FB Doodlings - "Scott Metzger: Some of property-tax burden should be shifted to vehicle registrations" - Part 2 - Granite Grok

FB Doodlings – “Scott Metzger: Some of property-tax burden should be shifted to vehicle registrations” – Part 2

tax policiesWell, I do have to admit, the Concord Monitor does get a large diversity of commenters on posts sometimes.  No, not the skin-color-deep-facial-features kind of diversity where only looks count.  I mean the only diversity that really counts – intellectual and philosophical differences.  Dick Lemiuex  riled up frequent Progressive CM and Grok commenter, Bruce Currie who wrote (emphasis mine, reformatted):

Mr. Metzger believes, “(New) Hampshire citizens know at a gut level that a property tax is not an equitable way to tax people.” But somehow, he seems to believe we will accept the notion that a car tax IS an equitable way to spread the cost of schools. If equity is the objective, how about “if towns were freed to set their own” head tax? Then, at least a family of 4, with 2 kids in school, would be paying twice as much as a retired couple without kids. That would create at least some link between costs and benefits. Maybe THAT would have more of a “gut level” appeal. Of course that idea wouldn’t appeal to heads of large families. Similarly, Metzger’s idea wouldn’t appeal to owners of high end cars.

The question is, who’s ox is going to be gored? Every tax creates winners and losers.

And Bruce wrote back:

Your solution ignores the fact that a strong public school system promotes the public good. Pitting one demographic against another, as your “solution” would do, ignores the sacrifices previous generations made to build and maintain good schools and communities. Civic virtue is under attack by the right in this country, and has been for a long time. It’s being undermined by those who believe free market capitalism should come before democracy.

Now Bruce, we’ve missed you a bit here at the ‘Grok – we disagree on almost everything but I have to give you props for coming to the lion’s den (figuratively speaking) and holding your own.  But your response allowed me to prick a hole in your ballon:

You are conflating several things that should be. Educating a child is a public good for a private citizen-to-be. Merely having a govt school is not. Good schools are a public good in providing that education – it doesn’t have to be a government owned and entitled public school. Communities do depend on educated citizens but as Lincoln showed by example, they don’t have to be educating in a public school.

I would also propose that Progressives on the Left, in their headlong mania to devolve any traditional value from the public square, are those that are attacking “civic virtue”.

“…free market capitalism should come before democracy.” The short answer is that we don’t live in a democracy (as much as Progressives wish to make it so) but a Republic. And you are wrong again to have others believe that we who simply want more choice believe in that phrase. One is an economic system (which Progressives hate) and the other is our Republic system of governance of checks and balances (which Progressives also have been trying to dismantle for over 100 years – read your own historical documents, some of which I have been posting up at my site)

And I think that in looking at the culture around us, it is clear that something went badly awry with the first symptoms in the 1960s as the first buds of a Marxist spring sprang from the Frankfurt School and hoed by the New Left.  We are now reaping that harvest – the violence we see today all over the news.  The Progressives and anti-Constitutionalists center around an inanimate object as the subject of their fright.  Once again, they miss the point completely.

What they will not admit to (or perhaps, decide not to see – Heh! Sorta like the “racial unconscious bias” they accuse we Conservatives of all the time – tit for tat, folks!) is that the Progressive culture relies on one thing: there cannot be any Individual “self-governance” (e.g., the imaginary dude on your shoulder saying “you really don’t wanna do that”) but only external governance.  Self-control versus external laws’; the extension of the 60s “if it feels good, do it” but adding in “and if we haven’t written an external law to govern that behavior”.  No more right or wrong from a Christian perspective…

Sidenote: I have yet to understand why Progressives think that the 10 Commandments are bad in and of themselves: don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, honor your mother and father, don’t lie, don’t covet other peoples’ stuff.  Why are they bad? What is about them that do not promote good behavior?

Except I do know they hate the first four – Progressives seek to replace God with themselves and replace God’s moralizing with their own.  Yeah, how’s that workin’ out for the rest of us.  At least God gives us the Free Will to choose; Progressives make theirs mandatory.

Back to guns.  Guns in and of themselves just lay there – they do nothing except rust (reminds me, time to give mine a good cleaning).  If you listen closely to the current weaponized youths (politically speaking) and their handlers and financiers, there is never much of a mention of the entire culture toileting itself in getting here.  They only wish to punish we good people that maintain that internal governance and do it well.  They don’t understand, perhaps with the training in schools, and without a solid moral code imprinted on their hearts and minds, that the REAL solution to this problem (which, btw, is getting better, not worse – this is a seldom happening event especially when compared to other ways of dying) is themselves.

They admitted to bullying their classmate at that Douglas school system – and they wonder why the outcome?  They won’t admit, in a serious and soul-searching manner, that THEY were his problem.  It was part of their “culture”.

And it is the culture that is the problem, not that hunk of steel, plastic, brass, lead, and a few chemicals.  We’ve arrived at a point in culture where lives don’t matter, others don’t matter – only self and instant gratification do – the “if it feels good, do it” sowing coming back to haunt us all.  When there is no belief in something bigger than oneself, that Someone (yes, God) will hold you to account at some point, well, then the brakes have let go and past social norm inhibitions are now gone.

The Left created a culture of death with abortions on demand; they redefined what is, they redefined the language, and they redefined the philosophy that all Life is precious.

No more.  And they wonder what they have wrought never understanding that when you keep removing bricks from the Wall of Society, it will topple over.

Socialists, that have hated this country from the 1880s realized it and worked to remove those bricks.  They’re loving the omelettes.

Wait until the rest of us say no.

 

>