This occurred at a relatively unlikely place, the language-focused blag Lingua Franca. Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics and prolific language blagger, wrote:

The 1897 session of the Indiana General Assembly passed “A Bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth.” It asserted that (i) the ratio of the chord and arc of a 90-degree segment of a circle was 7/8; (ii) the ratio of said chord to the circle’s diameter (hence to the diagonal of a square inscribed in the circle) was 7/10; and (iii) the ratio of the diameter to the circumference was (5/4)/4. Pi must be equal to 3.2 for these things to be true. Yet the bill nearly made it through committee in the Senate, until one senator pointed out that it was ultra vires for the Assembly to define mathematical truth.

…when you assemble a few hundred ambitious people who managed to win elections and let them vote on proposed laws, you occasionally get silliness. Possibly about mathematical truth, or even linguistic truth.

The latter came up this past week when the French Senate passed a bill (already passed by the National Assembly in December) criminalizing a specific linguistic act: asserting that the slaughter of Armenians in Turkey during 1915 does not satisfy the definition of the word genocide.

This law (which President Sarkozy is widely expected to sign into law) makes it a crime to deny or “outrageously minimize” the number and motivation of the mass killings of Armenians. To assert the view “What happened in 1915 was not genocide” would be a prosecutable offense. The bill legislatively insists that a certain set of contingent historical events meet the criteria for use of the term genocide, and forbids asserting the opposite. If a document were found proving that all the killings of Armenians in 1915 were unintended side effects of a hyperspace bypass construction operation by extra-terrestrials, it would apparently be illegal for historians to discuss the document at a conference in France. This is legislative idiocy.
[...]
I have not expressed any opinion about the history. Since Armenian-Turkish journalist and editor Hrant Dink was murdered in broad daylight for treating the topic, I’m not exactly eager to. And my ignorance of early 20th-century Anatolian history is profound, so perhaps it’s just as well. But Mark Liberman noted on Language Log that The New York Times, after decades of demurral, reportedly decided in 2004 that “genocide” was and is an appropriate word for the events in question. (And you don’t turn the Gray Lady around easily—The New York Times still requires clause-initial whom, for heaven’s sake).

Mass killings of Armenians in Turkey as the Ottoman Empire collapsed appear to be copiously documented. My reasons for calling the French legislation crazy do not lie in any disagreement about the documentation. And I don’t care for wacky historical contrarians—nobody despises Holocaust deniers more than I do. I just think that it would be a monumental blunder to enact a law stipulating a point of lexical denotation. Insisting that you have to count the events as meeting the definition of genocide is as silly as trying to legislate the area of a square inscribed in a circle of diameter n.

The right way to handle thought crimes (or mathematical contradictions) is the American way: We grit our teeth and let people utter their loony ideas. We don’t use the criminal law to define their lexical denotations as erroneous or to forbid their ideas from being uttered.

Sarkozy isn’t Satan, and the fanatical Turkish denialism about 1915 is not virtuous or even sensible; but passing a law stipulating anything about how the word genocide is to be applied would be a stupid legislative mistake.

A commenter going by beedhamm wrote the following comment:

The main piece of support for your argument (something to the effect of it’s “legislative idiocy”) is stated here:

“The right way to handle thought crimes (or mathematical contradictions) is the American way: We grit our teeth and let people utter their loony ideas. We don’t use the criminal law to define their lexical denotations as erroneous or to forbid their ideas from being uttered.”
Now ask, what proof is there for this statement in the rest of your article? You’ve taken a serious, complex, nuanced situation and attempted to treat it in a lighthearted fashion, primarily by repeating something to the effect of it’s “a stupid legislative mistake.”

Perhaps a cognitive linguist, like Lakoff, would be better suited to comment on this issue?

I didn’t reply to this comment because I didn’t even know where to begin, perhaps largely because beedhamm failed to even make a point or state a single opinion, other than insinuating that Dr. Pullum’s conclusion is wrong and that a more detailed, in-depth, scholarly treatment of the proposed French law would lead to a different conclusion. Such a weak stance and absurdly heinous implication (that such laws aren’t mistakes and punishing speech can be desirable) were about par for the course for this morally questionable and intellectually bankrupt individual, as I discovered later.

Below that, an Armenian fellow whose name I will not paste because it was written in Armenian script, wrote:

Sound like you (the author) are one of the extremely uneducated (although have the opportunity to study whatever desired), wrongly self-confident Midwesterns that I’ve seen for years while studying there, that are no different from the uneducated (mainly cause they don’t have the choice to study), extremely ignorant immigrants whom I see every day now at the East Coast.

Please note that the language barrier has nothing to do with this Armenian’s misunderstanding of the principle of freedom of speech, as seen by the ensuing exchange. I responded:

Geoffrey Pullum: “Governments have no business legislating word definitions, any more than they have legislating mathematical relationships. We also shouldn’t silence, censor, fine, imprison, threaten, or otherwise punish people for the words they say and write that harm no one, however wrong or insulting they are.”

