vivo, you answered the question, “I’m asking, seriously, how does one revolt against socialist theft?” with “By creating or increasing businesses, profits and jobs.” But why should anyone who actually can create or increase businesses, profits, or jobs do so if their motivation, to say nothing of their sheer ability to do so is continually and increasingly sapped by soak-the-rich taxation?

You’ve responded to a number of people with one-liners that echo the “progressive” cant. Have you thought about whether those bumper stickers are actually true? Whether they work? When revenues to the government demonstrably increase after tax cuts and decrease after tax increases, does that fact register with you? When there were calls for Bush’s impeachment (or, as now, for his being tried for “war crimes”), does Occam’s Razor dictate that the reason no such charges were brought (or ever will be brought) is that there’s a nation- or worldwide conspiracy to protect Bush, or because they’d be groundless?

I tell this story often. I was in Dallas in, what, 2006 or so, at a funky gift shop – you know the kind, full of “novelty” items like librarian action figures and snooty-pop-culture versions of classic games. At the cash register was a display of buttons. My fave was the one that said, “Oh well, I wasn’t using my civil liberties anyway.” I was absolutely charmed by the unselfconscious irony of whoever caused that button to be made, the buyer who thought it’d be cute for their store, the manager of the store who thought it’d be oh-so-relevant to display prominently in the age of Dear Leader Bush. All of them apparently willing to overlook the fact that if Bush really were what they continually said he was, that button would have meant a file an inch thick at State, informing by frightened neighbors and children, and men in dark glasses at the door saying, “Sir or madam, please come with us.”

vivo, think.