Taxes for Thee but not for Me

If paying taxes is patriotic, what should we make of the Obama “Government of Tax Cheaters”?

Tom Daschle with has been added to “The Most Tax Corrupt Administration Ever”. Turns out that he had a $100,000 tax bill that he considered himself too good to have to pay.

I’ve never had much sympathy for the Wesley Snipes, Willy Nelson, etc. who get nailed for tax evasion. Much as I don’t like taxes… As unbridled corrupt as the system is… taxes are real. If you make money, you KNOW that the tax man wants a piece of it. If you make lots of money, you get to hire accountants to minimize what the tax man getteth. But you don’t get to just ignore it.

Is it just me, or is there some truly profound message in the fact that the “Party of Higher Taxes” has so many members who think “Except for Me”? Is it highlighting the unbridled arrogance of people who truly believe that they are some type of higher class (in the traditional blue blood, Kennedyesque, not really of the same species sense) of people anointed by some higher power (Gaia? Their infinite sense of self-worth?) to rule the lower class plebes? Privileged by assuming that ‘burden’ to not be bound by the rules they impose on their lower class wards? Warren Buffet says taxes are too low while he pays an army of accountants to protect his wealth. What a blowhard hypocrite. If he truly believed that, he could fire the accountants, write a big check to the government, and then tell us we don’t pay enough.

Taxes to these people are not a mechanism to pay for government. If that were true, they would be more willing to pay them. It is a form of government. Just as the torture chambers of Saddam’s Republic of Fear were used to keep the riff raff in their place, Leftists use taxes to keep the opposition in its place. Classic Stalinist communism. Steal everything. Give it back to maintain the minimum level of societal function to keep the plebes quiet, reward obedience, and distribute the rest among the ruling nomenklatura* as payment for their ’sacrifice’. Leftists see no reason to pay taxes because they see no need for them to control themselves.

I’ve said it before, so let’s sing it again.
Chorus: “There is nothing liberal about the Left. There is nothing Progressive about the Left.”

The Democrats are not Liberals. The Democrats are not Progressive.

The attitude of these people who are assuming power in the Obama administration and the congressional majority is the antithesis of the egalitarian philosophies of the liberals who cast off the monarchy to create the republic.

Paying taxes may in fact be patriotic (hat tip to Joe “Foot-in-mouth” Biden). But espousing higher taxation as a means of control, especially while assuming one too privileged to pay themselves, may be treason to the fundamental philosophy on which a free and open society is built.

* Nomenklatura – Soviet Union ruling elite. aka: Communist party bigwigs.

Here comes 2012

I contributed to the Sarah Palin PAC today.  Not a big contribution.  But four years is a long time.  Plenty of opportunity to add more.

One of the people I talk politics with a lot still thinks Hillary will be the first woman president.  I don’t think so.  She can’t run in 2012 because she’s in the administration.  Realistically, she’ll be too old in 2016.  She had a shot.  It required almost a decade of unbridled media propoganding, and she got undone by an upstart from Illinois.  She had one chance and missed it.  Buh-Bye.

I’m putting my money (literally) on Sarah Palin.  Yes lots can happen in the next four years.  But it’s going to take having something to look forward to to get through the next four years.

Republic of Fear

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was often called the Republic of Fear.  Everyone was taught to understand in no uncertain terms; survival = obedience.  Obedience did not = survival.  Under Saddam, people learned that even the most obedient servant could get picked up in a purge, caught in the crossfire, or simply targeted for the Husseins’ amusement.  And willingness to obey was not sufficient.  Saddam’s Republic of Fear had no forgiveness for mistakes.  Stepping out of line, even by accident could leave you deposited in pieces in small cardboard boxes at your family’s front door.  Fear was the motivator, the educator, the guiding light through a life.

For the last few years, the leftists/anti-Bush/democrats accused the right/Bush/republicans of fomenting fear as a way to garner votes.  Mostly fear from attack by outside forces.  “Terrorism” in leftist circles was simply fear-mongering, a way to say “boo!” to children and scare them back into the corner of the ‘pro-defense’ party.

But lets look at the real Republic of Fear in the United States.  Let’s look at the left’s fear-mongering.

