A very long time ago I heard what I thought was a very good idea, which sank like a stone and was quickly forgotten.

As I’ve mentioned, We the People of the United States find ourselves with an imperfect union. We don’t just disagree with each other about the specifics of government policy, we disagree about the very form and function of government.

A lot of that disagreement revolves around the elusive concept of ‘fair’ and how to make sure everybody has the right opportunities, attitudes, a healthy bank account, and perfect health.

Well I can’t do anything about that.

But I observe a lot of argument about what we spend federal money on.

What should our priority be?

Building up depleted military supplies, fixing up decaying infrastructure, providing healthcare for all, supporting culture?

Everybody has their own idea of what should be a priority or even what should be a function of government at all.

And resources are finite, which observation makes some fly into a rage, like a child when you tell them daddy can’t buy the latest X-Box or something.

But most people seem to realize there is only a certain percentage of our Gross Domestic Product government can absorb before it becomes an anchor on the economy.

The Frazer Institute of Canada came up with a figure of 27% of GDP as the optimum percentage of the economy the government ought to control. I have no idea how they arrived at that figure, or whether they claim it’s universal for all times and places or particular for North America in the 21st century, but let’s go with it for the sake of argument.

Currently we vote for representatives who will then vote how to allocate our taxes in a complicated process with a lot of horse trading resulting in winners and losers. But losing makes people unhappy so there is a strong tendency to try to give everybody what they want, which doesn’t make anybody happier and results in putting a lot on the national credit card.

But as economist Herbert Stein observed, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”

What a Libertarian candidate named Sandy Cohen in New York (if memory serves) came up with years ago was the idea of voting with your tax receipt.

Unfortunately this very serious idea was presented in a very unserious way, posing nude with a telephone strategically held for modesty’s sake announcing he had “nothing to hide.”

But the idea was, how about letting us have a little democracy in the economic sense.

How about check boxes on our income tax form saying, I want X amount of my taxes to go to this, Y amount to go to that, etc?

It could start out on a small scale. We could try allowing voters discretion over 10 percent of their tax payment. If it looks like a good idea after a while, increase it to 20 percent etc.

But (I hear you say) this would mean the rich would buy what they like from government!

News flash, they already do. But they do it by buying legislators. This would offer them and everybody else the opportunity to put their money where their interest lies without corrupting the state, and incentivize actually paying their taxes.

But I hear, the government knows things we don’t. Secret stuff they can’t tell us.

So let the government keep X percent control over taxes. Point being, this can be tried on a small enough scale it shouldn’t do any harm if it doesn’t work.

— Steve Browne is a former reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent