Comments on: Greece and California

By: Obnoxio The Clown

Obnoxio The Clown — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 20:23:25 +0000

Damn – beaten to it by the Great Simpleton. That’s exactly what this is all about.

By: bellagerens

bellagerens — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:32:54 +0000

Well, quite. But it’s funny to watch the redistributionists moan about ‘getting something back’ when we all know redistribution from rich to poor is a moral good, not an insurance policy. The Californians should have been happy that their wealth was going to poorer people! How selfish of them to ask for it back! Etc etc blah blibbity blah. Hypocrites.

By: bellagerens

bellagerens — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:30:06 +0000

Yeah, I too suspected that was Hill’s real attitude: ‘Our lovely left-wing friends in California need some help! Those cold-hearted neo-con bastards won’t give it to them!’ Only such a fool as he could look at the Californian spectacle and not decide that their high-tax-and-spend experiment failed.

By: The Great Simpleton

The Great Simpleton — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:26:13 +0000

But this isn’t really about rich and poor, its about Democrats lording it over Republicans. Those wonderfully liberal democrats of California have been subsidising the nasty right wing neo con (and any other pejorative term for Republican you can think of) Republican states and making the most of it when times were good.

This wasn’t, in the jargon, progressive taxation and redistribution from relative rich to relative poor, it was a chance for liberals to play Righteous. Now that the still relative rich are feeling a bit poorer they don’t feel like being Righteous and giving to the relative poor and want their money back.

PS I use the term liberal in its USA sense ie left wing socialist not in the libertarian sense.

By: Hrothgar

Hrothgar — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:06:35 +0000

Ha! You caught them on this one. As Aristotle would say, there are no contradictions; check your premises. The Guardian should give logic a try.

By: CC Truckston

CC Truckston — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:05:07 +0000

Why should any state subsidize any other state? In fact, the subsidy comes from other states through Congress, which allocates money not for the purpose of “helping,” but for the purpose of political engineering. If Americans had refused to send income tax money to a bloated federal government that wastes it on programs that, for the most part, are outside its constitutional authority, and instead paid modest taxes to their state governments, perhaps California and other states in similar financial straits would not have been so profligate with the peoples’ money, and would not be sticking their collective hands out to Congress for bailouts. As it is, Californians got themselves into this mess, and they should look to themselves to get out of it, as should all states, and forego dependency on the national government, which, by its example, engendered in the state legislatures the spend-without-limits mentality.

If the states ignore federal unfunded mandates and get their financial houses in order, and Americans stop funding the national government’s out-of-control spending by refusing to pay income tax, then they can reign in the dangerous and unconstitutional accumulation of power in a central government that is on the verge of no longer having the consent of the governed. Jefferson said it best: “Whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” Well, “whensoever” is now.