A few days before Christmas my son and I were in the site office with a friend of ours solving the problems of the world as we sometimes do. The topic of government taxation came up and how every aspect of life is taxed.
As the conversation continued, our friend Mike expressed a point of view we had never considered so I asked and received his permission to use it here, with some background and explanation.
When I was a teenager I worked part-time at my dad’s General Motors dealership and every now and then this old fellow walked through the shop saying hello to all the mechanics and would wind up going out the back door where he would just stand around. Over the next few minutes the mechanics would lay down their tools one at a time and go out to talk to him, as well as the car salesmen and fellows from the parts department. After a few minutes of this, the old fellow left just the same way he came in, which was all a mystery to a teenager in the early 1960s.
Later I learned his name was Charlie and he was a salesman for the Irish Sweepstakes, a betting scheme that Ireland used to finance its health system. Since it was illegal in Canada to gamble, everyone had to be very careful about buying a ticket.
Boy things have changed. Now in every service station and convenience store Canadians can buy a wide variety of national and provincial lotteries that the governments control and sell.
The sale of liquor and beer has much the same history with bootleggers being the largest suppliers until governments saw how much money could be made. Now there are beer and liquor stores and even grocery chains selling what was previously not acceptable in society.
It’s amazing what gains acceptance when government can make money from it.
So now our governments have decided the sale and recreational use of marijuana will become legal so Canadian business is falling over itself to grow, distribute and sell this plant. The entire reason for this legalization is money and nothing else. Governments allow companies to grow and sell it while taking a cut of the profits.
So with the legalization of pot government now becomes our bootlegger, our bookie and our local dealer. I assume that taking 50 per cent of everyone’s wages, plus sales taxes on everything we buy, is just not enough to run a country that is already over $500 billion in debt.
I suppose they might think if a good percentage of us are drunk or stoned we won’t care much about how we are being governed. Maybe I’m old fashioned but I thought we created governments to protect us from international threats, crime and from ourselves, so I don’t see this action as progress.
Prostitution is the only vice our government does not yet control and I wouldn’t be too sure it won’t happen because if I had told the mechanics in dad’s garage that in my lifetime betting, alcohol and marijuana would be legal and sold by the government I would have been the topic of several jokes.
So I believe Mike was right: Our governments are slowly taking over what organized crime used to do and are operating off the profits.
Greg Hoover is a project manager in industrial and commercial construction who has lived with Christina in Tsawwassen for 25 years.
