Freedom Swiss style: Pay a per head tax on your pet or the state will kill it.
So much for private property—one’s pet—being one’s own. If pet owners don’t pay the state money, most of which goes into someone else’s pocket, it will come after them. A local Swiss politician described it for what it is:
“It’s meant to put pressure on people who don’t cooperate.”
That’s what’s called “liberty” by socialists.
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I believe the link is a little messed up.
The swiss are a heavily armed people. I suppose that the job of taking somebody’s dog away to kill it runs a high risk. Will they send S.W.A.T. teams to take people’s dog.
The cost of such an operation would certainly surmount the tax lien on their dog.
they are armed, but most of those weapons (and the ammo) actually belong to the government.
Wrong! On the contrary, the guns that members of the Swiss army are forced to keep at home are not even the tip of the iceberg (300’000 assault rifles & semi-automatic pistols at most). Nobody knows how many firearms there are in the land of the Switzers, but all serious estimates (not the UN’s, not the federal government’s… ) agree that there are way more guns than there are people (pop. 7 mio).
Christoph, forced to keep the SIG SG 550 #A2’005’945 at the foot of the Mont-Pelerin since the 14th of July 1988…
not the info I had, but all right, thanks for correcting me on this one!
I’m curious about this backwards sort of gun ownership. Sounds good in principle, but seems like mixed results in practice.
So, are you allowed to practice with your weapon as you think necessary? Is open carry allowed generally? How do you get more ammo if the government technically owns it? And if you wanted to privately own a weapon, is it yours or the states – ex, could you own an automatic weapon purchased on the open market?
Governments are pretty insane instutions. Look at the Whiskey Rebellion, it was quelled not because it paid off (because it didn’t) but because they wanted a show of force.
Of course governments are insane institutions, they have absolute power, they don’t need to follow any kind of logic and they don’t need to answer to anyone. They can do everything that pleases them or comes to their mind.
When normal citizens do things, they have to account revenues vs costs and live within their means and they have to account that any wrongdoing and criminal acts from their part can and will be severely punished. Therefore they have to balance their decisions and make tradeoffs and decide logically what to do based on risk vs reward etc.
But governments are above all the laws of mankind, nature and economics, so they don’t have to make sense, they are above sense.
The purpose of seizing power is to make yourself above previous constraints. This is why libertarians are wrong when they claim that communism or socialism are failures because they cannot calculate all the variables.
It has never been the goal of communism nor socialism to calculate all the variables nor to make the right decisions. The goal of communism and socialism is to impose your ideology and will on others through force. In that sense, those systems are an absolute success.
Those who claim that capitalism is a failure because there is still poverty and misery and want are completely wrong. It was never the goal of capitalism to bring abundance and wealth to everybody.
The goal of capitalism is to create a free market and to uphold private property. Of course there will still be poverty and illness and misery. It’s up to the individuals to work and cooperate to eradicate those problems. Capitalism is the best framework in which they can do this because it gives individuals the most freedoms to do this. But capitalism is not a person and therefore it cannot be accounted as a failure for individual’s poverty and misery.
So, Einstein’s definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results. I would add that insanity is to be accountable to nothing and nobody.
Do they really think they can make it up for government deficit spending and corruption by taxing people’s pets ?
Surely there has got to be better way to finance the deficit, like cutting costs for example.
Sorry – link now fixed.
>>> The cost of such an operation would certainly surmount the tax lien on their dog.
The revenue generated by the dog tax is inconsequential. The point of this tax, as the politician openly said, is to condition people into submitting to the statists’ claimed authority. That’s priceless.
Do we need a better example of their being no end to what these people will do? And you’re afraid of anarchists?
This reminds me of the fraternity at my college that sponsored the “If you don’t come to our party we will shoot this dog.” event. Of course the you only included women and I do not think in the history of the fraternity did they actually have to shoot the dog.
I’m trying to figure out what phantom service they claim is associated with the pet tax, or have the Swiss pretty much dumped all pretense that taxation actually supports a related service?
France taxes practically every aspect of social life. From company hardware investment to the hiring of new personal, over Google advertisement and the weight of big cranes. Not a hair from the dog though, but I think it’s only on behalf of Brigitte Bardot…
The service of not shooting your dog.
Why are there libertarians in the land of the Switzers? Because the Swiss are not free.
Why are there libertarians in those United States? Because Americans aren’t free either…
Christoph, libertarian citizen-soldier-slave at the foot of the Mont-Pelerin.
“Nemitz told the AP on Monday that authorities have received death threats since news of the plan got out.”
It is tempting to if the Swiss are really Libertarian or are they blowing hot air.
Getting pretty desperate, aren’t they?
And everybody is mad at Michael Vick………..At least he owned the dogs!
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