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Well, existing taxes are for very specific and well delineated purposes. We can re-name the fees we pay to access the standard to "Standards User Tax", and it gets collected when you want to access the standard. Obviously, we wouldn't want a vague general tax to cover a wide variety of general purposes, we want to keep things as specific as possible. Is it that the taxes are already high enough, and we feel that the existing tax base should also cover the cost of standards development, maintenance and distribution? By what mechanism would individual government bodies levying taxes direct the appropriate funds to standards related activities? If you think that the regulatory and building code system isn't working and want to act to change the status quo, you should travel to other jurisdictions that don't have a robust system of standards. Then it would become abundantly clear that standards development and adherence is expensive and worth every penny. Yes, a guild system, it's called the building trades, we have this where I live and it works pretty well. As for secret laws, well, welcome to the western world. No one ever told us what all of the laws are that we're expected to follow. We are never issued a little book. We are expected to learn, read, ask, and pay for resources required in order to live as functioning members of society. There are other things we have to pay for. Clothes, for instance, are not issued for free by the government, but wearing them is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions. Do we consider that governments should provide those for free? |