Taxation and Inflation

I received an email from a conservative list with a headline of “You cannot tax this country into prosperity.”

I replied with “You also cannot overprice the country into prosperity. It’s the flipside of taxation.”

Polygamists and the totalitarian dance of morality

My friends, that is just the beginning. We need to begin to view these crackdowns the same way the sharks view the folks who fall overboard…ever ever circling towards the center. What I am talking about is an ever increasing insistence upon moral purity coming from all places the government. With the polygamists we have a situation that most people oppose. So the government won’t have much trouble with public opinion. The people will be largely in favor of arrests or trials or jail sentences. That is just the periphery. The prosecutions start with issues at what we might call the moral extreme…things that “everybody” views as wrong. Think of the spinning skater who brings in her arms. My prediction is that maybe not this year or the next, but soon we should look for the gray areas to get smaller and smaller and the crackdowns to become more numerous. Look for more “titty tax” legislation appearing on dockets in legislatures around the country. At the same time stings on sex workers and their customers will increase, probably with changes in legislation in Nevada. Video rentals and other entertainment media will be tracked more intensely. We should also expect to hear rumors and official stories of “sodomy” raids. They’ll start with same-sex couples, then cross whatever dubious boundary they have set up will send officers to homes all over. People will raise the “consenting adults” argument but it won’t carry them very far in court. All this will be served up on the hors d’overve tray of protecting us. This insistence on exacting morality by people whose own practice of it should be questioned is all part of the move to a place we all said we’d never go to. Just remember what I am telling you. You won’t be the first people to say “it could never happen here.”

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is created whenever we try to guarantee that something can never happen again.