For decades, the left has pounded out the message that if they are not listened to and obeyed, THE WORLD WILL END!  No mere attack that will kill people and seriously disrupt our national economy.  We will ALL die.  Not a threat to our way of life (which by the way they wouldn’t see as a bad thing.)  It will be the End Of Days.  Only by enslaving ourselves to their enlightened vision can we be preserved, if you ignore the fact that much of their vision is the elimination of most or all of the human race depending on which flavor of environut is speaking at the moment.  Most of the environazi movement, Anthropogenic Global Warming in general, algore in particular, justify their solutions and demands for blind obedience by claiming that humanity will end if they are ignored.  No fear-mongering there.  No siree bob.

From there, we can go though the whole litany of liberal fears.  Outsourcing will cost you your job, even though the unemployment was the lowest in my experience.  Your children will go without.  You won’t get a flat screen TV.    “FEAR!!!   FEAR EVERYTHING!!!!  Only we can save you.  Give yourself to us.  We are the ones you have been waiting for!”  Throw in the class hatred fears.  “We punish success to spread the wealth or we fear somebody might get rich.”

The Left wants people to fear far more than the right does.  The Right doesn’t want people to quake in fear.  The conservative position it to stand resolutely against the darkness, a la Battle of Britain.  That’s what the gun thing is all about.  The Left thrives on people quaking in fear like the armies of Mordor.  That’s the reason for the anti-gun thing.  The only reason any society is disarmed is not to make it safe, but to make it docile…and weak…and helpless…and helplessness leads to fear, the Ambrosia of the Left.

1,459 day remaining

Obama’s a one termer.  He was going to close Gitmo all through the primaries.  It was simple.  Just close it because it is evil.  He was catering to the Leftist in the Democratic party (did I just repeat myself?).  During the campaign, Gitmo stays open because he wanted the centrist position to get independents.  Now two days after becoming the Living God On Earth (Don’t believe me?  Ask any of the MSM kneeling before Him.)  Gitmo will be closed…in a year…after some study…because we need to know who’s there…it’s realy a very complex question…don’t bother me.

Good start Barry.  Realy nail that issue down.  The only thing more fun that counting down the days to the end of his reign is counting how many faces he’s got.

[sigh].

I’VE GOT IT! LET’S BAIL OUT EVERYTHING!

And I’m not talking about mere money.  I’m talking about the getting down to the deep philosophical core of Bailoutapalooza.  Punish success and reward failure on steroids applied to everything.

Congress should pass laws to regulate everything (because they will anyway) so that in any competitive venture, the winner has to give all his winnings to the looser.

Imagine how much better baseball would be if Congress passed a law so that everytime a team gets a runner to home plate, the other team gets a run.  This would prevent the scoring team from profiting undeservedly from their accomplishment.   The World Series would be played by the two teams that couldn’t score a run to save their lives.  Who wouldn’t enjoy that?  All the teams that worked so hard to actually get runners around the bases could bask in the sense of wellbeing brought about by knowing that they had helped send the disadvantaged (excuse me, the run challenged) to the winner’s circle.

But what would keep just anybody from playing professional baseball then?  We have to limit participation because if anybody can play and get free runs from the other teams, whose going to pay the professionals?  The answer to that is simple.  In order to participate in this new socialy enlightened baseball league, you have to tithe your local congresscritter.

Yes, this will fix everything.  Now let’s all sing, “What a wonderful world it will be…”

“If a tree falls in the forest…

… and there is no one there to hear it, did it make any sound?”  Ah, the intellectual pigmyism of philosophers.  Perhaps they should ask the squirrel that just got knocked out of its nest.  Sound is propagated by vibrations through matter.  When someone hears a tree fall, they are hearing the vibrations in the air caused by the tree’s motion and impact with the ground and surrounding trees.  Simple physics.  How dumb does someone have to be to even compose the question that the air will not vibrate because they are not there to ‘experience’ the sound?  And I say dumb because philosophers are generally supposed to be edjercated.  Too bad their edjercation didn’t teach them anything.

Truth is what is.

Not what you think it is.  Not what you want it to be.  Not what is popular.  Truth is not defined or limited to what anyone or everyone knows.  Truth does not go away because of the ignorance of the speaker.

Truth is.

