So much going on today. Feel like a tea party? (By the way, the media coverage has been pretty bad, both in terms of some outlets blatantly dumping on the idea -- most of the MSM, I'm talking to you -- and other outlets blatantly promoting it -- and that's you, Fox News.) Check out one law prof's take on the tea party movement.
Tax Day and the entire tax structure and industry are just begging to be satirized. Maybe we can laugh our way through our W-2s and 1040s with a little help from the indispensable Onion. Satire Alert -- take a look at its fake (and slightly Kafka-flavored) news story, "2008 Tax Records Reveal Sasha Obama Made $136 in Allowance Money."
Is the entire idea of high (and practically confiscatory) taxes (plus a ballooning and increasingly interventionist government) a type of collectivism? Not to mention statism. Blurb (though the whole thing's worth a look):
Collectivism holds that the individual has no rights. Your life, your existence, your interests and the product of your labor now belongs to the group. If the group needs a bailout, health care, green cars, low mortgage rates, a job, an education—anything at all, it now becomes your responsibility to provide it, whether you want to or not.Yuck! (Sounds like it's time to "go Galt"?)
You see it in both the redistributive legislation, which takes money from people who’ve earned it and give it to those who have not, along with the language itself. Phrases like “we’re all in it together”, “I am my brother’s keeper” and “shared sacrifice” boil down to the same frightening reality: You are here to serve. And unlike the charity of volunteerism, the “will of the people” is implemented by force, not by voluntary trade.
This is a profoundly anti-American ideal. From the original Boston Tea party came the Declaration of Independence, which articulates the morality of individual rights. In this country, you are born free with the absolute moral right to make of your life what you will.
“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” refers to your life, your liberty and your happiness. America was a truly revolutionary country because, for the first time in history, every man was born not with a duty to serve the king, the senate or society, but with a moral right to live his own life and pursue his own happiness. The Tea Parties are protests against government power and in support of a society in which man has the right to live selfishly for his own sake, not sacrifice himself for the “common good.”
But for collectivists, sacrifice is seen as absolute. You’re expected to sacrifice for your neighbor, your government, your country. For AIG and Citigroup, deadbeat homeowners or auto workers, whatever or whomever the geniuses in Washington decide has more rights than the rest of us. The individual has a value only as a means to the end for society. His life, his dreams, his income, are Uncle Sam’s to marshal and allocate.
On other fronts, I have some tax-errific video for you too:
Oh, and people? Getting the hapless, tin-eared Joe "Gaffemeister" Biden to cheerlead for higher taxes is a really, really dumb idea.
Here's something a bit more comedic:
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