Post by RS Davis on Nov 10, 2004 13:09:01 GMT -5
"The Whole Hog Special Interest Sandwich"
by: Garry Reed
What's the difference between pork and bacon? In a sociopolitical-inedible context, pork is the prize our Potomac politicos pass out to their henchmen hacks back home after digging their digits into the pockets of the people they pretend to represent (i.e., "pork-barrel politics") while bacon is the reward of working for an honest wage (i.e., "bringing home the bacon").
When the US Congrasp passed its purported "corporate tax reform bill" (aka corporate welfare giveaway) in October, conservative columnist Doug Thompson rightly ripped the rats in his Capitol Hill Blue e-column. But his shopping cart of abuses included both pork and bacon.
One of his pork examples was a bill for 231 million taxbucks to finance selected privately owned shopping malls in Syracuse, Shreveport, Atlanta and Lakewood, Colorado. This is classic pork; carving choice chops from everyone's piggybanks to benefit a favored few.
But Thompson also includes multimillion-dollar tax breaks for aircraft manufacturers, railroads and archery companies as examples of pork. But a tax break is not pork. A tax break is deciding to let an honest wage earner take all of his hard-earned bacon home. And "allowing" folks to keep their own bacon is not the same as heisting ham hocks from someone else and passing them on to the politician's pet porkers. Libertarians should never squeal when people get to keep what's rightfully theirs. When just a mere piglet, I remember people complaining that churches ought to be taxed: "If I have to pay taxes, so should they." But once I became libertarianized I realized that those people had it exactly backwards. The idea that all guinea pigs should get gutted equally is a pigheaded idea of justice. The correct response is: "Everyone should get the same tax break that churches get."
Read the Rest...
by: Garry Reed
What's the difference between pork and bacon? In a sociopolitical-inedible context, pork is the prize our Potomac politicos pass out to their henchmen hacks back home after digging their digits into the pockets of the people they pretend to represent (i.e., "pork-barrel politics") while bacon is the reward of working for an honest wage (i.e., "bringing home the bacon").
When the US Congrasp passed its purported "corporate tax reform bill" (aka corporate welfare giveaway) in October, conservative columnist Doug Thompson rightly ripped the rats in his Capitol Hill Blue e-column. But his shopping cart of abuses included both pork and bacon.
One of his pork examples was a bill for 231 million taxbucks to finance selected privately owned shopping malls in Syracuse, Shreveport, Atlanta and Lakewood, Colorado. This is classic pork; carving choice chops from everyone's piggybanks to benefit a favored few.
But Thompson also includes multimillion-dollar tax breaks for aircraft manufacturers, railroads and archery companies as examples of pork. But a tax break is not pork. A tax break is deciding to let an honest wage earner take all of his hard-earned bacon home. And "allowing" folks to keep their own bacon is not the same as heisting ham hocks from someone else and passing them on to the politician's pet porkers. Libertarians should never squeal when people get to keep what's rightfully theirs. When just a mere piglet, I remember people complaining that churches ought to be taxed: "If I have to pay taxes, so should they." But once I became libertarianized I realized that those people had it exactly backwards. The idea that all guinea pigs should get gutted equally is a pigheaded idea of justice. The correct response is: "Everyone should get the same tax break that churches get."
Read the Rest...
