I have never understood liberalism's blind spot for liberty when it comes to taxation. A 24-hour waiting period before a teenager can have an abortion is an allegedly grotesque violation of individual freedom, but a federal government that takes vast amounts of your money -- the means by which you exercise your every freedom -- to distribute as it sees fit is 'progressive'? The USA Patriot Act, whose threat to privacy was somewhere between entirely theoretical and non-existent for the overwhelming majority of Americans, shocked the liberal conscience. But our income tax system -- made idiotically complex by both parties -- demands countless hours of preparation and requires law abiding citizens to reveal (and document!) many of their most private decisions to government inspectors every year is 'reasonable.' Yet many liberals even think complaining about this is a sign of right-wing dementia.
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-- columnist Jonah Goldberg, writing in USA Today on the hostile reaction many liberals have had to Tea Party rallies protesting higher taxes and spending.“There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.”
― W.H. Auden
"God made the angels to show His splendour - as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But men and women He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of their minds."
-- Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
--Antoine de Saint-Exupery