The Weapon - Apocalypse - part 12
By Diana the Valkyrie
Taxation to the point of confiscation


Duncan:

I was feeling particularly helpless. We were a couple of miles above the
ground, and me without a parachute. And after the seeing-to that I'd just been
given, I don't think I could have fought off an affectionate kitten. And so,
naturally, Wendy chose that moment to launch her attack.

"Duncan?" "Hmm?" I replied, drowsily. "How come you only seem to hire pretty
young girls?" she asked. My brain heard the alarm bells ringing. I've been
around women before, you see, and I know the answer to the easy ones like
"Does my bum look big in this?". I also know the warning signs of the
difficult ones. I was too close to Wendy to be able to see her face, but that
probably wouldn't have helped me anyway. She can put on any mask she wants to,
her face isn't connected to her emotions the way ours is. Actually, I'm not
sure that she has emotions, maybe she just pretends to. Hell, I don't even 
know if other people feel the same way I do, maybe we just all use the same 
words for things that feel different to different people. But that goes more 
so for Wendy.

She isn't human. I have to keep telling myself this, because she does such a
good imitation. Most of the time. And she keeps refining it. She watches what
other people do, and she copies them, it's like kids do with their parents as
they grow up, and you keep thinking "Where did she get that from?" But are
kids human? Not really. The thing we call "growing up" is the process of
becoming human.

I tried to think. Where did she learn jealousy from? I suppose, the more she
mixes with people, the more she's going to find new things to try. So, is she
really jealous, or is she just pretending? No, that's not it. Is she really
imitating jealousy, or is she just pretending to imitate jealousy? I mean,
imitating pretending. Or maybe pretending to imitate pretending. My brain
hurts. I can't handle this. The only answer is to take all this at face value,
which, of course, is what she wanted in the first place. OK, you win, Wendy.
As usual. I better answer.

"I don't. Fiona isn't exactly young, you can't tell me that Sally is pretty,
and Jeff isn't even a girl." "OK, Fiona isn't young, but you have to admit
she's good-looking. And she's younger than you are, so relatively speaking,
she is young." "True. And Sally is prettier than I am, so I suppose,
relatively speaking, she's pretty." "So how come you're hiring a harem?"

Uh. I think she's been watching daytime soaps, this comes straight out of
"East Enders", surely. "Wendy, I'm not hiring a harem, I can't even cope with
you, I hardly need a harem." "And I saw the way you were looking at her." "At
who?" "You know who I mean."

Dammit. Where did she get this script? More importantly, why am I following
the same script that she is? Time to change the game.

"Wendy. Your strength is my strength. Your power is my power. I will love you
and protect you and command you. Until the end of time"

I looked up, and found a pair of large blue eyes, about the size of saucers,
looking down at me. And then a big soft mouth covered mine, and a small hard
tongue thrust itself between my teeth, and Wendy communicated love to me, and
I communicated it back. And we didn't really need words. I'm pretty sure she
had been playing a game with me just then.

And then I slept pretty well. The recipe for sleeping well, is to be relaxed,
feel safe, and it helps if you're exhausted. Wendy made sure of all of those,
so when I woke up the next morning, I felt pretty good. Plus, as I returned
from the land of Nod, we were still a couple of miles in midair, so I felt
safe from Wendy's dreadful habit of dragging me under a cold shower to "help
you wake up, Duncan".

Hah. I underestimated her resourcefulness. She pulled me through a
thundercloud, and I got drenched in cold rain and sleet, and treated to a
light-and-sound spectacular. For a moment I was worried that she'd get me
fried by lightning, but then I realised that A) I'm not earthed, and B) she
wouldn't be doing this if it put me in danger. So them I just relaxed and
enjoyed it, as much as one can relax and enjoy being soaked in a thunderstorm.
And after a little while, she decided I'd had enough, I was fully snatched
from the arms of Morpheus, and she dived down and in through my cat-flap. Or
maybe that should be "Wendy-flap". And I got my hot-towel rub-down, which
makes the whole thing worth while.

