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Edited on Thu Apr-16-09 12:13 PM by JHB
One guy manages to tell you everything you need to know about what motivates these idiots:
Lou Webb of Durango said Obama acts like Robin Hood.
"It doesn't work to take from the people who have amassed something by taking great risk," Webb said. "We can't take from those people and be Robin Hood and steal from them and give to the guy who doesn't want to get up in the morning and go to work."
Now, just who is he talking about here? Exactly what budget items is he talking about? Any? Nope, it's St. Ronnie's "Caddilac-driving welfare queen" imagery all over again.
And then there's the stock "libertarian"/Rand-oid character, who could be played by a cardboard cut-out:
Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, 95 percent of all working families will receive tax cuts, according to a news release from the White House. In addition, 70 percent of the tax benefits will go to the middle 60 percent of American workers.
"That's nice," said Mark Mahlum, a self-proclaimed libertarian. But he said taxes violate economic freedom. The most important thing individuals do daily is earn a living, Mahlum said. But then the federal government confiscates a huge chunk of those earnings, he said.
The primary function of the federal government is to defend property and life, and regulate states, he said, but it has extended its responsibilities and inflated in size, which restricts individual freedom. "The emphasis of the Obama administration is on the collective, not the individual," Mahlum said. With the system in place, the wealthy pay most of the taxes in America, he said. But to Mahlum, the wealthy should not have to subsidize the poor, and everyone should pay for what he or she receives.
Oh, Ayn-forbid the wealthy subsidize the poor. Because everybody knows, the poor have all the advantages. :puke:
Mahlum advocates user taxes and taxation at the local level. The federal government is inefficient and spends too much money collecting and administering taxes. "If you use it, you pay for it," Mahlum said. "If I drive a mile on the highway, why shouldn't I pay for a mile that I drove rather than splitting it up among everybody? You should pay for what you get and not for what someone else gets."
Now, this guy is interesting to me, because I describe myself as a "left-libertarian", and I use precisely that example to demonstrate the irony of the standard "libertarian" line:
Imagine, if you will, using some kind of EZ-Pass system covering every public road in America. Every vehicle would have a tag, and would be rated for things like weight and surface pressure to better reflect the wear & tear they put on roads. What this would let you do is divide up the yearly maintenance costs of any particular stretch of road among the vehicles that actually used it, and weighted for the wear & tear they put on it. Goods transported over those roads have those costs factored into their pricing.
So what happens when this libertarian dream-system has been working for a while? People cut costs by concentrating: rather than being sprawled out all over, they arrange things so they don't have to drive as far or as frequently. Goods, where they can, would switch to rail systems for the heavy transport, only switching to trucks (and lighter ones at that) where they have to. And won't that clustered society be a treat for those "real true libertarians" who hate "collective" solutions?
And another side effect of that sort of road financing arrangement: we all know how much "real true libertarians" love Big Brother, and the above system IS a Big Brother system: for billing purposes EVERY vehicle is traced every moment it's on a public road.
That's why I call myself a "left libertarian". "Collective" is not an inherently bad word. It's not freedom if you have to spend all your time watching your back against everyone else.
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