[fabian]

...Good God man is it necessary to articulate to you the difference between human bondage and legal obligation?...
Yes it is necessary and you have not done it! We have zero obligation to tax a confiscatory tax on our wages and homes which then is used to destroy our very nation in so many ways. Yes, it was a revolution against excessive taxation. THey would have revolted from those high taxes from the King even if they had good representation..then again, the taxes would not have been laid if they had the decision making capabilities of them. The war with the King was over far far less taxation than we are slaves to now. They could never have dreamed of their very income being taxed to 50%! good lord man, where is your healthy outrage? Yes, we still have the voting power, but their is a whole system and power structure that we have to overcome now and I pray that the vote will be able to...otherwise we will have to do what the founders said we should anytime a government becomes oppressive.

[nathanbedford]

Rubbish!

This is what you said:

We are litterally slaves to a partial socialist system and that is similar to the slavery issue back before the civil war.

We are not "literally" slaves. A literal slave is in bondage, cannot get out of slavery, is not recompensed, can be physically abused, and has no recourse. There is no similarity. If you want me to be outraged over our tax and spending policies I will join you, I will get on a soapbox with you, but I will not make an ass of myself professing that which simply is not true.

As to the rest of it, the country waged its Revolutionary war to gain the right to tax itself not to be free of taxes. It ratified a Constitution which provided for taxing power which provided a constitutional method of regulating taxing and spending by a representative body. That ain't slavery. Now, it may come to pass that that representative body enacts bad or foolish policy but that is just what it is, bad policy, not slavery.

Let's say there's a young lurker running down this thread deciding whether his honest inclinations toward conservatism are the right philosophy for him. What will he think as he says to himself, "to be a conservative do I have to believe this stuff which is patently untrue?"

[lentulusgracchus]

The war with the King was over far far less taxation than we are slaves to now.

That's a point often misunderstood. It wasn't the rate of the tax. It was the fact that America was being set up to follow Ireland, not England, in the parliamentary tax regime, which was rapacious and confiscatory in Ireland.

Without representation in Parliament, we were set up to become the next Ireland, our productivity having already surpassed England's and teased up the institutional avarice of Parliament's "appropriators".