Posted on 03/25/2009 4:51:18 PM PDT by Puddleglum
03-25-2009
Taxes are high and debt is crushing because government has exceeded its bounds. It has exceeded its original scope as defined in the Constitution, in which we give it some of our power so that it may safeguard all of our liberties.
States have lost a great deal of their independence because they are beholden to federal tax dollars, and as such they no longer represent the best interests of their people.
States do not provide relief from the federal government; instead, they empower the federal government to keep taxes high so that they can keep their own pipeline of federal dollars flowing. They are kept on a short leash by the federal government and are loyal to it. Their loyalty to their in-state taxpayers pales in comparison to their loyalty to the government. Consider this: how much do they spend to lobby Washington for your money? And how much do they spend to consult you about how to spend it?
In light of the above, we do experience something very much like taxation without representation. Your state government is beholden to Washington and looks more and more like it every day. The politicians you elect from your state go to Washington primarily to lobby on behalf of people who need tax dollars. Candidates are funded largely by people who want tax money. State and local governments and businesses push their federal representatives to bring home more of the pie.
Politicians spend your money, and your children’s money, because they literally do not see the taxpayer. You are invisible - you have no representation, you make no noise, you are quiet and law-abiding and have other things to do during than organize and agitate -- you work. You feed and cloth your family. So who represents you? Your state officials are largely proxy federal officials. Your representatives are kept busy as low-level administrators of federal spending programs, lobbying for earmarks and pet projects. Where is your voice? If the federal government is onerous, where do you turn? To your state? To your town? No – they are have too much vested in keeping the money from Washington flowing to their own bureaucracies to care that you foot the bill for it all at great cost to your liberty and livelihood. Even your local police are so funded by money from the war on drug, war on terror, war on gang violence, war on this and that that they can scarcely be called your own. And now our president wants to use a voluntary mandatory civilian service corps to empower groups to lobby, coerce, and agitate for the expansion of entitled classes – at whose expense? Yes - yours.
In the grand government equation, taxpayers are invisible precisely because they are honest and responsible and do not care to ask the government for much. Who would have thought you would need to hire a lobbyist to ask to be left alone?
Today, we taxpayers need to organize to represent ourselves. We must do what our politicians cannot and will not. We must rebuild the fence that protects our liberties from infringement. Without our liberties, we are not Americans. Without them, we fade into just another forgettable organization of servants and masters, of people who give orders and people who accept them but with no fervor and no allegiance. We become an animal farm, another one of history’s many doomed collectives, with some pigs fatter and better fed and more equal than the others.
With the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, thirteen dissimilar states reluctantly banded together to erect a fence to keep the wolf from the flock, to safeguard what makes life worth living, to keep a tyrant from taxing without representation and to keep strutting politicians, located an ocean away and having little affinity or sympathy with Americans, from micromanaging their lives. The Houses of Parliment saw the colonies as a cash cow for England, to be milked for all they were worth and granted as few liberties as possible in the process. A similar gulf of estrangement exists between the governing class and taxpayers today. Now, some 220 years after our ancestors agreed to organize society in a simple, limited manner under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,the wolf we sought to protect ourselves from is inside the fence. Today, our guardian is too often our predator, and the wolf picks us off by ones and two and threes because we are quiet and acquiescent, because do not have well-heeled representatives, because we are not lobbying for a piece of the pie, because we do not live to cheer like idiots when our representatives manage to bring home a nickel or a dime of the many dollars we send to Washington. We want to herald politicians who let us keep our dollars, not ones who spend them. We want to herald politicians who recognize, like we do, that the wolf inside the fence is the one we need protection from.
So what can we do?
The answer flies in face of everything valued by everyone who would rather simply live and let live and be left alone: taxpayers must organize, nationally, and articulate a simple, enumerated list of principles they expect their politicians to adhere to. The list can be quite simple, and the effect of holding politicians to it, and of testing them by it, can be quite profound.
Let me suggest a pledge that candidates be asked to take:
This is just my humble and rough suggestion of some principles to assert nationally, but I believe it is imperative that this country's diverse small-government movements unite and agree on a few basic articles. It is also imperative that they organize, coordinate, challenge candidates and of course field candidates who share their beliefs and fervor. America was designed wisely and contains the mechanisms to heal itself from within. We could not love the Constitution if we did not also find in it our hope for bettering America. It is simply up to us self-effacing people to get to know each other, to work together, and agree on a few basic principles we can advance again and again and again until our representatives learns once more to represent us, and not the state.
PS - I set out to post his in blogs/personal and hope I have succeeded. Apologies in advance if it ended up where it shouldn't go.
PS - I tagged this as teaparty because it is my idea of the sort of the need to define a core statement of the threat of big, tax-addicted government. The essay began percolating in my head after attending the anti-stimulus rally here in Oklahoma City.
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