Image: Across English Bay
March 31, 2024
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Remembering Radio Caroline
March 28, 2024
It is 60 years ago today since Radio Caroline, the first of the British pirate radio stations began broadcasting. It was an event and a summer I remember well.
In the previous 18 months, the British music scene had exploded, first based on the incredible success of the Beatles but then quickly followed by dozens of groups from all over the country. Unfortunately, the staid old BBC held a monopoly of British radio and so many of us listened to this new music on Radio Luxemburg which broadcast in the evenings. However, the playlists of Radio Luxemburg and BBC TV’s weekly Top of the Pops were more or less controlled by the major record labels and didn’t cover the full spectrum of pop music then available.
Ronan O’Reilly, an Irish entrepreneur, decided to broaden the choice. He purchased an old ship, refitted it with high powered radio equipment, and parked it just outside British territorial waters. On 28th March 1964, Radio Caroline began broadcasting with a Rolling Stones song, and pirate radio — pirates because they were unlicensed — almost immediately changed the entire British cultural scene.
For the next few years, everyone I knew listened to the pirates (a number of other radio ships had joined in the fun) and no matter the laws the government tried to impose, their popularity continued to increase. By 1967, even the BBC had been completely revamped, with BBC Radio One becoming simply a copy of the pirates. That was, indeed, the Summer of Love.
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Happy Holi Day 2024!
March 25, 2024
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Poem: Call In The Middle of The Night
March 25, 2024
“You what?”
“You what?”
my voice echoed down the line
like a bedlamite
bouncing off
cushioned walls.
Then,
suddenly,
the silence,
the quiet electronic crackles,
hung in the dark night
as if my question had gone,
disappeared down a deep and endless well.
Minutes passed, maybe hours.
In the end, I whispered “I love you”
and put down the receiver
as the bitter sting of nausea overwhelmed my throat.
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Night Music: All The Young Dudes
March 22, 2024.
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Voluntary Taxation
March 21, 2024It is tax time again. And yet again I make my pitch for an all-voluntary tax system.
Way back in June 2002, I proposed doing away with all non-voluntary taxation by replacing income and all other taxes with a consumption tax. This is what I wrote in 2002, and I still see little need to change the basic structure proposed:
The basic principles for a new tax scheme are that it should be essentially voluntary, and concerned with ensuring equal opportunities for all. Therefore, I would propose the elimination of all personal and corporate income taxes as they violate by their very nature the voluntary aspect of taxation. I propose to replace the revenue with an all-inclusive sales tax on goods and services with a few, well-defined exceptions (the figures below represent Vancouver costs of living and could be adjusted as required):
• all foods
• shelter (to $24,000/year rent or the first $700,000 of purchase)
• all non-cosmetic medical, dental and optical-health services
• all educational services
• financial services (bank charges etc) to $500/year
• legal services to $2,500/year
The sales tax should be a single percentage across all categories of goods and services in order to reduce accounting and bureaucratic requirements.
The use of the sales tax for the bulk of government revenues brings a great deal of volunteerism to the matter. The exceptions provide an important and necessary break for those goods and services which can be described as the necessities of life; above that, the more I choose to buy, the more taxes I choose to pay. Rampant consumerism therefore becomes a tax liability.
On the other side of the ledger, also to the good, the simplicity of the scheme allows for huge bureaucratic savings in administration and zero non-compliance. The tax would also be levied on all capital transfers outside the jurisdiction. It will oblige tens of thousands of “tax lawyers” to find genuine productive employment.
All government activity should be categorized into line items that can be shown to have a direct bearing on the level of the sales tax. In this way, the people are enabled to make decisions about what sections of government can be further cut to reduce the level of taxation. Conversely, any additional work to be performed by the government can be readily calculated as an addition to the sales tax.
In other words, the cost of a government service will be immediately and directly calculable — and the people can make their judgments on whether to go ahead with it on that basis. It is one thing to say that a government program costs $600 million — an abstraction at best; it is quite another to say that program x will cause a rise in the sales tax by 1%.
In a capitalist system where the government bureaucracy acts as a nanny on so many issues, taxation of some sort is inevitable, as will be resistance to such taxation. The sales tax that I propose will allow the taxation system to operate on a voluntary basis, thus achieving considerably greater support and compliance.
It might be claimed that rich folks will simply remove their money from Canada to avoid the sales tax. Possibly true, but in my scheme, the sales tax would apply to all such financial transfers from the moment the scheme is announced.
Finally, I believe that many political types concern themselves far too much with how much money people make. If we concentrate on the input (salaries, bonuses etc) there will always be those who can play fast and loose with the rules. However, if you apply taxation to outputs (purchases, transfers etc), the returns will always be progressive: the more they spend, the more they’ll pay.
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Night Music: You Really Got Me
March 20, 2024.
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Poem: Midnight Snack
March 18, 2024
It’s 2am and the furnace
of our passion
is cooling slowly
we rise, tottering together,
arms entwined,
to the kitchen kissing
after making love
we make toast
thick with butter oozing
rich strawberry jam
streaked liked blood
or rust on a fence rich
as sweet love’s triangle:
you and me and toast
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Snacks Tonight #62
March 17, 2024.
Egg vanilla custards
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Jak's View of Vancouver v.3 