Tax extraction is about to get a lot more painful. Competing groups are coming together to legislate long-term increases in their benefits, using the economic decline as an excuse to strengthen their favorite mandatory charities.
The AARP's 'Divided We Fail' propaganda campaign has state and federal representatives on notice that they're expected to show their obedience by immediately increasing funding for senior medical programs. As part of the political balancing act, they're also calling for increased spending on government education.
Many experts still think it's possible to prevent the inevitable default of Social Security and all the other types of social welfare, if taxes are raised high enough. They may even be right about that, but they ignore the fact that Social Security is fundamentally unfair.
Widows can demand a century of taxpayer income without having to work for one second: anyone can seize money from the taxpayer simply by marrying the right spouse (well, not anyone). Meanwhile, those who know they won't live long enough to enjoy any benefits are forced to subsidize the retirement of others. Someone can pay taxes for fifty years and not get one cent back if they die the day they retire.
S.S. is just one of many taxes designed to benefit politically powerful groups, i.e. large groups.
Right or wrong, I wouldn't surrender this money voluntarily but would prefer to spend it on myself, often stupidly. Others would invest it wisely.
Others know for a fact the liberal solution is wrong. They can prove they are worse off under this system.
It goes without saying that more people thrive and prosper under a big government.
Both sides of the political spectrum have united in a web of coercion for the benefit of favored interest groups. Voters happen to be expensive. Every electable politician must work around the clock to tighten the noose of central control. There's also a strong religio-cultural component. Soon, another gaggle of candidates will be spouting platitudinal pieties more suited to the middle ages.
Trillions of dollars will be extorted at virtual gunpoint and 'invested' in social spending programs. Most medical spending is at the very end of life, keeping decayed bodies going for a few weeks longer, at a cumulative cost of several teradollars per decade. A particularly expensive form of mandatory charity involves maintaining bodies in a persistent vegetative state for years. Many victims are still aware, but unable to move in any way.
The Obama administration has to consider many competing interests. Politically, the best compromise is to give all donor groups most of what they want. In Obama's case, the first priority has been to limit the inevitable budget cuts, and to reverse them where possible.
The situation is complicated by the fact that the bar has been set very high. While culturally conservative, the preceding Republican administration has been the most free-spending entity in human history. Meanwhile, the police actions in Asia only sharpened the appetites of the defense contractors.
All this points to vast tax increases ahead. Economists agree that the new spending can't all come from inflation and future debt. We'll have to reduce consumption levels too.
The challenge will be to raise tax revenues to the promised high levels, a problem that has barely been discussed as of 2012.
This brings us to the subject of control. Governments are ambivalent about the instruments of power. In fact they often come to control those who wield them, as Mao found out during the Cultural Revolution, which he couldn't limit once it had started.
However, the first principle of power seems to be: use it or lose it. It takes a crisis to get the power in the first place.
The accumulated obligations, from pensions to school subsidies to prescription drugs, are so immense it will be necessary to intimidate and even frighten the taxpayers into working harder. There's just no other way to make the numbers add up. Things won't be as bad as the random terror used by authoritarian organizations like the Cheka, the NKVD, the Sea Org, the Securitate, the Stasi or others; but random people will still be made to suffer to 'inspire' the others to submit.
Those with the power will do bad things to you. The methods of social control are varied.
The first level involves restrictions, bureaucratic rituals and monopolies. Society is designed to prevent over 99% of activity, including most improvements.
At some point, everyone has had to produce their government-issued birth certificate just to be allowed to drive, to work for money, get a government approved bank account, a library card, an apartment, or even to listen to satellite radio.
Those people who manage to lose their government documents, or never had them in the first place, are methodically destroyed in a death by a thousand cuts.
Poor individuals are screwed to begin with (of course the poor invariably vote for their oppressors anyway).
Uncertainty is the strongest control tool. Work hard for your money, and it can all be seized in a frivolous lawsuit, or some other legal extortion such as alimony theft. Laws targeting marginal citizens are almost universally supported. The police will shoot you dead if you resist arrest for using drugs without a prescription. Once you're in jail, they own you.
Government is a permanent culture war. Religion and tradition are pitted against social drift. All sides try to redefine the truth, for example by mandating religious creationism in science classes. Perhaps mainstream scientists are indeed deluded. More likely the previous sentence describes creationists. They don't want creationism to be taught as part of religion class. Aided by sympathetic politicians, their goal is to make science subordinate to their faith.
Even if they somehow succeed in placing creationism at the core of mainstream biology (it would take a major social decline), school taxes still won't be voluntary. Scientists won't be allowed to come to church on Sunday and tell the congregation there's no proof that God exists.
How will it all end?
Long term trends point toward more federalism, but the number of governing authorities will also increase. Each will seek to tax and regulate its subjects.
At the local level, businesses may demand tax relief before moving to a new area, but complex exemptions will only increase the total amount of regulation and bureaucracy.
There will be unpredictable shocks to the system, and inevitable failures.
New communities and economic networks will suddenly arise and demand their share of the power pie. Someday there may even be purely online constituencies.
The most disruptive trend is the increasing power of software. It will make it easier to track everyone's contributions and consumption patterns, and to impose more accurate (though not necessarily fairer) user fees.
It seems unlikely the ideals of freedom or quality of life will ever replace the more practical power balances between selfish interests that have dominated history. Big Government will only fade away if it ever becomes obsolete.
That may only happen when it's replaced by something even more powerful, perhaps the ultimate totalitarian society, an integrated overmind without individual identities, much like the Borg collective. This seems rather more likely than Ron Paul winning the presidency in 2012.
The alternative would be a remote future of ever diverging minds, spreading out through the universe, exploring many possibilities at once. Without central control, there would be no way to prevent countless atrocities.
Until then, the only option for the small minority that wants freedom is to seize it by any means possible, perhaps by opting out of the mainstream economy.
That may become easier with technology, but for now it's still extremely difficult.
The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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