Tuesday, December 07, 2010

What's mine is mine

According to my understanding of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution (and I grant, I am no legal scholar of the documents -- just a sufferer of a slightly-above-average amount of history education), all men are created equal, and shall be treated as such under the laws of this great nation.

So, how is it that we have had a different set of standards for taxation of citizens? How is it that our leaders can be -- and have been for more than a century -- demonizing "the rich" and taking away from them a greater percentage of their earnings than they do others? I thought we were supposed to be the great egalitarian society, and the Land of Opportunity, but what the POTUS says is, we are a nation divided along class lines, just like Europe of two centuries past.

When will this nitwit and his ilk realize that class warfare is a nihilist game, and using the government to wage that war is quite the opposite of what the founders had in mind. When will it occur to them that undermining "the rich" employers also drags down the workers? To make the wealthy poor makes everybody poorer, because, not only are they destroying the source of employment, but they're also killing the goose that lays the golden eggs of investment in medicine, technology, art, and even infrastructure? If the government aim is ultimately to own everybody and everything so they can redistribute it as they see fit, aren't we little better than Zimbabwe?

And, on the subject of Constitution and our properties and persons... why is everybody discussing the TSA grope-and-hope stuff as an issue of privacy? That term is too (a) terribly overused, and therefore (b) too vague and generic to be remotely useful in this debate. It's not about mere privacy, here. It's about unwarranted search and seizure. When did this thumbing of the nose at of the laws of nature (man mechanically lifting his person in flight) actually violate Constitutional rights? How is the generic search of persons who travel even remotely warranted? Did somebody put a devil's clause in the ticket sales contract, surrendering all personhood once one sets foot on the concourse of an airport? Is it really too much to demand that the authorities first have probable cause before they scan our skivvies or put their hands on our erogenous zones?

Not that I fly. I'm just trying to wrap my head around this thing. I was raised to believe we had rights -- not the least of which being that nobody can search us or seize our persons and properties without our having first broken some specific law. I guess the documents I read are not related to the ones the current POTUS used to teach young'uns about.

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