Once upon a time there was a small, prosperous, self-contained island community of a couple of hundred people. Theirs was a friendly, tropical island with lots of game and fruit and wild vegetables, and life was good for the people.

 

Some of the people fished and some of them wove baskets and some of them built grass houses and some of them gathered fruits and vegetables and some of them domesticated a few of the native animals, and they traded the results of their special skills among themselves. Some of the people became successful enough that they were able to pay their fellow islanders to herd pigs or weave more baskets or tend their vegetable stands so that they themselves could devote their time to administration. A few of them became so prosperous that they were able to afford grass houses with two or three rooms instead of the typical one.

 

There was an island council, a small group of elected representatives that met for a couple of hours every full moon and made decisions about issues affecting the whole group. It was a great honor to be chosen to be a member of the council, and the honor was thought to be sufficient compensation. There wasn’t much time involved, and it didn’t interfere with the council members’ other and more productive activities.

 

Then one day, one of the islanders fell and broke his leg.

 

There had been accidents on the island before, of course. Sometimes there had even been tragedies. And there were always a few people who, for one reason or another, were unable to care for themselves. But before this the islanders had always, in the way of close-knit communities, voluntarily come to the aid of those who needed help. But this fateful day — maybe because the accident happened while the council was meeting — before the community had time to react, the council decided to step in and help the injured man.

 

“He’ll need special food and the services of the Medicine Woman,” said one of the council members. “And since he can’t work at his job, his family will need help buying meat and vegetables. His wife will need to tend him, so she’ll have to have someone to come in and help with the children.”

 

“How will we ever get all that done? We have jobs of our own to attend to, and being a council member isn’t supposed to involve that much time,” said another.

 

Two of the council members offered to oversee the collection of money from the rest of the community, and see to the necessary purchases to help the injured worker. But, they pointed out, this would now be a full-time job.

 

The council decided the community would be required to contribute enough money to buy food and medical services for the injured worker, food for his family, and to hire a domestic helper for the worker’s wife. They also authorized the collection of enough money -– by force if necessary — to compensate the two council members for the time spent in this charitable project. They argued long into the night about the new budget and how much each islander would be required to contribute.

 

The next morning, armed with a list of islanders and institutionally-mandated fairness guidelines, the two council members went to collect the taxes from the community. Most of the people agreed, some more reluctantly than others. But a few of the little businesses, those that had been only marginally successful before, were barely able to afford the payments required of them. In fact, two of them had to fire several of their workers, because the money that had been set aside for wages had been taken as taxes.

 

At the next meeting of the island council, the fired workers appealed for help, and the council, seeing their plight, agreed to continue collecting taxes to be given to any islander who was out of work because of the taxes.

 

The additional taxes, of course, forced several more marginal businesses to close their doors. With more taxes to collect, even two full-time tax collectors weren’t enough, so the erstwhile business owners applied to work as their assistants. Since the merchants-turned-bureaucrats were no longer producing anything of real value, the only way to pay for their services was to raise taxes yet again.

 

Within a short time, more than half of the islanders were either working for the government or receiving unemployment compensation, with the remaining 45% struggling to support them.

 

Since people smart enough to run successful businesses seldom need a crystal ball, the few remaining merchants packed up their families and their best workers, put them in boats, and rowed to another island, where they established a successful and prosperous society. The first thing they did, after hauling their belongings onto the beach, was agree to learn from past mistakes. Their new government would never be allowed to interfere with anything the people could do better for themselves.

 

I don’t know what happened to the folks left on the first island.

 

Maybe they wised up.

 

Maybe not.

KsSmallBiz.com, November 22, 2006 

Posted by Sharon under Libertarianism | No Comments »