People constantly engage in various behavior that threaten to disrupt the status quo in society. Since modern politics, there have been two ways for leaders to respond to this problem. Conservatives have argued that it's easiest to change people's behavior by giving them the freedom to alter their cultural and social patterns. Socialists have suggested a more straight-forward solution: tax people who don't behave.

The "tax motivation" underlies much of socialist politics. But there's reason to be critical. Just think of speeding. Corrupt readers are familiar with my position on speeding, which is that it's a pretty weak way of increasing traffic security. Driving fast doesn't necessarily mean that you're a bad driver; on the opposite, a lot of people, especially elderly, can be dangerous on the road at low speeds.

So what about forcing drivers who speed to pay tickets? The answer is quite simple: you don't alter your driving behavior just because you're forced to pay a fine. You pay it and you move on. High income drivers are also able to just pay and continue speeding as before. Sweden understood this and installed speeding cameras on many roads to photograph violators. The problem? The authorities are forced to inform you on the road with signs before you pass any camera. So, drivers slow down, drive slowly past the camera, and move on. In case they're lazy, they can always look up on the web where every single camera is located. In short, speeding tickets are useless.

Taxing people to change their behavior doesn't work. But leaders never learn. The Green party in Sweden campaigned during the election with a policy suggesting raised gas taxes to force people to buy "green" cars. But people living on the countryside who are dependent on driving everyday to work are unlikely to pay two or three times the money for a new green car, just because the gas price is up. They are more likely to just pay up the money and move on. In the end, all the taxation is doing is stealing money from people's wallets. And just think about all companies who are dependent on delivering products by car. In reality they'll experience a company tax.

Socialists blame classical liberals and capitalism for worshiping money, but it is socialists who believe we can change the way people think and behave, just by forcing them to pay more money for a service. People don't work that way. They need more factors to take into consideration before they change behavior. Think of the IT-boom in the late 90's in Sweden. The government claims it was financial policies who made it big, but the reality is that many companies allowed their employers to buy a home PC to a cheap price. The result? Their kids played around with Windows DOS after work and became computer gurus. When I was a boy I had a friend who never joined us when we played football or chased girls. He stayed home and built home pages for different organizations before the term "HTML standard" was even coined.

Giving people more money, on the other hand, is in many cases a good motivator. Pay an employee more money and he or she will take on more responsibility and work longer hours. We like to contribute to our company, but we're not willing to become work slaves unless we see a special reward coming our way. Socialists have never understood that positive reward always is better than negative punishment. If it was that easy, I'd paid the Russian hackers who send out Viagra spam to my email a lot of cash, a long time ago.