You: “You must be an uneducated, ignorant, privileged, out-of-touch moron.”

Nice job. You made your case really well, except I thought your Concluding Statement could have used a few more baseless insults.

This Armenian responded,

For your knowledge (since you need some): A word is the most powerful weapon existing on this planet (that is the same as religion, propaganda, etc.). So you agreeing with the thought “We also shouldn’t silence, censor, fine, imprison, threaten, or otherwise punish people for the words they say and write that harm no one, however wrong or insulting they are.” (by the way, see how it’s done? I mean the quotation) is another indicator of your low level education.

I ended my interaction with him with:

Just to clarify, you’re basically saying that it is ignorant (uneducated, stupid, wrong, unenlightened) to object to the idea that a government should define certain speech as harmful and punish users of such speech in proportion to the harm their words cause? Maybe you don’t realize how ridiculous that sounds to the English-speaking world. I didn’t think there was anyone outside of totalitarian governments who thought that way anymore. It is clear that nothing can be gained from interacting with such a sorry excuse for a human. Have a good life, and I hope you find your authoritarian police state someday.

(There was another brief exchange between us that was definitely hampered by the language barrier, but that’s not vital here.) Language barrier or no, this person’s intent is perfectly clear: The State should define certain speech or (mis)uses of words as harmful, should outlaw them, and should punish transgressors with the full force of the law.

I don’t care where you’re from, who you’re descended from, what your family or country has gone through, what your native language is, how fluent you are in the language you’re writing in, or what type of government you have lived under, there is NO EXCUSE for advocating the use of the police power of the State to punish people’s words or ideas. Boycotts, fine. Retaliatory slander, fine. Peaceful protests, fine. But this Armenian would lock you and your family in a cage for years for saying the wrong words in the wrong context. Those are monstrous thoughts written by a monstrous person, plain and simple. We (well, especially I) use all kinds of colorful language to describe people whose ideas and actions are abhorrent, so perhaps some of their meanings or effects get watered down on the internet. Well, here we have as clear-cut an example of a fascist, authoritarian, hateful, uncivilized, Statolatrist barbarian as I have ever had the displeasure of interacting with. Over the last couple years, spurred mainly by my own regret at how I responded to some people in internet discussions and the unpleasantness I felt when people were assholes to me, I have committed myself to responding politely and respectfully to others at all times, much to my and their mutual benefit, I’m happy to say. (You’ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, right?) However, I have no sympathy for anyone who would ever even consider taking such an anti–free speech position, and such a pathetic excuse for a human being deserves no respect, politeness, benefit of the doubt, or moderation in our condemnation of his opinions or exposure of his depraved, wretched character. As Professor Farnsworth would say, I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

beedhamm responded to my first comment as well:

When did we agree that the deniers of genocide use “words … that harm no one”?

I suspect that we have to be a bit more careful to make sure that when we write “no one” we don’t just mean “me and the people like me.”

Again, he fails to really even make a point, other than to imply that words do, in fact, harm people, and by failing to qualify his statements with at least an admission that censorship laws can be a bad idea, he implies that they are good ideas, specifically the French genocide law. Therefore, I decided to take him behind the woodshed:

Of course words themselves harm no one, except emotionally and psychologically to the extent that the victim lets them. I guess you should be arrested and charged with a crime for harming my emotional state? Should I be arrested and charged with a crime for insulting you and the Armenian person above? How about if I said these things in the wrong locations:

The Holocaust never happened. Hitler was a great guy. No events in or around 1915 could be considered genocide, especially as concerns Armenians.

Those are all false statements and terribly offensive and ignorant, but no one was harmed by them. Yet according to German law and soon-to-be French law, I could be punished by law for typing them within their borders. That is absurd. If you disagree, I doubt either one of us will gain much by continuing this discussion.

Do you think it’s morally unjust right now, i.e., an attack that should be punishable or defensible by force, to deny that Armenians were the victims of genocide? Or is it only wrong after a government outlaws it? If it has always been harmful since 1915, then what action or recourse should victims of such denial have been taking all these years? Surely they are right to strike out in self-defense in response to such offenses. What compensation are they due? If it has always been morally wrong, then surely it is wrong everywhere, not just France or Turkey or Armenia. Plenty of Armenians live in the U.S. What punishment should the New York Times be subject to for refusing to acknowledge it as a genocide? Surely if it’s wrong, period, regardless of law or geography, then I should be put in jail or fined heavily (or retaliated against in self-defense by all my victims) for typing it to prove a point.

Furthermore, surely there is not just one word in all of the French language that the government should determine the definition of. What other words fit the criterion of requiring definition by the government? What words in the English language fit the bill?

Is denying that Armenians were the victims of genocide a punishable offense if any human sees or hears it? Or just Armenians? Should the severity of the punishment be proportional to the number of humans or specifically Armenians who are exposed to it? What about someone who copies and spreads a speech or writing with such denials? Should this person be commended for alerting the Armenians (or all humans) to such offenses, or should they be punished similarly to the original perpetrator for spreading such lies? The words themselves do harm, remember, so it can’t matter why that person was motivated to spread the offending speech or what context it was done in or what commentary the spreader appended to the genocide denial. (You can’t rob someone and say “Theft is wrong” to avoid punishment. If the words do harm, the offender must be punished, right?) If someone wrote it in a private, personal journal and it was discovered happenstance by a visitor, should that offense also become punishable? After all, the words themselves are harmful. What if no Armenians actually saw it? What if only a single half-Armenian saw it? Should the fine be reduced by half?

How about implicit denial? Is that an aggression against person or property that should be punishable by force of law? For instance, someone talks about Armenians or Turks in or around 1915 but simply fails to mention the word “genocide”. What if they use all kinds of other words, like massacre or slaughter or travesty or injustice, but implicitly deny that it was genocide by avoiding this specific word? Surely that must also be wrong, not just after Sarkozy signs the bill but every day since the genocide ended (or even during it). What if future books about genocide are published that do not mention anything about Armenians? How about any current books about ethnic cleansing or genocide that might not mention the Armenian genocide and thereby implicitly deny it? By your logic, such books must necessarily be banned in France, and unless you’d say that right and wrong depend only on the law, such books should be banned everywhere, forever, in self-defense to prevent further harm being done by the words on their pages. If anyone’s definition of right and wrong depends on what laws politicians write and pass, then they can’t carry on an intelligent conversation with me.

The reason Dr. Pullum did not offer a detailed or academic defense of his contention that this French law is the wrong way to deal with offensive speech is probably partly because none is needed. It is self-evident. One’s innate right to free speech is not bound by anyone’s sensibilities or any laws, and certainly not math or history. If you agree with such censorship and dismissal of free speech, then, well, I would certainly want nothing to do with authoritarians of your ilk. Denying someone of a part of their property and liberty for typing or saying something offensive or insulting would be a far worse crime than any the offender supposedly committed. The words themselves are not harmful, not in any way that falls under the purview of law. And to re-state Dr. Pullum’s point, it is simply self-evidently absurd to suggest that any government can or should define words and punish people for their misuse.

I could have gone much farther than this reductio ad absurdum, but I doubt he got very far into my rant or understood how the absurdities that would result from censorship laws expose the inconsistency and untenability of his position. It is not possible to retain any semblance of a principled moral or political philosophy or even to put on a show of being a civilized, respectable, intelligent human being while asserting—even failing to deny—that words and ideas inflict harm upon others in ways that should be punishable by the State.

I am saddened to learn that many European and Asian countries already have laws against genocide denial, not just Germany. You might say, “Oh, now that you see how widespread genocide denial laws are and how acceptable they are to hundreds of millions of people, do you want to tone down your attack of the supporters of such laws?” Quite the contrary. They are all objectively, verifiably, undeniably wrong, just as all murder, rape, taxation, conscription, and all other free speech–abridging laws are wrong. It is quite possible that Holocaust deniers deserve for bad things to happen to them, but I’m thinking more in a karma-driven way, not through the police power of government.

If I had to guess, based on spelling and (lack of) opinions on the merits of free speech, I would guess beedhamm is from somewhere in the Eastern hemisphere, perhaps Germany (“hamm”?) or somewhere farther east, where the innate right of free speech is less universally acknowledged than it is in North America. Therefore, it might be far past noon where beedhamm sits and longs for the kidnapping, beating, and imprisonment of people who misuse the word “genocide”, so I will take his current silence as an admission of defeat and acknowledgment of the beatdown I handed him (or her).

Amazon.com is resisting the state of California’s new law that intends to force online retailers to collect sales tax for California transactions. Amazon, of course, argues this would be bad for business and the economy as a whole, and it is threatening to simply stop doing business in states that impose a sales tax on it. This is Manjoo’s take on it:

There are two powerful arguments in the tax debate between Amazon.com and the state of California. On the one hand, there’s simple fairness. For years, online retailers—which weren’t required to collect sales tax on purchases from Californians—have enjoyed a huge advantage over physical stores, which must collect sales tax. … Tax proponents also argue that the law will let the state’s businesses compete against online stores, thereby creating local jobs.

Are you fucking kidding me? Raising taxes is a good strategy to create local jobs? What is this, 1700? Is this any different from the mercantilism that the field of modern economics was basically created to refute? One group of companies must impose sales taxes on its customers, and another group doesn’t, and this puts the former group at a competitive disadvantage. The only solution you propose to remedy this asymmetry is to impose equal taxes on the latter group. That doesn’t seem a little odd to you? There doesn’t seem to be any proposal missing from this debate? No other solution strikes you as even worth mentioning? No, guess not.