And Bill Clinton notwithstanding, there is truth as to what the definition of is is.

So how do you know what truth is?  Assuming you are of normal perceptive ability, not schizophrenic, delusional, demented or otherwise altered, you should trust your senses.  But this is actually harder to do than it sounds.  Behavioral research abounds with experiments showing that participants will alter their perception of a situation in order to ‘fit in’ with a group.  And therein lies the problem in much of the world.  The surrender of one’s own perceptions for the perceptions of other for the perceived benefit of ‘fitting in’.  To belong.  To curry the favor of peers, or superiors.  It is what makes people expend time wondering if falling trees make noise.  After spending a lifetime surrendering one’s own existence for the existence of others, it’s not surprising that some people begin to doubt existence itself.

This tendency to alter one’s own perception to conform with others should be the source of the skepticism that is supposed to be the basis of scientific analysis.  Not skepticism about whether the world is or is not.  But skepticism about conventional wisdoms and widely held beliefs about the world.  In a person’s own mind, they need to ability to hold a consistent universe against which conventional wisdoms are tested.  This is the bullsh*t meter.  It’s what separates the independent from the gullible.

One more time with feeling

I said it before and I’ll say it again.  There is nothing “Progressive” about the political left.  I keep reading articles by conservative and rightish bloggers who use “progressive’ to reference the political left.  It’s like calling career criminals people who practice an ‘alternate lifestyle’ or serial rapists men who enjoy the company of women.  “Progressive” should be reserved for people who actually, like, want to see progress.  Not used to identify luddites, marxists, anti-humans and other degenerates.

Why won’t the Global Warmists admit defeat?

Because it’s not about Glowbull Warning.  Never was.  It was about political power and luddite driven deindustrialization (yeah, I made that word up) and environazi anti-humanism.

Cold temperature records continue to be set around the world.  Oceans are cooling and lowering, glaciers that have been retreating for centuries are growing.  Antarctic sea ice is reaching record coverage, Arctic sea ice is growing at record pace.  Virtually every prediction that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) crowd has made has failed to come to pass.  It’s almost as if the Earth (Mother Gaia) is trying to give them a lesson in hubris.  Unfortunately, she’s talking to an empty class room, because they were never listening to her in the first place.

Back to basics

A suggested plank for a conservative political party (which largely leaves out the Republicans, aka Democrat-lite).

“The Business of America is Business.”

President Herbert Hoover is much maligned by history, but he was right on this one.  Like at the beginning of the Lord of the Rings Movie – things that should have been remembered were lost.  The purpose businesses serve in a national economy is not to make the rich rich, oppress the poor, provide a tax base, make jobs for labor mafias, provide community outreach programs or any of the other socialist/liberal agendas/accusations they get stuck with.

The purpose of business is to create economic activity.

It’s that simple.  Everything else is secondary and derives from that Prime Directive.  The purpose of government is to facilitate that activity through the maintenance of infrastructures such as transportation systems, money and a legal environment that promotes a positive business environment.  Such a legal environment does not necessarily consist of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), promotion of monopolies, abusive employment practices or other unsavory or destructive business tactics.  These contribute to the localized benefit of individuals, individual companies or industries, but usually to the detriment of the overall economy.

The problem today is government has ceased to be a facilitator and has become a parasite, willingly out of a animosity or unintentionally out of a sense of just plain stupid, sucking the life from the enterprises that are supposed to drive the nation’s economy.  Socialism, the ownership by the government of the means of production, has failed in EVERY country it has ever been tried in.  That is because governments are always driven by political pressures.  People who excel in government excel in politics, not in providing goods and services that prove they value by being competitive against other people trying to provide goods and services.  People in government succede by accumulating power.

Things go badly when these two activities, government and enterprise, merge.

Remembering the SS Admiral

This post is primarily for the local St. Louis, MO readers.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is writing  a book about the SS Admiral, a side-wheel river steam boat built in the 1930’s that ran excursions up and down the Mississippi from the Port of St. Louis.  I was only five the one time I sailed on her.  Therefore, if anybody who was an adult and has clearer memories than mine would want to contribute stories about the SS Admiral, send them to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by e-mail.  Here is the link to the paper’s page on the story.  Share Your Memories