Further thoughts

As I lay in the dark last night wondering how many cats I was going to wake up buried under--it's gotten pretty cold around here, for around here--I happened to have further thoughts on my previous post, Say what?!, in which Mr. Robert Frank was in full-Keynesian bloviation mode in the Noo Yawk Slimes.  After opening his piece with

There are really only three basic truths that policy makers need to know about deficits: First, it’s actually good to run them during deep economic downturns. Second, whether deficits are bad in the long run depends on how borrowed money is spent. And third, eliminating deficits entirely would not require any painful sacrifices.  {Emphasis added.}

he went on to the previously quoted 

Anti-tax zealots denounce all taxation as theft, as depriving citizens of their right to spend their hard-earned incomes as they see fit. Yet nowhere does the Constitution grant us the right not to be taxed. Nor does it grant us the right to harm others with impunity. No one is permitted to steal our cars or vandalize our homes. Why should opponents of taxation be allowed to harm us in less direct ways?

"Thees", as Stosh would say, "eez Socialeezm."

Now, the left tends to get all wee-wee'd up when we label them socialists, and while I am willing to concede that "labeling" can lead to intellectual laziness, labeling things is what people do. Sunday School was a long time ago, but I seem to recall that Gods assigned Adam the task of naming everything there was. One of the first things we learn in First Grade Arithmetic is "Sets"; ergo, "Socialism is the set of all socio-politico-economic philosophies which hold that you have a right to demand the hard-earned rewards of the sweat of my brow."

Frankly, I think Mr. Rich's article illustrates that the Socialist/Collectivist/Communitarian/Progressive/Liberal grasp on reality is... meager. He somehow segues from taxing sulfur dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act to taxing motorists to get them to stop "congesting the roads", to taxing them further to get them to drive smaller vehicles, because heavier vehicles increase the danger to others in accidents.

From taxes to raise revenue, to taxes to modify behavior, in one swell dialectic foop.

While "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one" sounds pretty, it ignores the fact that the moral right of "the many" to force "the one" to do their bidding is limited; that's why the nation is set up as a Constitutional Republic, not a "straight" Democracy.

Plus, Keynesian economics has pretty much  been debunked.

That and the really sloppy thinking, if you can call it thinking...