And then there’s the other side of the argument: ARE YOU KIDDING, YOU WANT TO RAISE MY PRICES, WTF???
[...]
In other words, this isn’t an argument between two equally reasonable positions. It’s an argument between reason and emotion, between your brain and your gut. Amazon has no intellectually sound arguments against collecting taxes from residents—by all ethical and civic standards, its position is unsound. Instead, Amazon is counting on our emotions prevailing…. [emphasis added]

Are you motherfucking kidding me? Amazon has no reasonable arguments against collecting taxes, and its anti-tax position is unsound by all ethical and civic standards? Since I can pretty well guess the type of intellect that would arrive at this interpretation of the Amazon/California sales tax debate, I am going to guess that Farhad Manjoo deems all arguments against online sales taxes unethical and unsound, not just the particular ones Amazon is making and not just in the state of California.

To make it clear which other arguments against online sales taxes I am referring to (and all taxes that have ever been or ever will be imagined, proposed, debated, or implemented in the history of the universe), let me state the only argument that is needed: All taxation is theft, and all taxes are therefore unjust. All tax collectors, tax bill writers, tax imposers, tax renewers, tax failing-to-opposers, and tax supporters are either thieves or accessories to theft and would be dealt with, in a just society, in proportion to the severity of their crimes. Taxation is nothing more than legalized theft by a professional criminal class, a gang of thieves writ large. It is a metaphysical impossibility for any tax to be the slightest bit just by any consistent, logical, moral, or ethical standard, in any situation or for any purpose whatsoever.

Now that that’s clear, and since Manjoo claims to be all for reason and logic and against emotion and inconsistency, let’s muse at what else he must consider unethical, unreasonable, and unsound for ethics’ and consistency’s sake. I’ve already mentioned that Manjoo’s version of logic would deem American abolitionists’ anti-slavery position unethical and unsound because abolishing slavery would prevent northern whites from enslaving people like their southern counterparts did and prevent blacks from enslaving whites as equally as they were enslaved. Also, the Jews in Nazi Germany were using only emotion and not reason when they opposed the Nuremberg Laws instead of supporting equally oppressive laws for all. (Godwin demerits: -5.) According to Manjoo’s logic, the solution to our seemingly never-ending War on Terror and the terrorism it inspires that forced us to wage it is for some Middle Eastern countries to invade the Unites States, kill thousands of civilians, take out a few of our war leaders, and overthrow our government, because obviously two (million) wrongs make a right. Instead of eliminating the regulations that restrain some individuals and businesses but provide loopholes for large, powerful, well-connected corporations, Manjoo must favor ever-increasing restraints to trade until no one is allowed to conduct any economic activity (except the government, of course). Instead of simply legalizing prostitution and marijuana, Manjoo must favor outlawing sex after a date in which the man pays for dinner and must long for a return to alcohol prohibition, because under current law, prostitutes and marijuana growers and sellers suffer from “unethical” and “unfair” disadvantages. Manjoo’s twisted version of logic and consistency also dictates that violence against women, gays, and children be combatted by fostering a more violent, aggressive culture on all sides rather than striving to eliminate as much violence as possible in the first place.

I think Farhad Manjoo’s ideal society must be that of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, in which everybody is hindered equally by a wise and all-knowing State.

If people like Farhad Manjoo had any influence in society, we would live in a world in which a parasitic political class tried to take as much wealth from its citizens as it could, demagogues spewed rhetoric of fairness and equality while swindling everybody, the masses blindly followed them and ignorantly parroted their slogans while failing to scrutinize their policies with any intelligence or skepticism, and a fascist police state imprisoned world-record numbers of innocent citizens for victimless crimes while fostering an ever more violent, discordant, divided, intolerant, uncooperative culture.

Manjoo has the gall to continue typing after assaulting his readers with such an affront to logic and decency. He delves into some legalistic arguments about Amazon’s “presence” in the state of California and the California laws that should make its sales taxable, so, you know, of course, if some politicians in the past voted for and judges in the past approved of various tax laws—politicians and judges whom possibly a very small minority of current California voters have actually voted for and tax laws that possibly no one in the state of California or elsewhere was actually allowed to vote on—then those taxes are “fair” for all of eternity or until our wise and gracious overlords take it upon themselves to repeal them for us. He dismisses Amazon’s position as either disingenuous or childish or both, because some politicians and judges have said Amazon’s sales should be taxable. That honestly seems to be the extent of his argument. What an apologist, Statolatrist boob.

Amazon’s vice president of public policy, Paul Misener (aptronym alert!), put out a statement that borrows from the rhetoric of the Tea Party. The ballot initiative is “a referendum on jobs and investment in California,” he said, and “with unemployment at well over 11 percent, Californians deserve a voice and a choice about jobs, investment, and the state’s economic future.” If Amazon spends substantial sums to push such a ballot measure next fall, it’s hard to see how it could lose. The ads write themselves: Don’t let greedy lawmakers tax your Internet purchases!

Though I doubt most voters would care to pick apart such a populist message, such a sound bite falls apart under scrutiny. For example, the idea that Amazon is an “out-of-state” retailer in California is a complete fiction.

You see, opposition to sales taxes is all emotion and demagoguery. There is no economic, rational, or moral argument behind it.

