‘One day Lal Shahbaz Qalander was wandering in the desert with his friend Sheikh Baha ud-Din Zakariya. It was winter, and evening time, so they began to build a fire to keep warm. They found some wood, but then they realised they had no fire. So Baha ud-Din suggested that Lal Shahbaz turn himself into a falcon and get fire from hell. Off he flew, but an hour later he came back empty-handed. “There is no fire in hell,” he reported. “Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world.”’

The company makes a profit of $10 million and has 150 employees. To make the calculation simple, assume all employees  earn a salary of $60,000. Assume half the employees are single and half of them are heads of households. Each single employee will pay a tax of $9,900 and each head of household will pay about $8,200. So employees pay an income tax of about $1,350,000.

Company Revenue: $45,000,000

Cost of goods sold: $35,000,000

Sales/service tax paid by the company during manufacturing/operations (when buying goods or services) : $1,400,000 (8% of half of $35 million)

Company Profit: $10,000,000

Corporate Income Tax (@35%): $3,500,000

Employee salaries: $9,000,000

Tax paid by employees: $1,350,000

Money spent by employees: $5,400,000 (60% of their pre-tax salaries)

Sales tax paid by employees: $270,000 (5% of total money spent)

Total tax: 1.4 + 3.5 + 1.35 + 0.27 = $6.52 million

Is this too much? Or too little? How do we make sense of it?

From the point of view of the employee, let’s see what would have happened if there was zero tax on everything. If all these taxes did not exit, this money would go into the pockets of the individual employees.

$6.52 million divided by 150 employees is $43,466. So each employee’s salary would rise from $60,000 to $103,466. This is the true extent of the cost of government.

Whether the benefits of government exceed the costs is a matter of personal opinion.

Emperor Wu took an interest in Buddhism and spent a great deal of public wealth on funding Buddhist monasteries in China. When he had heard that a great Buddhist teacher, Bodhidharma, had come to China, he sought an audience with him. When they met, Emperor Wu had asked how much karmic merit he had gained from his noble support of Buddhism. Bodhidharma replied, “None at all.” The Emperor asked, “Then what is the truth of the teachings?” Bodhidharma replied, “Vast emptiness, nothing holy.” So the emperor asked, “Then who are you standing in front of me?” Bodhidharma replied, “I do not know,” and walked out.

It’s like saying people shouldn’t use the beige color.

Why would we care?

It’s easy to install other media players and other browsers even if you have some defaults. You ought to have a browser pre-installed to be able to download and install something else. Apple’s computers have a lot of stuff pre-installed. So does Ubuntu.

Besides, Microsoft’s share of the browser market is about the same as Google’s share of Internet search.

If he could really transform himself into a goat, why wouldn’t he simply use his powers to transform a bicycle into a car? Why steal?