The Ridiculousness of Government: The Florida Wi-Fi Tax

For years there’s been a funny little e-mail hoax circulating around the Internet about a tax on e-mail. The state of Florida, where senior citizens and bad elections go, has decided to go one step further and place a tax on computer networking within people’s homes and businesses. You gotta hope this is a hoax as well, because the e-mail and the proposed tax both are truly ridiculous.

This is not a tax on equipment sales. This is a tax based on whether or not you are using a router or networking switches to connect up computers in your home.

What are they going to tax next? Air?

Don’t underestimate the insidiousness of this proposal.

How are they going to enforce it? Well, other than counting on everyone’s honesty, something governments generally do not do, they would have to come into your home to determine what networking equipment you have. Even if they did it by affidavit, the law establishing the tax, sooner or later, will lead to court cases deciding that it gives the government has “just cause” to enter your home or small business. Our only hope to stop it would be if we could get a court to decide that it amounted to an “unreasonable search” and violated the US Constitution. I doubt if that’s likely.

This feels to me like the worse kind of intrusion and terribly bad policy for any free country or state. The fact that state and federal governments already get too much tax money aside, the bigger questions concerning this proposal lie around the possible intrusion into people’s homes or home businesses and personal application of technology. It needs to be fought at almost any cost.

It makes me wonder if things are so bad in the State of Florida that their legislators are drinking seawater.