War Tax Resister as Stranger Than Fiction

A Review from The Free Liberal:

...Pascal goes through a process of transformation herself in seeing the good in the taxman. Although Stranger than Fiction is Crick’s story, she perhaps utters one of the most important lines in the movie from a free liberal point-of-view. When asked how she went from being a Harvard law student to being a radical baker, she explains that she wanted to be a lawyer so she could save the world, but once at school she spent all her time baking for study groups and not attending to her grades. She realized that her true skill for improving the world was in baking cookies. Ana Pascal derives pleasure from making people happy. Although the word “socialist” is bandied about, it is clear she is an entrepreneur of the John Mackey variety.

Essential good comes not from “fighting the system” or undoing injustice brought on by external forces, it comes from our ability to help others achieve their own happiness. Not everyone is an artistic baker who creates amazing delicacies, but everywhere people are working to reduce the cost of happiness for others, doing good for them in ways visible and hidden. We do this on a personal level with our friends, family, and colleagues, and we do it for people whom we will never meet but will nonetheless benefit from the derivative effects of our efforts to build and innovate in our work. In economics we call this the “free market.”

The taxman is unloved because he is precisely the opposite of the entrepreneur. He takes wealth from us to pay for things which don’t help society (or at least we think a good bit is unhelpful). He does not operate on any principle other than that he has been sent to enforce a technical rule against a technical violation. My grandfather, who was an IRS auditor, often remarks that he should have gone into car sales, “because nobody likes to pay taxes, but everyone is happy when they are buying a car.”