Hurrah for H&R Block

As I write on the imperial holiday of President's Day it occurs to me just what kind and decent employers we taxpayers are. Once upon a time, taking a government job meant accepting a lower level of pay in return for job security. It is why government jobs like police officer, court stenographer and garbage collector were so desirable to waves of immigrants in the last century. Over the years, the self-serving bureaucracy, the power seeking unions, the spineless politicians and the sleepwalking general public have changed the equation. Not only do today's government workers have salaries comparable to similarly qualified people in private industry but they also have medical and retirement plans like the rest of us dream of. Not only that. As I and most of you spend today at work we have told our equally paid and better benefited employees to take the day off. Pretty decent of us, I'd say.

Through the wonders of forcible funding and militarily backed monopoly today's government worker has managed to have it all: high salary, excellent benefits, job security and their second three day weekend in February. It's a beautiful thing. Meantime, those of us who are footing the bill are hard at work pleasing customers with goods and services so that we can keep half of what we earn while the other half enables the people whose salaries we pay to sleep in.

All of this puts me in mind of the approach of tax time. Being rational people, I assume most of you are planning to pay your taxes. This is not to say that you like paying taxes to support the federal behemoth and its armies of well rested bureaucrats. My only assumption is that you will opt to remain in the state of low level economic slavery rather than move into the next stages of imperial enslavement. These stages are: organized harassment, armed intervention, property seizure and physical confinement. These will surely come to you if you decide not to pay your taxes. Therein lies the logic of paying; the opportunity to remain in the least intrusive stage of slavery. In the immortal words of Lou Costello, "Just pay the man the $2."

This year you might be able to help support a worthwhile effort while you go about paying your $2, especially if you are an NRA member. H&R Block will donate to the NRA every time a member has his taxes prepared by that firm. As you can imagine, the collectivists are up in arms, vowing vengeance against Block for having the temerity to work with a law abiding organization to uphold the Bill of Rights by giving them some of their own money. It is one of the tenets of it-takes-a-village collectivism that the only acceptable donations are the ones given to them or else extracted by the government and doled out by the politically correct elites. Capitalists who make donations to a gun rights group just do not fit under that umbrella. And they can't stand it.

The collectivist outfit leading this hissy fit is a group calling itself Gun Industry Watch, which purports to be a student group affiliated with Alliance for Justice. Didn't Batman, Wonder Woman and Aquaman used to belong to that? I wonder if they still belong? I wonder if they still have the same cool headquarters?

If you want to know more about Alliance for Justice it only takes learning who some of their member organizations are:

  • There is NOW Legal Defense, the people who believe in protecting women from abusers and predators but had no time for Linda Tripp or Juanita Broadrick because they were too busy servicing Bill Clinton's needs.
  • Then we have the National Abortion Rights Action League Foundation along with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. These people believe in a woman's unassailable right to pay someone to stick a fork in her baby's skull and suck his brain out up to and including some ever lengthening time after birth. They just don't believe you should have the right to defend yourself and your family from lowlifes and other predators.
  • Add to that the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society and Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund. You know these guys, right? They are the bozos who will let firefighters die because a fish needs the water. They will tell you that you cannot develop your own private property because they have found a rare tick living on the posterior of a rabbit whose warren happens to be on your land. And, by the way, your entire investment is now worthless because you can't build and no one will ever buy your land.
  • A personal favorite of mine is the National Education Association. This bunch holds most of America's children hostage in sub-substandard schools where their self-esteem is kept high despite their utter lack of preparedness for life as it is actually lived. Where a thinking person might expect a teacher's union to function as a professional trade association dedicated to improving the services they provide to parents and children this bunch chooses to follow the model of the coal miners, dead set on getting every last penny and perq they can get from you. That includes two three-day weekends in February.

Supply your own mission statements for the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Legal Aid Society of New York, and Equal Rights Advocates. The list goes on and on, just like its members tend to do. These are the people who think you should be giving more money to the government so they can afford to take away more of your God given individual rights. And their current targets, through Gun Industry Watch, are the NRA and H&R Block.

As an NRA member, I recognize the organization's many failings. Even so, it remains the most visible and effective advocate of our Second Amendment rights. Flaws and all, the NRA deserves the support of freedom loving people because if they suddenly disappeared the statists would have a field day dismantling the Second Amendment in an orgy of do-gooderism.

As to H&R Block, I know noting about the company beyond their commercials, the fact that their web site looks pretty useful and the collectivists are out to get them. That's good enough for me. The enemy of my enemy and all that.

It seems to me that H&R Block deserves a shot at your tax preparation business this year. If you plan on remaining in the state of low level slavery, consider H&R Block. If you are not into Turbo Tax and doing it yourself, consider H&R Block. If you do not have any special allegiance to some other tax preparer, consider H&R Block. If you support the Second Amendment, even if you are not an NRA member, consider H&R Block. If you resent having holier than thou elitists who want to tell you which rights you can keep and which are too dangerous for you to be trusted with, consider H&R Block. This is a very small way of making some good come out of the evils of taxes, statism and collectivism. Consider it.

February 19, 2002