He concludes,

The reasons for Amazon’s tax battle are obvious. It’s not that it can’t institute a sensible tax collection regime, but that it won’t, because it has no incentive to do so. Amazon’s position may be indefensible, but it has a trump card. Raise your hand if you want higher prices. Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Gee, an absence of taxes promotes economic activity because prices can remain lower. Companies that don’t have to impose sales taxes have an economic advantage over those that do. Our entire country and especially the state of California seem to be suffering from a deficiency in economic activity (and also personal savings), so I wonder what we could do to spur some more economic activity and help people sustain or augment their bank accounts. Maybe ELIMINATE TAXES INSTEAD OF IMPOSING NEW ONES?

I know it isn’t fair to berate this poor liberal columnist because he suffers from a lack of imagination that would allow him to envision any activity, personal or economic, private or public, that could be conducted between two consenting parties that didn’t require the benevolent hand of the State enabling and supporting it, so he could never imagine supporting any measure that would decrease government revenue or decrease government spending, but I honestly thought that it would have occurred to someone with a job that affords him a personal computer and an internet connection that one solution to the sales tax inconsistency that exists between internet and brick-and-mortar stores is to ELIMINATE EVERYONE’S TAXES! Is that too abominable to even mention? Is that idea so abhorrent that it never even occurred to him? I wouldn’t be surprised. It would never occur to him that government (particularly, California’s state government) is a huge part of our economic problems and that any measure to decrease its revenue should at least be considered.

The bottom line is that Amazon’s transactions with its customers are mutually consensual exchanges that harm no one, and the absence of sales taxes on them also harms no one. If others are harmed by other taxes, then the solution is to eliminate those harmful taxes rather than attempting to harm everyone equally.

Robert Heinlein famously said, “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.” Manjoo wants politicians that you didn’t vote for to control your behavior, control your money, and control every company’s behavior and money as well. He has no good intentions on this issue, and his ignorance or bias is not an excuse. People like him are dangerous and uncivil, and we are surrounded by them.

Travesties like this should provide libertarians with insight into why Democrats and Republicans are so angry at the realm of politics and economics in general and why they direct so much vitriol and derision at libertarians: they must know that their beloved system of taxing nearly every single activity by nearly every single person within an arbitrary geographic area, in order to “help”, “protect”, and “provide for” their captives, is a complete farce that destroys far more wealth than it even pretends to create.

The ridiculous tax bill that could befall an individual for such an innocuous trade, borne of sheer luck, is just an extreme example of the harm that every single tax in the history of the world has done not just to the taxed but also to the untaxed who might have traded with them. The State declares itself sole arbiter of justice and sole protector of a group of people, and in order to fund its maniacal obsession with controlling ever more aspects of its subjects’ lives, it says, basically, “Oh, it looks like there’s monetary value in that—we’ll take some of that money and leave some of it for you. You know, to protect your rights and your property.” It is not possible to support such a ridiculous, hypocritical, violent, larcenous racket without crippling ignorance at best or disingenuousness or malice at worst.

The existence of such a racket also makes it obvious why libertarians get so angry at Statist idiots who think income taxes are a good idea.

Reading that CNN article reveals something of the lengths that Statolatrists will go to to justify their beloved income tax system:

However, if it were construed as a gift, it would not be taxable, Columbia University law professor Michael J. Graetz told the Times.

“The legal question of whether it is a gift or prize is whether the transferor is giving the property out of detached and disinterested generosity,” Graetz said. “It’s hard for me, not being a Yankee fan, to think of the Yankees as being in the business of exercising generosity to others, but there’s a reasonable case to be made that these were given out of generosity.”

How generous of the wise and glorious IRS to leave the exchange of gifts outside of the realm of its predations. Will Christian Lopez have to hire a tax lawyer to support his non-payment of $14,000 to the IRS for his gifts? More money and labor wasted. It shouldn’t matter whether his rewards were a gift or not. It is also immaterial whether Lopez himself or the Yankees pay whatever taxes are necessary (which they will, in all likelihood); the IRS is still wasting resources, violating the rights of its subjects, and destroying wealth by even existing or taxing anything.

For his part, Lopez is being just as magnanimous with the IRS as he was with Jeter.

“Worse comes to worse, I’ll have to pay the taxes,” he told the Daily News. “… The IRS has a job to do, so I’m not going to hold it against them, but it would be cool if they helped me out a little on this.”

Oh, how surprising, he’s part of the problem. Fuck him, then.

Instead, it seems like everything I read from liberals about taxes, the economy, or the federal budget is “The rich aren’t paying enough taxes!” and “The rich used to pay more, so it follows that they should still pay more!” and “The middle class is being destroyed by low taxes for the rich!” and “The rich don’t pay their fair share!” For instance, when I first saw the title of this article, “How the rich soaked the rest of us”, I optimistically expected to read about inflation, Wall Street bailouts, crony capitalism, restrictions on job creation, barriers to entry, government waste, and/or the complete failure of Obama’s stimulus program. Instead, the entire article is about how the rich used to pay more taxes than they do, and the things they do with their money don’t help others in an economic or social sense, so their tax rates should be increased to redistribute wealth to others and help balance the budget. Not a single time does the author mention the exorbitant spending exhibited by every American Congress since the Great Depression, nor does it mention the inflation that impoverishes everyone else more than the rich, which inflation is necessitated by ever higher spending.