After breakfast, she dropped me off at the office, left the babies in the
creche, and lifted off for Texas, to get some more oil into our formerly-dry
oilfield. Jeff phoned me fifteen minutes later when she arrived to tell me
that she was busy synthesising, and I took the opportunity to get him up to
date on how things were going. Meanwhile, I tried to work out how many G's she
must have pulled to get there so fast. I calculated twelve, which wouldn't be
possible if she were carrying anyone, but when she's by herself, the sky's the
limit.

You'd think that, given what we were doing, people would be appreciative and
sympathetic. If you thought that, then you don't know people. If there's one
thing that people hate even more than being helped, it's being made to feel
guilty because someone else is helping. And, although we hadn't set out to
make people feel guilty, that's what was happening. Oh sure, the babies were
happy. I mean, it beats dying of disease, malnutrition and neglect. But there
were three groups who weren't at all happy.

The first group, was all the babies we weren't helping. And that was a lot.
We'd known up front that we weren't going to solve the whole problem, but we
knew that whatever we could do, would be better than nothing. The second group
was all the charities in the same field. You'd think that they'd applaud our
efforts, and publicly that's what they did. But they didn't exactly fall over
themselves to help the newbies in the field.

But the worst was the governments. We weren't a charity, we weren't a
non-profit. The fact that all the money we made went into baby rescue, was
irrelevant to them. They taxed us like a profit-making multinational
corporation, which was, of course, exactly what we were. They taxed us on
income, they taxed us on expenditure. They taxed money on the way out of the
country, and they taxed it on the way in. They hit us with country, state,
county and city taxes. They taxed us in advance, and in arrears. Wendy wanted
to know what it was they were using it for that was more important than what
we were doing, and I didn't have an answer.

Moira was great. She fought them tooth and nail. She fought them in the tax
offices, she fought them in the courtrooms, she fought them in the appeal
courts, she would never surrender a penny more than she absolutely had to. She
set up offshore trusts, she set up shell companies in tax havens, she used tax
breaks wherever tax breaks were on offer. She assured me that it was all
entirely legal. "No-one need pay a penny more than the law requires" was one
of her favourite expressions. I kept thinking of Enron, and hoping that she
was as honest as Fiona said she was. Well. At least she was pretty. But don't
tell Wendy I said so.

So anyhow, I was sitting at my desk, trying not to watch Wendy on the floor
playing with the babies, and trying not to think that she played with me in
just the same way, except we played very different games. Come to think of it,
maybe she saw us all as her babies? Who knows how she thinks - we've talked
about it, but there's some things that are just so alien, you can't hope to
understand. Like the way she just can't see how money works. "Bunny bunny
bunny bunny whoops bunny whoops bunny bunny bunny bunny," she said, and the
babies gurgled. That stupid bunny game. But the babies love it. Go figure 
a baby.

Huh? Where was I? Oh yes. Sitting at my desk, trying to find a tactful way to
explain to Fiona that although we were flowing through a fair bit of cash, it
wasn't actually unlimited, and yes, she did have to listen when Moira told her
that she couldn't do everything she want to do. And then Moira rushed in
looking very cross.

"Bastards," she said. Wendy looked up, and I said "Who?" "Bastards, those
bastards," said Moira. Wendy lost interest and went back to the babies, and I
told Moira to sit down and take a deep breath, and I had two reasons for that
advice. Well, three actually, the obvious two, plus it would also calm her
down and get her to put a coherent sentence together.

"They're changing the tax laws!" she said. Oh, rivetting, I thought, and got
ready for a long lecture on the finer points of international taxation
treaties. "It's a new tax, coming in at the next Budget, they're calling it
the Oil Revenue Tax." "But surely that won't affect us," I asked, "all our
production comes from outside the country." "But that's the whole point.
They've decided to tax production even when it's non-UK." "How can they do
that," said Wendy, "that's just not fair."

