Tax and Death

.. in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes

&mdash Benjamin Franklin[1]

Tax

I came across a meme - Tax is a subscription fee to the state we live in. In a way the statement is true.

You owe some money to the land where you live. Most of the countries collect it income tax, some countries do survive without collecting income tax[2]. Having said that Income Tax is not the only tax the state can impose. It charge us via some other means too - corporate tax, Value added tax or Service/sales tax.

Death

Its an interesting part of life, more like a closing note to the life. From the earliest of time people madly tried to win over it, eventually learning there is no other option than to embrace it - willingly or not.

Even now, there are quite a chunk of VC money is spent on ways to defy/defeat death. Yet, the status quo remains. Death survives (pun intended).

There is no wonder Tax and Death are grouped together. One more things that’s going to be inevitable is..

Migration

There is a graffiti in Stavanger Train station that goes like “we are all birds of migration; some with feathers and others without”. I coudn’t reproduce exactly. But how true these are?

Migration as term defines relocating away from one’s home town. With the varying scale we are all migrating birds. The migratory nature and the nudge varies from people to people.

• Some relocate to nearby town to expand business
• Some of us move inter-state in one’s country to avail better job, thereby better income.
• Move into entirely foreign country for money, better living or surviving hostile environment.

Talking on absolute terms, paleontologists are confident we migrated all the way from Africa and settled down where we are now, some millennia ago. Since then what other places our ancestors are through to? - varies depending on where we are.

How accepting are we?

We are not migration as like tax or death. It’s understandable that breaking away from status quo is not so easy - either letting go of someone from your neighbourhood or inviting someone new, belonging to different color/culture or tradition to stay closer to us. Yet, it’s what going to happen. Its inevitable. Inclusiveness being used everywhere needs to be practised more widely.

As a migrant what should you do?

In most of the cases - you, me and everyone else let go of comfort of hometown and explore new places to get better living or provide better environment to next generation or both. It’s fair for the local to expect a new immigrant to adapt, accept the law of land. Its expected to obey the rules and follow the traditions without affecting the locals residing next to you. After all you should be a Roman when in Rome.

Bonding with people is like a bimetallic strip[3]. The bimetallic strip expands at different rates when heated, meaning they deform on heating. Similarly, with living closely there tends to be not so pleasant experience, but we should tolerate and accept individual as is. It’s not necessary to like tax or death but we do accept it as part of life. It is time to accept migrants and encourage migration. After all we are result of multi-generational migration.

References:

[1]: Death & Taxes - Wikipedia [2]: Countries without income tax - Investopedia [3]: Bimetallic Strip - Wikipedia