Another opinion column says that the middle class is being assaulted by income taxes. Yeah, just like everybody else. It says,

No one class of citizen has an overly high burden of paying income taxes in 2011. But overall, Americans making $1 million or more are shouldering less of a tax burden than before. When the government has been deficit spending at record levels, it’s time to increase taxes.

First of all, every class of citizen has an overly high burden of income taxes, because every tax is too high. But most importantly, the fact that millionaires are shouldering less of a tax burden than before does not mean they should go back to paying more; it means, as every fact related to income taxes means, that we should continue decreasing taxes on everyone, from rich to poor. And government deficits should be solved by cutting spending, not increasing taxes. As Helmut Shoeck said in his masterpiece Envy, “The envious man thinks that if his neighbor breaks a leg, he will be able to walk better himself.” Some people having more money doesn’t make others worse off. Spending their money in ways you think will stimulate the economic recovery for the rest of us is a completely debunked, groundsless, immoral 1930′s solution. The only taking of money from the rich that can be justified is taking their money that they gained from inappropriate cooperation with or actions of the government, which surely amounts to billions of dollars, but it would take a libertarian analysis to make that case, which is beyond the comprehension of today’s liberal Democrats, who are limited to class envy and Keynesian spending debauchery.

Allowing people to do what they want with their own money, in addition to being the only morally just solution to any fiscal or tax issue, will result in a greater production of wealth because less economic waste will occur because extra-market decisions by the government will be eliminated and replaced with decisions made entirely based on prices specified by the free market. If any liberal actually had an interest in what is just, then he would advocate reducing (and eventually eliminating) everyone’s taxes, not just some people’s, and if he had any interest in nationwide or worldwide economic growth, for society as a whole, from top to bottom, then he would advocate the economic system that results in the least possible economic waste. This system is the free market, where economic calculation for every single decision and every single transaction is possible and is accurate, based only on the market forces of supply, demand, free exchange, and people’s preferences freely demonstrated.

All that liberal Democrats seem to be able to give us is the same, tired, lame drivel about increasing taxes for the rich and spending ever more taxpayer money on things the taxpayers obviously don’t want (otherwise they would buy them themselves). It is the same class envy and the same Keynesian “tax and spend” rhetoric that has necessitated our high tax rates in the first place, wasted untold trillions of dollars, limited economic growth to a paltry 2 or 3% per year, prevented labor from finding its optimal usage and created 8 to 10% unemployment, and caused more and more inflation to pay for our government’s debts. Why can’t we hear something interesting or inspiring from the American left once in a while, like the virtues of individual decision making and a universal opposition to any more tax increases?

This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against “locavores” who want to grow all their own food or buy it from their neighbors and, presumably by extension, to buy most everything in their lives locally or make it themselves, and yet still live something resembling a 20th- or 21st-century life.

Adbusters supports something called “Buy Nothing Day”

(It’s on November 26th. You’re supposed to purchase nothing. Don’t support your neighbors, your friends, or anyone but yourself. Don’t swap your own stuff for anyone else’s. Regardless of their intent, that’ll be the result.)
[...]
I was kind of enjoying their (ahem) unique point of view until I got to this quote. It’s from a guy named Bill Mollison, founder of something called the Permaculture Movement.

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Oh for the love of God. Where to begin, where to begin.

We are more secure than we’ve ever been because we can’t look out our kitchen windows and see our entire food supply. If the view from your kitchen is your only food supply, and something happens to the area in front of the kitchen window, you’re in deep, deep shit. Google the word “famine” when time permits.

But if you have cheerfully taken part in the capitalist evils of globalization, you don’t have to worry as much. Iowa could waste its entire wheat crop by converting it to enthanol or some other useless boondoggle, and it will hurt me. But there’s always Nebraska. And Canada. And Russia. The Ukraine. As long as those places are growing wheat, and as long as someone in our government doesn’t shut down the supply of wheat (to protect American jobs), then I’ll probably be okay.

As long as some raving locavore doesn’t require me to live off what’s visible from my kitchen window, I’ll be okay.

But wait, Mr. Bill Mollison, founder of the Permaculture Movement, there’s more. I’ve got more for you. Where are you going to get your kitchen, the kitchen you’re going to look out from to view your wheat, your bananas, your strawberries, your lowfat decaf triple-skinny mocha, your carrots, lettuce, arugula, your mineral supplements and your chicken, fish, and occasional slice of roast beef? Where will this kitchen be produced? The kitchen itself. The wood, the brick, the sheetrock, the heat and air vents, the electrical wiring, the ducts, the oven, the stove, the sink and the water faucets? The refrigerator? Pots, pans, and George Foreman Grill? Does that have to come from your front yard?

