Jane dreams most nights, of which I am envious. Her brain would light up a brain-o-scope like an electric storm, lobes crackling with inner lightning. The night before last she fidgeted until she woke me up, panting and murmuring like a medium. A face like molten metal was shrieking at her in tongues, apparently. An evil face, of an old man with long hair.
It doesn’t do to draw too much literal meaning from dreams [I pause to scrape the long hair back from my lined face] as they’re often confused and quite random in their depiction. It’s not quite the same thing but sometimes I wake up with a phrase or even a melody looping over and over as I surface. This morning I rolled over and it was, greed begets government, greed begets government, greed begets government...
A little later now, and increasingly irritated by this rotating riddle, news filters through to the bathroom that the government wants charitable giving to be enabled at cash machines, to promote its concept of the ‘Big Society’. My first reaction to this is if the institution of government wasn’t historically so self-serving, I might believe. The way things are, it smacks of further abrogation of responsibility.
It got me thinking, though, and then I experienced a Eureka moment. We could reform the tax system to include compulsory individual giving, direct to the government department of choice, with each cash withdrawal. Pull out fifty quid and give five to defence, the police, the health service, arts or education. No contribution, no cash. Let the people vote according to their proclivities.
Security of critical funding might be provided by, say, half the tax currently deducted at source. If it’s Big Society they really want, then they have to give it up. It would be interesting to see a chart of this kind of giving overlaid on a graph of current spending commitments. What better way to close any discrepancy between the will of government and that of the people? It's taxation and voting rolled into one.
On the other hand, if tax revenue dropped significantly, as people found other ways of getting hold of their money, we could conclude that society doesn’t want to be big after all, right? And that we pay our taxes precisely to avoid having to think about society at large. Sadly this seems like the most likely outcome but happily it also provides an answer to this morning’s riddle. We need government to keep us from the asocial effects of the relentless pursuit of self interest.
Jane pops her head round the door as I’m drying off. “My tonsils are up again,” she says.
“Mine too, I’ll make an appointment for both of us when the surgery opens,” I reply, scrubbing my head with the towel.
We’ve already blitzed the bacteria with a course of antibiotics each but it hasn’t worked, some things just aren’t that easy to eradicate.