"Fair," said Moira, "Dunc, in the context of taxation, what's this word 'fair'
all about? Wendy, the idea of taxation is to grab as much as you can without
actually killing the Golden Goose." Wendy blinked, shook her head, said
"Goose" and went back to playing with two babies and a ball. "So what's the
damage," I asked, wearily. "They want 35%" she said. "That's a lot," I
replied. "A LOT???" shrieked Moira, "it's practically the whole cheese.
They're already taking all those other taxes, this is on top of of that." "Uh,
so what's the total?" "Ninety-two."

That got my attention. "Ninety-two percent?" Moira nodded. "We pull a hundred
dollars of oil out of the ground, and we get to keep eight?" She nodded again.
Bloody hell. This wasn't just killing the goose, it was milking it to death.
Mind you, there's precedents. Badly thought out taxation systems have led to
tax rates in excess of 100% in the past.

"But can they do that, Moira? This is extraterritoriality, they're trying to
tax us on business we're doing in another country." "Dunc, they're the
government, they make the law, they can do whatever they bloody like." "No
they can't," said Wendy. We looked over at her, sitting on the floor. She
looked like a teenager playing with a couple of baby sisters. I reminded
myself that she was The Weapon, probably capable of dropping an entire country
into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and then getting back in time for lunch.
I turned back to Moira. "Can we fight them?" I asked. "Yes," said Wendy.
"Wendy, uh," I said, "Moira, can we fight them?" "In the courts, you mean?"
she replied, "well, we could try, but, well, I won't say that the government
controls the courts, but if we do win, all they have to do is bring in another
law, and we're back to square one."

Wendy stood up. She looked down at Moira and I, sitting round the desk. She
held her arms folded across her chest, and asked "Duncan, you seem to be
reacting quite hard to this, how important is it?"

I thought for a moment, to put it in terms she'd understand. "It means, if we
knuckle under to this, that for every five babies we could rescue before, now
we can only rescue one. It means, forget about rescuing half a million babies,
we'll only get a hundred thousand."

She frowned. "So the government will rescue the other 400,000?"

"Uh, no."

"So what will they do that's so much more important?"

"Uh. Roads, railways and buses. Schools, hospitals and doctors. All the stuff
that governments do."

"Well, I can see that's important stuff, but who decides that it's more
important than what we're doing?" she asked.

Damn, she does ask the difficult questions. This is the key difference between
socialism and capitalism. Who decides where resources go, the state, or the
individual? And, of course, it isn't black-and-white like that. A better way
of posing the question is, what percentage of resources should the state
allocate, and what percentage should be left to individual decisions? A
socialist believes that the state can make better decisions, so moves the
percentage in favour of the state. The capitalist believes that the state
makes worse decisions about what people want than the individuals can, so
tries to reduce the state's share of the cake.

But Wendy asked the question, and she's entitled to an answer. "This would
have been a proposal from the Chancellor of the Exchequer, agreed by the
Cabinet, drafted in detail by the Treasury and debated and passed by
Parliament, although there would be a three-line whip, so MPs would vote
according to the way their party told them."

"So who decides," asked Wendy. Fair question. I thought about all those
different players in the game, but most of them were either doing what they
were told, or just working out the details. "Cabinet," I decided. Moira
nodded. "Bunny bunny bunny bunny whoops bunny whoops bunny bunny bunny bunny,"
said Wendy to one of the babies.

"So that's who I need to talk to," said Wendy, standing up, "where is he?"

"Uh, hang on, Wendy," I said. "Wendy, you can't just ask the British
Government to do what you want," said Moira. "I wasn't planning to ask them. I
was planning to tell them. Nicely. To start with. Firmly, if necessary." I
looked at Moira, she looked at me. "Can she do that?" Moira asked. "Her
specialty is making men incontinent by staring at them," I explained. Moira
laughed. "I'm serious," I said, "when you see her clench her fist and frown at
a guy, get ready to hold your nose." "So, where is he," asked Wendy.

"It isn't a he, it's a them. The Cabinet is a committee, they meet quite often
and decide what's best for the country," I explained. "Where and when," asked
Wendy, her hands on her hips.