Posted on 04/21/2007 6:42:25 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
We've got some real challenges facing us. FR was established to fight against government corruption, overstepping, and abuse and to fight for a return to the limited constitutional government as envisioned and set forth by our founding fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and other founding documents.
One of the biggest cases of government corruption, overstepping and abuse that I know of is its disgraceful headlong slide into a socialist hell. Our founders never intended for abortion to be the law of the land. And they never intended the Supreme Court to be a legislative body. They never intended God or religion to be written out of public life. They never intended government to be used to deny God's existence or for government to be used to force sexual perversions onto our society or into our children's education curriculum. They never intend for government to disarm the people. They never intended for government to set up sanctuary cities for illegals. They never intended government to “rule” over the people and or to take their earnings or private property or to deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech, free religion, private property, due process, etc. They never intended government to seize the private property of private citizens through draconian asset forfeiture laws or laws allowing government to take private property from lawful owners to give to developers. Or to seize wealth and redistribute it to others. Or to provide government forced health insurance or government forced retirement systems.
All of the above are examples of ever expanding socialism and tyranny brought to us by liberals/liberalism.
FR fights against the liberals/Democrats in all of these areas and always will. Now if liberalism infiltrates into the Republican party and Republicans start promoting all this socialist garbage, do you think that I or FR will suddenly stop fighting against it? Do you think I'm going to bow down and accept abortionism, feminism, homosexualism, global warming, illegal alien lawbreakers, gun control, asset forfeiture, socialism, tyranny, totalitarianism, etc, etc, etc, just so some fancy New York liberal lawyer can become president from the Republican party?
Do you really expect me to do that?
I pinged you to that post.
Posted: August 20, 1999
1:00 a.m. Eastern
Scrapping the slave tax
Why is it that those who work hardest to deny the connection of “economic” and “moral” issues are also the ones who use money to manipulate the moral lives of Americans? The Bush/Forbes vote auction in Ames, Iowa, last weekend was just the latest example of corrosive big money at work in our political process. What could have been a genuine and informative test of grass roots support became instead a Roman circus of dancing girls, free banquets, and deluxe free transportation, as the money candidates worked hard to import enough well-fed and happy bodies to pump up their vote counts. The cause of self-government suffered as a result, as even Lamar Alexander can attest.
In Ames, as in the political life of the Republic, money matters precisely because of its effect on the moral foundation of our life. Economic policy should be judged first in view of its effect on the character of this people. Let’s turn away from the circus in Ames and consider the relation of money and character on a larger, and more important stage.
In case anyone is seriously tempted to be content with the modest gestures toward tax cuts that Republicans are chattering about in Washington, let’s remember that there is only one version of tax reform that is adequate for a free country: We must abolish the income tax and replace it with the tax system that was intended by our Founders — a tax system that leaves our people in control of 100 percent of their dollars, reinforces the deep habits of responsible liberty, and puts in place a permanent and effective impediment to the unlimited fiscal ambitions of our government.
Abolition of the income tax must be the premier goal of moral conservatives in the area of tax policy, and we must pursue this goal above all because of its moral dimension. The tax issue is a moral issue because it raises fundamental questions about the way American citizens will insist that they be treated by their government. The income tax is a slave tax, and accepting it will eventually replace the American spirit of ordered liberty with a materialistic servility. We should eliminate the tax code, repeal the 16th Amendment, and fund the government through tariffs, duties and excise taxes (i.e., sales taxes) as the Founders intended for good reason.
Most people already pay state and local sales taxes, and so their implementation at the federal level would not be the wild and risky innovation some opponents imply. But even if it is difficult, the benefits would massively outweigh the effort. Just for starters, restoring tariffs and duties to their proper role will make foreign populations who benefit from access to the U.S. market share the burden of supporting the governmental system that guarantees its existence.
But the important reasons lie deeper. Under a national sales tax, our income will be exposed to taxation only AFTER we make the decision about how to use it. Instead of waiting upon the whim of politicians and bureaucrats, we will control our own tax burden by controlling the amount and pattern of our consumption. And in larger economic terms, an excise tax system would impose natural limits on the rate of taxation — excessive rates would shrink revenue just as surely as excessive prices shrink the revenue of producers of consumer goods. The government’s revenue from taxation would depend on the voluntary choices of millions of citizens, and a government that couldn’t elicit from those citizens their agreement to make taxable purchases would simply have to do without the corresponding revenue — a tax cut “passed” by the people directly, not the Congress! This is what the Founders intended to be our economic situation — ordinary citizens in the driver’s seat of the economic patterns of their own lives.
Liberty from the income tax would mean, of course, liberty from the IRS. We would no longer have our privacy invaded by a government that was interested — officially and legally — in rummaging about in our business to find out how much we make, where and how we make it, and what we do with it. These questions used to be considered private business, but now the government of this supposedly free people can ask them at its pleasure, compelling satisfactory answers with the threat of jail and confiscation. Such systemic bureaucratic intimidation is fundamentally contrary to any substantive notion of political liberty. By contrast, under a sales-tax system we would not have to report the facts of our individual economic situation or choices to a living soul.
