Recently, while reading an excellent post on Wealth Distribution on Insight on Freedom I left a longer than usual comment. The following is some of that comment:Wealth distribution in destructive in many ways, but the worst in the under-mining of a basic American principle---the right to work and to keep the fruits of your labor. Recently I got to thinking about all the rights we have lost over the years in the name of public safety and the list is indeed long. And now a new snake is rearing it's ugly head and "public safety" is no longer alone. The new kid on the block is "public health" and if anything it will be more vicious. Some groups have been suffering the abuses of this monster for a number of years, mainly those who smoke---the tax abuses imposed on this minority are staggering and punitive. And now this new administration with its Keynesian Economics is getting ready to turn this monster on other groups seeing little resistance to the abusive taxes leveled on smokers. They have alcohol, sugar, soft drinks, snack foods and many other things in their sights and are already planning how to spend the new revenues that will be raised. And a third snake is beginning to show itself, migrating from the west coast and quickly spreading eastward. This new menace is called "Protective Environmentalism", this is perhaps the most dangerous, for its venom can infect the entire populous. Unlike "public health" it doesn't just seek-out the over-weight, the smoker, the drinker, the teenager with his soft drink, this new menace has a voracious appetite consuming everything in its path--liberty, freedom and individualism. This three-headed Hydra seeking to destroy our freedoms under the guise of, "Public Safety, Public Health, and Protective Environmentalism must be eliminated.
We arertainly entering a scary time when it comes to personal freedom. The smokers have been feeling it for years and nobody cared because of the negativity that smokers are now surrounded by. But once it became acceptable for the government to tax behaviors that they deemed dangerous it was only a matter of time before the taxes crept into other aspects of people's lives. With all of the new taxes being proposed it is amazing that this president can still claim that he lowered taxes on 95% of Americans.
ReplyDeleteThe truly scary angle that is going to be pushed hard to regulate and tax us is what you called Protective Environmentalism, this goes beyond just taxes. The government wants to tell us what we can and cannot drive.