Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Hidden Investments

One of the things I like about the idea of permaculture is that technically, it need not look very much like a farm. I'd still own land, but chances are it could look a lot like undeveloped land- perhaps very nice undeveloped land, but the tax liability is likely nowhere near as bad. Since modern agriculture undervalues the importance of improving soil, improving soil ought to be, as an investment, under-taxed. Modern agriculture reflects post-WWII industrial food production policy, largely because the government has been funding it for the past few years.
It strikes me that, in a funny way, children are a similar investment, though fraught with more difficulty. As with all people, governments have a knee-jerk desire to control them. Governments also notice any inter-generational capital transfers necessary to really pull it off as money to take for their own purposes. They only allow debt transfers, essentially putting our kiddies in hock to fund whatever insanity they dream up.
But, with all that, governments tend to look at children as nothing but costs. Abortion, contraception, health care, education- the vocabulary is laden with the connotation that children are a burden. It is only when they can be shaped into a political force that they suddenly become good. Consequently, though they may be vaguely alarmed at such odd notions as homeschooling (or unschooling for that matter), perhaps the authorities are unlikely to understand the value of a properly raised child, and therefore not tax you.

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