Sorry folks, still building up a proper rant on BC taxes and the like.

But on that subject, I inadvertently came up with a rather compelling idea at the pub this evening.  It seems to me that taxes needn’t be paid strictly in currency: that, since we’re ostensibly paying taxes to promote the general welfare, it ought to be permissible to pay taxes in goods useful for improving that general welfare.  After all, if I pay taxes in cash money, someone has to take that cash money and buy food for the hungry — but if I pay taxes in canned chili (for example), it can go directly to the hungry without any interference (and therefore entropy and loss of value) at the hands of those poor overworked bureaucrats tasked with turning bucks into borscht.

“But Matt”, you cry, “What about those poor bureaucrats?  If everyone paid their taxes in useful goods, they wouldn’t be able to extract their own salaries therefrom!”  Fortunately, I have a littoral answer:

Nonetheless, the fact that it’s apparently permissible to pay taxes in an intermediate currency — cash money — raises an interesting question: if we can pay taxes in one currency which must be somehow* transmuted into something useful, why oughtn’t we pay taxes in any currency which can be transmuted into something useful?

For example, energy independence and renewable energy are high upon our list of national — nay, international — priorities.  Some of us Canadians are a bit apprehensive of the environmental impact of the Alberta oilsands, and if we follow the example of the farm lobby Down South we’ll end up growing a lot of grain to produce bioethanol.  That grain needs fertilizer.  That fertilizer needs hydrocarbons and nitrogen.

Well, I have something that contains hydrocarbons and nitrogen, particularly after washing down a large bowl of chili with a few pints of Guinness.

I therefore submit that it is my patriotic duty to pay my taxes in shit.

Not only is this a heretofore largely untapped resource, but it has a far less inhibitive effect upon the economy than does raising taxes in the form of collecting currency.  Accepting excreta as tax not only strengthens a vital and strategic component of our national economic structure: it also captures a valuable resource that’s being literally flushed down the toilet and will almost certainly vastly improve citizen morale.

It also occurs to me that this may be the one means by which the grain-growing Western provinces would be happy to take shit from Ontario and Quebec.  I suppose we’d have to disinfect it first to prevent a pervasive infection of dumbworms, but still.

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* Namely, through a free market; not that you’d hear any government fuck admit as much