Taxes or extra overhead

This is an odd situation that happened in 2007.  We sent a parcel from Alberta to Nova Scotia and the business we paid to ship it charged us the Nova Scotia HST.  This seemed so out of hand that I ran it by an Alberta Finance person who opined that this was not illegal, it was a choice of the business owner.  We never used this business again and I still wonder if the taxes we paid ever reached the coffers of Nova Scotia.

PS  Part of the reason for the high cost of shipping (the parcel was about the size of a loaf of bread) was that we paid extra for "2 day delivery" - the parcel was actually delivered in 5 days. 

We all need to be reminded from time to time that taxes are actually a confiscation of our personal property.  This is bad enough, but when it is compounded by the tax collector skimming a margin for himself, it helps to understand why "tax collectors" were such unpopular - not to say reviled - persons in the ancient world.  In those days, it was common to farm out tax collection.  The way this worked was that a ruler would contract with someone to collect x amount of taxes in a certain area.  The "tax farmer" was free (indeed it was expected) to collect more taxes than the amount of his contract (i.e. x + y)  The tax collector thus had the incentive to enrich himself by collecting as much (or more) than what the market might bear.  This "mark-up" is part of the same approach which irritates so many ordinary people in the world even today.  When a driver's license agent in, say, Egypt, insists that a person pay a personal bribe, in addition to the govermental fee then we have this same piggy-backing of personal greed and corruption, on top of the (questionably legitimate) taxes.  The "little people" are helpless to change this system and are thus denied justice.  However, a thousand small cuts sometimes adds up to a rage that demands the overthrow of the whole system - "tax collector" and "tax perpetrator" included.