Death and Not Taxes

Consent culture, like everything, has hidden qualifiers. That’s just the reality of language, especially activist language. There’s plenty of forces in modern life that actively work against our consent, like taxes, but very few people would bother to frame that as an actual issue of consent. I suppose there is at least a choice: we can choose to pay taxes, go to jail, or have our wages garnished, but there’s no option to not play the game to begin with. A large cage is still a cage, and violence still happens even if it’s just on the edges. Hobbes wins again.

I’ve never heard of offering to voters to directly select where their tax money is spent, until it dawned on me that it’s at least logical possibility. I’m not deluded to think that it’s a new revelation, of course; the idea already exists, but it’s not as though it would enjoy practical support from the media or politicians. It would make some folks who prefer to stay under the radar a little too publicly accountable, and might give too much visibility to how things would be misspent (stolen). There’s hope at the local level, but if it actually goes through, and if voters elect to fund wrongthink services (or fund the right things under a wrongthink administration), the endeavor will be framed as you’d expect by mainstream media outlets.