people having decent-looking hair! If you want to go somewhere else, you're free to go somewhere else and pay for a hair cut. If you want to cut your own hair yourself, you can do that, too. But you have to pay the tax anyway, because the tax ensures that everyone in the neighborhood has access to haircuts. And if you don't pay the tax, the hair salon people will come with guns and take your car.

If you don't like that plan, I guess you just don't care about the poor!