Sure, Molly and Ringtail, you would love to pay more taxes – if only someone would just ask. Make everyone interdependent in a non-personal sort of way of course – it’s no fun relying on personal effort, family, relatives, or the community. Your respect for both independence and interdependence, is both remarkable and simultaneous.

Mykar – you hit upon the nub and the lie of all “equality” based arguments, that we are really individuals, with individual and not common, capacities and thus capable of unequal performance.

Like dear Baroness Margaret Thatcher said “There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

The whole idea of “equality” is a fraud.

Place any six children on a running field and tell them to "do their best" – and within a few seconds and one hundred yards some will be ahead of the others.

I want to see the bit of socialist dogma which identifies why the faster running child should do “less than their best” so as not to discourage the slower and when someone has found it – why should they assume the world is a better place because the creatively, commercially and entrepreneurily “faster runners” are to be held back to the performance of the mediocre.

It is those who ignore the clamour for mediocrity, as it is shouted from the socialist stands, who go through life intent to achieve and express their individuality and “self reliance”, who provide the greater activity base on which the state finds the succour of taxes and opportunity to play lady bountiful to the “slower runners”.

The Australian tax system is convoluted and over complex. The first place to start is a complete review of the collection system, the elimination of the low-performance and narrow based taxes (both federal and state) and simplification of statute. If we can drop a few thousand heads from the ranks of the tax office we will be doing a social service – too much brain power wasted on how to suck blood from Peter to infuse into Paul.

Dealing with the welfare bit – start by Killing off Medicare – the money I have “levied” (taxed) for it would have been better spent directly between me and the medical insurance company of my choice, competing for my dollars against other insurers (many of which were mutual provident societies before going down the “for-profit” path).

Place 6 kids on a running field and ask them to do their best is absolutely fine and dandy as long as they all run the same length track and jump the same obstacles. But if one has to run 3 times the length, or do it without shoes over rough terrain, or another has a track strewn with broken glass, the outcome will not be about raw talent, but about a better track, about advantage. The trouble with ignoring the inevitable inequalities visited upon all of us at birth and blithely entrenching privilege is that it is a tax on all of us. When we lose talent because it was born into the wrong family, or promote the mediocre because they were born into the right one, we all pay.
This isn't socialism, it is plain common sense, and why user-pays simply doesn't work in either education or health care, particularly for kids.

Col nobody has mentioned equality or society until you did. You are not responding to the issues raised but only to your idea that the only alternative to absolute individualism is socialism.

Surely it is obvious that increased individualism and self-reliance are not producing a better society.

We have had a rolling back of the 'socialist' policies of the Labour Government. A good example of a more self-reliant state is the US. Are we better or off in any measurable way?

It is a fact that Sweden, with much higher taxes, more welfare, and really really bad weather is a happier, safer, more productive and decent collection of indivdiuals and families. How do you account for that?

There are many flaws in your assumption about individualism being the fundamental aspect of human beings. Evolutionary psychology argues quite convincingly that we are not indivdiuals first and foremost. We cannot survive on our own and have never lived that way until recently. Humans have always lived in societies.

Perhaps the best example of a completely self-reliant society was Victorian England. Is that your idea of what we should be aiming for. If not how do you think things would work differently in a good self-reliant society. That seems to be to be a utopian belief.

You are ignoring the points about who looks after children in a self-reliant soceity. It is great if all parents were equally good at being parents but they are not. So your way condems all those children unlucky enough to be born to parents who do or can not care for them to be failures also.

We have no choice.As birth rates continue to fall and the baby boomers retire,we will all have to be more self reliant."Churning" is wasteful and inefficient;it just creates more bureauocrats.
Put more money into the hands of people who earn it and the economy will grow.Taxation does not redistribute wealth,it kills incentive for people to achieve,thus slows the economy.Get more people working in private enterprise and everyone will benefit.We have become a pathetically weak society always looking for Govt to do it for us.We are consumed with notions of safety , security and individual rights,yet balk at notions of reliance and responsibility.

Molly, you are back to your arguments that the government should play mummy and daddy if mummy and daddy don't do a good a job.

I must admit, it is a good way to boost employment - the unemployed could become parents - wiping bums and noses, cooking dinner, making lunches for all those kids with bad mummies and daddies.

Then the kids will grow seeing that mummy and daddy don't have to do anything, the government will provide all your needs and some of your wants as well.

They will think when they become parents they can do the same poor job. What a society.

Welfare dependency is a problem because people expect the government to do everything.

My old neighbourhood is full of people who are second and third generation welfare families and the government continues to fund them to drink, smoke, play the pokies and feed the kids chips with sauce four nights a week.

And back to the point of the article - my wife and I pay about $300 tax a week and get $240 back (including my HECS payment). It would be simpler and mean less bureaucracy if they just took $60 in the first place. At the very least.

t.u.s