Saturday, May 01, 2010

Give Us The Money



With shouts of "Give Us The Money" and "We Need The Cash", public employees demonstrate in Springfield, Illinois.

Nothing could make it more obvious after a demonstration like this that there is a war going on in America between government and the people over who is going to be the Master and who is going to be the Servant. Who will be on the leash and who will be on top.

The American Thinker has more.

H/T Jccarlton at Talk Polywell

Cross Posted at Classical Values

3 comments:

Jeff Gauch said...

To the protesters I would say we need the money as well, in fact since our employment situation is much more precarious it could be argued we need the money more than they. What benefit do they provide to warrant taking cash from me to give to them?

However the American Thinker article seems logically flawed. I don't see any moral difference between the government forcibly inserting itself between buyer and seller vice inserting itself between employer and employee.

Governments must exist, and if they exist they must be funded. That means taxes (the failure of the Articles of Confederation refute the inverse). To my engineering sense an income tax is preferable since it can be tuned to be non-regressive, unlike sales taxes. One does not design a structure that transfers load to its weakest members.

M. Simon said...

There is the other thought:

Lighten the load so that the weakest member is sufficient.

In an absolute sense neither option is possible. I would like to see the emphasis shifted to lightening the load.

Jeff Gauch said...

It's not really the other thought, just the other side of the equation.

What I would like to see is the tax code rewritten so that everyone from the checkout girl at 7-11 to ExxonMobile pays 10% of whatever they make over the federal poverty line. At the same time require every federal department to cut 20% out of their budget. I'd also like to see a line-by-line review of federal regulations, they've been growing organically for so long that there's probably an ecosystem encoded in there somewhere.

Of course these proposals make sense, which means they'll never be implemented.