This Cartoon from 1935 Perfectly Predicted the Mess America's in Today
Death and taxes are the two certainties in life. Heck, Saul of Tarsus was a tax collector (and a rather brutal one, at that), so I’d say we’re talking about a venerable institution.
However, if it does seem like things are getting worse, just remember what things were like during the Great Depression and the New Deal.
If you don’t believe me, believe Daddy Warbucks — who managed to perfectly predict the mess we’re in back in 1935.
Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks was, for those of you not in the know, one of the protagonists of “Little Orphan Annie” — the man who was able to provide the titular character with a good life in Harold Gray’s long-running comic strip.
Unfortunately, it seems, ol’ Daddy Warbucks fell on hard times during the Great Depression, as so many people did.
However, he had some choice words about taxes even when he wasn’t quite as privileged as he once was, as seen in a strip shared on Twitter by David Hines:
Conservative icon: Oliver Warbucks. pic.twitter.com/vVDGmXNwFV
— David Hines (@hradzka) November 16, 2018
Hear, hear.
It’s worth pointing out that for those of who are just familiar with the movie version of “Annie” (or the play), the original comic was quite free market in its outlook — a surprising thing in the 1930s, when conservatism wasn’t exactly the most popular thing in the world.
That didn’t come through in the play or the movie for reasons you can probably guess.
But Daddy Warbucks was and is correct. Taxes hurt growth. The more we tax and the more things the tendrils of the government touches, the more it affects our paychecks.
Yet, what the government thinks is that it’s helping us. They think it’s about taxing the rich to give to the poor.
Of course, the idea that taxes add up — the alarm clock and ax here, the iPhone and computer today — never occurs to anyone on the left. “Free” college. “Free” health care. “Free” everything — just so long as the cost is invisible. It may be more complex today, but the game is still the same — and it hurts our economy.
But that’s just part of the point. What everyone wants to be in the end is the kind of person who can control where the tax dollars go.
They want to be the drones — the people whose use to society is essentially allocating funds, which is to say redistributing them.
They’re the people who make sure it’s a hard-knock life for all of us.
Don’t be a drone, folks. Be a worker.
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