Today's Duluth News Tribune had a rebuttal of my Tea Party Local View. See "United States on a fast track to tyranny". You can see it free for about seven days.
His first fixation is on taxes as being a sole driver of economic activity - "High taxes drive taxpayers out of high-tax states…" True if you consider only people who measure only taxes as a cost. These writers never consider that taxes buy us lots of things that drive economic activity. He ignores that many companies move to where skilled labor is available and that it takes taxes to educate and train people.
That bastion of free enterprise, the Wall Street Journal, published an opinion earlier this week that a company moving to the South (low taxes and anti-union) may be getting lower quality: "Boeing's Threat to American Enterprise: When major firms move to the South, it's usually a harbinger of quality decline. Why let that happen?", Thomas Geoghegan, Wall Street Journal, 2011-06-20. Sorry, you'll have to subscribe to see the whole article.
He gets on the tax and spend mantra and that much is paid for by borrowing. But why is the money borrowed? For two wars? For infra-structure investment? To bail out large corporations?
He claims that the "intent of our country's founders is obvious from their writings…" I guess he knows better than the Supreme Court, which over the decades has had difficulty discerning the intent. He completely missed my comment that first a slave was property and not a person and then property (a corporation) was a person. I didn't put in my article that these cases were Dred Scott and Citizens United.
He claims that we are on "the fast track to tyranny as we relinquish … our dollars and choices to government officials who supposedly know what is best for us." He ignores that we are still a republic and can vote these people out.
He missed my point about free markets being many players with sufficient information. He ignores that our free markets have devolved into a few players with the power to buy our government. Now that is tyranny!!