The servile presumptions built into the income tax system have already had a deeply corrosive effect on the quality and extent of the responsibility we take for our own lives. The distance the income tax has already taken us down the road to servitude can be demonstrated by considering how rarely it is that we even question the government’s right to know how much money we make. We blithely file our income tax every year, straining to report with accuracy and completeness to anonymous clerks at a federal agency matters that we don’t expect any but our closest friends to ask us about, and which we probably would not discuss with our own children. Has it occurred to us sufficiently to ask what right or legitimacy there is to this fiscal exhibitionism?
The income tax is objectionable not only for economic reasons, and because the Founders took care to exclude it from the Constitution. It is also bad because it is based upon a premise that destroys one of the material foundations of privacy, and therefore of liberty. How can there be political liberty if there is no sphere of privacy beyond the reach of government? And how can there be such a sphere of privacy without a protected source of material support for it?
A free and vigilant people should never have tolerated this totalitarian beachhead for a moment. The income tax is an inherently communistic tax, precisely because one of the prerequisites of freedom is a sphere of privacy. It is based upon the premise of the preemptive claim of the government to full knowledge of the material foundations of private life. But when we allow any aspect of our lives to be treated as intrinsically the concern of the government, we implicitly accept the role of government to judge and control that aspect. The only reason government has to know about something is in order to regulate and control it. And so in granting in principle that the government has a right to know everything about our economic life, we have granted its right to control it as well. And if we intend to deny the government comprehensive control over our economic life, we will have to deny its claim to comprehensive knowledge — which is the essence of the income tax.
Inevitably, then, the decades of implicit acknowledgment that we are not sovereign in our personal economic lives have been like a universal solvent, dissolving the private and personal resolve each of us should have to control responsibly the actions we take in the acquisition and expenditure of wealth. The habits of American liberty run deep and have shown impressive resiliency. But habits, though long-lived, can finally die. Eventually the logic of the slave tax will work its way through the whole man, and we will make our peace with servility. Unless, that is, we root the thing out soon.
The issue is not the fairness or amount of the tax burden. The tax itself is the problem. The income tax must be replaced with a tax structure the first premises of which are the capacity of American citizens to make their own economic decisions responsibly, and the intrinsic role of such economic responsibility in the formation of the character necessary to preserve liberty. Men and women not fit to control their wages are not fit to control their government — this is the logic of the dilemma, and we must act accordingly.
If the moral case against the income tax is made forcefully and well, it will carry the day. The economic case against the tax is, of course, also overwhelming. And a further case can be made that technological developments will soon make the entire structure as much a relic as the doomed attempt of the Soviet Union to prevent its people from communicating among themselves. It is likely that the question is not whether to replace the income tax, but how to prepare for its collapse.
But these complementary arguments must not distract us from the fundamental one — a free people that pays slave taxes to its government is willingly training itself for bondage.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=18679
The injustices done to "some" Japanese Americans was unjust and needed reparations. Oddly enough, few people know that internment only occurred in select areas of the country, whereas Japanese Americans in other parts were not interned.
Many of those Americans went into the camps with successful farms and business, and came out and were paid a pittance for their property that had been sold.
Wow—your list is remarkably short on conservative accomplishments, long on excuses and personal attacks. I must have hit a nerve. Thanks for playing.
I’m not really interested in your age, unless it’s severely outside the normal range. If you’re not descended from anyone who lived during American slavery, you’d have to be very old.
Here we go with the drama queen BS and playing the "liberal" card crap...did you learn that from Keyes.
Quick, call the mods...ban the liberal...ban the liberal...
I’ll vote for Sharpton over Keyes any day, at least he is honest about being a crook
Well, thank you, Mr. Reagan Man. I'd give you an apple, but my horse at it. Yes, I realize now that JR was not only referring to black people. Since we had been talking about blacks, reparations, tax exempt status for blacks, yata yata yata....I thought he was referring to them specifically.
Of course you would.
Is the language in this thread what this site has stooped too? Amazing...
and of course you would be taken in by a shyster
That is over the line. NautiNurse does not deserve that.
MOgirl
Didn’t your tagline read “Honk for Fred” before?
I’m still recovering from my early cuts and bruises, but that one absolutely jumped out at me. I was surprised. Not instigating here, but I don’t cut anyone any slack based on race.
WideAwakes
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“your list is remarkably short on conservative accomplishments, long on excuses and personal attacks. I must have hit a nerve. Thanks for playing.”