Will you need to grow the trees for wood within view of the damn kitchen, just to feel safe? Are you going to set up a kiln to make bricks out of local mud? Mr. Mollison, have you ever looked at the different locations that Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand blindly coordinates in a united effort to put ceramic tile on your countertops and your floors? Are you going to go off into a blind lefty panic if some of that stuff is manufactured by little dark people who don’t look like you, you racist son of a bitch?

Sorry about that. I can’t stand racism masquerading as compassionate save-the-earth do-goodism. Back to the topic at hand….

Let’s get to the window itself, that window Mollison is looking out of to see his garden and his wheat field and chickens and goats and fish tank and brick kiln and lumber forest and all the other things required to make Bill Mollison feel safe from the efforts of other people in strange places with funny names.

Bill, do you have any idea, any idea at all, what goes into making a damn window? Do you want all that going on in your front yard? Or is food the only thing that makes you break out in fantods if it’s handled by Mexicans? Is it ok if Mexicans or Canadians, or people from across the county line make your window?

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

Ok, we’re getting to the end of that insane sentence. “We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window….and see our friends working nearby.” Hell, is there going to be room for them if Bill Mollison requires all of this industry in his front yard? Or are they all going to be Bill Mollison’s employees?
What will the view have to look like from their kitchen windows if they have the same phobias and anxieties that afflict Bill Mollison?

Do you think we might all be better off if we allow everyone else in the world to compete for the honor and privilege of producing our food, kitchens and windows? And we can give them what we produce in return? And maybe, just maybe, they can one day have a kitchen of their own? With windows?

I think the fact that locavore morans like Bill Mollison don’t go buy a few acres of woods and live off the land with their moran hippie friends is strong evidence of my assertion that they want to live a 20th- or 21st-century lifestyle while still growing and making just about everything on their own. What is stopping them? Land is cheaper than housing. I bet there are enough of them to form a community of idiots who think that that life would be anything but toil, misery, and disease. Why not go practice what they preach? Because they enjoy the amenities of modern semi-capitalist life and the benefits the worldwide division of labor brings, that’s why. Maybe they want to remain active participants in the modern world so they can increase support for the State-backed enforcement of their locavore lunacy on captive victims. Anyone who thinks that a logical extension of locavorism would allow people to be much more than hunter-gatherers or, perhaps, Medieval serfs simply isn’t paying attention.

The Obama regime has been up to some heavy justice-trampling entirely aside from planting the seeds for takeovers of both the health care and financial trading industries. Glenn Greenwald details Obama’s authorization of the assassination of U.S. citizens. While it’s true that this has become old news and I have even written a few blag posts since this Greenwald post, the quotes are no less juicy:

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations.
[...]
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
[...]
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.

In more Orwellian news, the Supreme Court ruled that some convicted sex offenders can be kept in prison indefinitely by federal officials (presumably the Department of “Justice”), after they have completed their prison sentences. It is terrifying how broadly sex crimes are defined, how aggressively they are pursued, and how remorselessly people who have only been accused, much less convicted, of sexual crimes are treated. There are people whose lives are ruined because they had oral sex as teenagers or because they walk around naked in their kitchens and their wannabe-tyrant neighbors have some twisted appetite for punishing others for anything they can. This ruling will soon extend to terrorism and all other crimes that some lawyer or judge can construe as being related to “national security”, if it doesn’t already.

The RIAA and MPAA want the government to force all computers to contain software that automatically deletes alleged copyright-infringing material. The best arguments against the RIAA and MPAA anymore are quoting them verbatim and reporting their behavior. As Voltaire quipped, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The RIAA and MPAA could not exist in their present form or commit any of the violations they have become infamous for without a monopolistic state and, particularly, a powerful central government backing them up. By the way, did you know there is an “Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement”? My god, they might as well rename it MiniIntelProp.

We are coming up on Presidential Candidate Obama’s original proposed date (summer 2010) for withdrawing (or at least beginning to withdraw) most American soldiers from Iraq. While I don’t believe he ever actually had any intention of scaling down the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or reducing the U.S.’s military presence in the Middle East to any considerable degree, my skepticism and his duplicity are not even necessarily the most important issues about his promises/plans to withdraw troops. Most important is any well-intentioned president’s inability to divert our military’s path from one of aggression and expansion to one of defense and contraction. There are too many people and too many industrial interests opposing such a sea change for it to ever happen, except that I think America’s impending financial collapse will force the military to contract and withdraw, which side effect will be nothing but good.

You don’t have to be remotely libertarian-ish to be outraged at this: Novartis sales rep who alleges she was raped by a client was subjected to “disciplinary action” by HR, and the managers showed no interest in pursuing the case or bringing the alleged rapist to justice. I don’t have anything to add; the heinousness of it all is self-evident.

