Tigerhawk writes:
This is really quite something, right there on the pages of the New York Times:
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?Apparently advocating lower taxes for moral, rather than technocratic, reasons warrants jail, never mind that silly First Amendment. The author of that insanity is a professor at Cornell, so it was probably easy for him to get it published in the NYT.
Who is an “Anti-tax zealot”, anyhow? Is it someone who believes in lower taxes, or as the passage above implies, no taxes? If it’s the latter, now the Gray Lady sees conservatives and libertarians as anarchists; only a few weeks ago, they were Stalinists — the latter word possibly for the first time ever, used pejoratively by a Timesman:
It is, yet again, a rather sad commentary on the abysmal state of education that a so-called (self-proclaimed ?) “elite” school would have on faculty a professor(I am assuming) who doesn’t understand The Constitution protects rights, not that it “grants” them.
“Robert H. Frank, an economist at Cornell University”
One should read Donald Alexander Down’s, Cornell’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. This academic institution abandoned its standards over 40 years ago. Grade inflation often became the norm—especially in the softer sciences.
Liberals detest free speech. The first amendment as we knew it will not be around much longer.
Whether it’s called hate speech, or something else, soon people will be going to jail for having the wrong opinions.
Christians will be among the first.
If you read the whole thing, I don’t think the author meant that he is advocating a “hate speech” law, but merely making gross generalizations and poorly thought out logic (as well as poor writing that makes it appear that he is against the first amendment.) His logic is:
1) All people against taxation must be selfish people thinking on their own self-interests.
2) All or most of these self-interests must cause harm to others in some way (a classic anti-capitalist fallacy)
3) Therefore, anyone who is against taxation is advocating harm to the rest of the population and should be IGNORED and taxation should be forced on them.
I can’t believe this guy’s an economist! Not even a Keynesian would produce such a disjointed, marxist argument.