LOL...who said my political conservative accomplishments were short...I’ve run for local Central Committee and campaigned for lots of candidates...the list goes on dimwit. But as I said I don’t have to justify to a liberal supporter like you...If you are fighting against JimRobinson in this battle, and you are troll, you are no conservative...Howlin had a long list too but troll she was.
BTW, you are fighting for the Giuliani in this fight because I’ve checked out your multiple attack list on people (oh what a coincidence, all supported the owner of the site)
So quit being nauti and thanks for attempting to disrupt but you aren’t bullying me - go Howlin to the moon. lol
I was on one this morning and it wasn’t the Rudy supporters who were the most vicious, but I’ll look around.
***It would serve you well to do a reality check. Looking on the rudy threads after this thing got started is still looking on the one side of the battlefield. You need to look at the rudy threads prior to last saturday.
I have to say that a fair amount of flaming has always been a part of FR, though, so I don’t see that as the primary reason for tossing these people out.
***Yes, the prior flaming is true, but this time what is different is that people are denigrating the CORE VALUES that drive this socon site and the socon movement.
Here’s an example from February
Just what ARE Rudy’s qualifications that make him the “BEST man to lead as CIC?”
Posted by Kevmo to Skip Ripley
On News/Activism 02/26/2007 5:31:39 PM PST · 466 of 486
You’re not listening...Rudy Giuliani won’t split anything.
***The last three FR polls show Rudy splitting the base. You’re not listening.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1782311/posts
He can’t...he is what he is.
***He is a liberal.
A “split party” is a reaction to a primary loss by a band of people who didn’t get thier way. Hence the term “sore loser”.
***Whig party is more like it. If you guys can’t learn from history and how the republican party was formed, then history will bypass you. By the way, it’s the GOP that’s leaving us, we’re not leaving it.
The only way the party will be split is if the folks who don’t get thier way in the primary opt out.
***Let’s just say we’re the Unicorn Admiration branch of the party, again. If we consistently see that Unicorn Admiration stuff is still on our platform but non-unicornian candidates have been calling us “sore losers” and “kool aid drinkers” and “party splitters” and “hillary voters” and the whole gamut, what do you think happens? The truth is that this here unicornian arm of the GOP commands some pretty impressive numbers, and we are all very reluctant to part with our unicornian belief systems. It’s the non-unicornians who don’t value their belief systems and can’t see the big deal about a few dead baby unicorns or the right for unicorns to keep and bear UnicornArms or the traditional Unicorn values. The non-unicorn side of the party is a bunch of losers. Whenever the party loses an election they blame it on us because we don’t fall in line with them. Whenever we win an election they preempt our values and say we’re too extreme. And the non-unicorns are too dense to realize that they risk breaking up the GOP Permanently.
The candidate does not tell them to stay home...he does not say “I break with thee, I break with thee, I break with thee”. Those “split” folks are the ones doing the splitting.
***No, but when the candidate accepts money from the Unicorn Hunters Association, and there’s 30Million dead baby Unicorns and the unicorns are blatantly ignored by that candidate, he is ONLY trying to win the dumb Unicornian vote. But basically, we Unicornians have our own candidate and we’re moving forward with him. This is a Unicornian website, so your candidate certainly making any brownie points by having his followers come here and talk down about unicorns, insulting unicornians, and ignoring dead baby unicorns. Why don’t you guys go to the other non-unicornian websites and win converts there? I’m sure the left-wing non-unicornian side of the democrat party is very willing to hear your candidate’s message.
My solution is this...we have the primaries...we support our candidates. We let the chips fall where they may.
***Agreed, and I look forward to your former mayor endorsing Duncan Hunter. Of course if it’s anything like the way he endorsed the last few GOP candidates, it will be a speech full of left-handed compliments.
When the dust settles and the air has cleared and a nominee is picked, we support him or her (Condi?) because we’re Republicans and we want Republicans to win.
***Good for you. Now, do yourself a favor and check to see if this is a republican website? Is it? Does the GOP pick up the check? Here, I’ll help you with the answer: NO. So the next time you come onto someone’s Unicorn Admiration Society website, try to learn a little bit of Unicorn before you start insulting them for not giving up their Unicornian beliefs. It’s just plain polite — and after all, the word “politic” comes from the word “polite”. I am not interested in your liberal candidate. I’m sure you can find some liberals who would be.
Now I know some of you are saying “No, I’m a Conservative, I want Conservatives to win” Great...then you should go off and form your own party.
***Got that. We have been hearing it more and more lately. It’s a numbers game from hereon in to determine whether or not we are welcome. If we aren’t, and we form our own party, the GOP is doomed. Good luck with that.
Either that or you can accept the decisions the majority of folks within your current party make and then work to steer that party towards your view.
***Well said.
Abandoning the party is not working to change it.
***If anything, the party would be abandoning us.
Abandoning the party is setting fire to it so you can argue about how best to put the blase out.
***Very well said, except that your starting premise is invalid so your conclusion is wrong. Other than that I like what you say.
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