I think it’s sad how many people want more nationalization/centralization of all kinds of laws and regulations. An alarming percentage of people think national or even worldwide standards for businesses, behaviors, and just about everything else would make our lives better, but this is exactly the wrong attitude. More diversity of options, as a general rule, makes just about everything better in the long run, mainly because freedom is good for people and more innovation occurs when we can try different things and succeed or fail based on merit. The latest example that prompted me to write this is a comment I read in a discussion thread about stupid alcohol sales laws, commonly called blue laws. The comment read, “i hate the variation in alcohol laws from State to State. this shit needs to be modernized and made uniform across the Nation. i think it’s absurd that in my state, PA, i can’t buy liquor/wine from ANYWHERE but a State store.” Yes, since it is obvious that government and only government has created your problem, then the best solution is MORE government and MORE concentrated power in the hands of people who are EVEN FARTHER removed from your home and your life and who care about you individually EVEN LESS than the people who passed the current laws, if that’s possible. I’m sorry to end on an arrogant or haughty note, but Statists are stupid.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly skipped town for two days, so SF had no mayor. This is a problem? Let people run their own lives for a while without getting in their way, and see how well it works!

I think it is incredibly unfair to fire teachers or other public employees because of some supposedly scandalous but completely legal pictures of them on Facebook or mySpace or somewhere else on the internet. Sometimes, the victims were fired for things that weren’t even pornographic or illicit in any way. Ashley Payne, a 24-year-old teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, was fired because of non-pornographic pictures and supposedly profane comments posted to her Facebook page. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, I wasn’t doing anything provocative,” she says. She had set everything in her profile to “private” and was not friends with any students or parents. She has no idea how the parent who brought the complaint gained access to her photos. Oh, and also, the parent complained of Payne’s holding an alcoholic drink in one of the pictures. The completely infuriating, despicable, wretched, reviled, pathetic, sanctimonious destructiveness of idiotic teetotaling motherfuckers aside, by what right does a school board fire a teacher for doing nothing illegal, pornographic, harmful, or even unadvisable by any standards? I wish I had the link to a story about another teacher who was fired over some photographs of her in provocative poses, taken either by her boyfriend or husband before she ever became a teacher. So if you have ever done anything that someone in the school system or related to someone in the school system wouldn’t have done herself, that is grounds for firing. This is so typical of the the overly intrusive nanny state and the fascist busybodies that run our stupid society.

It strikes me as a sign of technological impairment or old-fogey-cluelessness when people refer to blog posts as “blogs.” To me, the LRC contributors are the most prominent perpetrators of this transgression. They’ll write, “In reference to your blog from yesterday…” or “…which I wrote about in a previous blog.” Hey, guys, “blog” is short for “web log,” as in, a journal. You wouldn’t refer to an entry in a child’s diary or a starship catpain’s log as a “log.” You would call it an entry. The proper term is blog post or blog entry. You can shorten it to “post” without using any more keystrokes than you now use. Calling a blog post a “blog” is like Senator Ted Stevens calling an email “an internet.” (In case you were wondering, yes, this is the only type of situation in which I would use the conventional “blog” instead of the uber-|337 and irreverent “blag.”)

Ha! Some person at “Progressive Nation” writes of the “growing rift between Libertarians and Republicans. No, this is not a repeat from the 1970’s, the 1980’s, the 1990’s, or every year of the Bush regime.

The first-class moran who occupies Michigan’s lieutenant governor post wants to tax bottled water companies to rescue the flagging revenues of a college scholarship program. In the state with the worst economy in the nation. The one that’s been in a depression for a year longer than the rest of the nation. The one losing businesses in hordes. It is simply depressing that after all these years, liberals refuse to understand that taxes hurt businesses and employment, and that taking more and more money from the taxpayers to put into government programs only destroys wealth. If you want education to be more affordable, or you want to save the environment (as the rest of this idiotic tax would fund), get the government out of both, and let people, companies, and communities solve their problems for themselves.

Juice is as unhealthy as soda and contributes just as much to obesity and diabetes, say some scientists. Yeah, you know who else blamed juice for the world’s problems? HITLER.

Apparently hosting a Harry Potter–themed dinner party for charity around Halloween is an infringement of Warner Bros.’s copyrights.

An “up-or-down vote on health care”?! You want the Congress and the President to make a single, sweeping, incontestable, one-size-fits-all decision on a multi-trillion-dollar endeavor that will affect the financial and medical well-being of nearly every single living American and future Americans for generations to come? You think an entire industry that each and every one of us must make decisions about and interact with on a monthly or yearly basis should be reduced to an “up-or-down vote” by a few hundred politicians? You fought and argued and marched and pleaded against the unilateral, power-grabbing, hegemonic abuses of the previous corrupt Republican regime, and now you are urging the Democrats in power to make a similar, unilateral and incontestable decision that every single American must live under and deal with regardless of whether they wanted it? It is unilateral because it entails a single government issuing edicts and a single president signing bills that govern everyone else’s life. THAT IS THE PROBLEM! YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM! TAKING POWER FROM THE PUBLIC AND GIVING IT TO A FEW POLITICIANS IS THE PROBLEM WITH OUR WORLD! Why don’t you stupid liberal Democrats get a clue about something for once?