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We don't need accountants and lawyers just to live our lives. We don't even need them if we have a well paying job, a mortgage, a fulfilling long term relationship, and a clutch of progeny. But we do need them to run a business, because --and this is the part that explains why-- your brain is finite, and you cannot be an expert at accounting, and law, and your actual profession. The willingness to outsource expertise to other people is what makes society possible. As for calling income tax a punishment: that's a bit weird, because you're not paying taxes on "your money", your money is what's left after taxes, the amount before taxes was your employer's money. Only some of that is going to be yours. If you live in the US, you unfortunately live with an idiotic system in which you are handed the full sum, being way more than is actually yours, and then making you responsible for splitting it up correctly and punishing you if you don't. However, if you live in a more modern country, at least in terms of how tax is handled, you wouldn't need to do this at all. The taxes will be withheld as part of the transaction, paid by the party doing the paying, and what is received is 100% the receiver's money, with no further taxes owed. (we see the same idiocy vs. sensibility with sales tax: some countries like Canada or the US have the insane habit of listing untaxed price in stores, with an inflated price at the till. More sane countries instead list the actual price of goods, with the tax processing taking place in the computers that handle the payments) Remember: your country needs to make money for it to stay a country. Setting a rule where any monetary transaction taking place in the nation (made possible only because there is a working national economy in the first place) has to include a portion that gets used to fund the nation that makes the economy possible isn't too crazy. Sales tax, income tax, capital gains tax, etc. are basically all the same thing (money changes hands, the nation gets a portion of it so it so that it can keep operating) using different rates (mostly) adjusted to be appropriate to how much is necessary to prosper. Of course, in a good tax implementation, you don't "get that money and then you have to pay taxes", instead those taxes are withheld as part of the payment and when the tax date rolls over, you have nothing to do (something that a number of countries actually do). It's when you get into levies (property tax, fuel surcharges, etc) that things become a bit more questionable, and one of those "what kind of country do you live in" differentiators. |