Sunday 25 February 2007

Pic of the day: Snow is fun! At least if you are very young.

Short: Snow and taxes

Finally it has stopped snowing, after 4 days. Luckily the last two day have been mild and the snow fairly heavy, no longer whirling around and gathering into drifts. All that remains now is to get it away from the places where it must not be. In the city, trucks and tractors are hard at work. In the outlying neighborhoods, cars are snowed down until some of them look almost like natural snowdrifts.

By now people will begin to excavate the car-snowdrifts, carefully. Very carefully: You don't want to bang a metal spade into the side of your car. Not even here in Norway, where being rich is the norm. (Well, upper-middle-class rich that is, not filthy rich.) Actually, the cars are correspondingly expensive, if not more so: The state has slapped a ridiculous luxury tax on the purchase of new cars. The money from this is of course used to play Santa Claus later, often to the same people who paid it in the first place.

This may seem a comical (and quite possibly unintentional) effect of Jesus' statement: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" (and unto God what is God's), implying that the currency is actually in its entirety property of the government and that the individual is entitled to it only on the goodwill of the state. In practice, of course, even in Scandinavia the principle is not taken nearly that far!

You may think it would be easier to tax only the riches and give only to the poorest, letting everyone else do with their own money what they wanted. But in terms of sheer administration, I am not sure this would cause less work. If tax was not so pervasive, people would be less inclined to accept it. For instance if we taxed only the most expensive cars, we would get a lot of cars costing just under the magic line, and then people would buy the seats separately. ^^ Seriously, this is how people think. When there is no magic line, it is easier to accept. After all, everyone else is doing it too.

And it is certainly nice to have the local government funded well enough to clear the snow from the streets (even if it takes its sweet time) rather than having to bring your own spade...