Letter to a Tea Party "Leader"

I recently sent an email to a local Tea Party "leader" to question his opposition to the temporary five year Amazon sales tax exemption. I am posting his reply and my followup. I have not secured his permission to post his letter, so I believe it best to allow him to remain anonymous.

Dear Mr. Martin,

Thank you for writing and expressing your concerns over my position on the Amazon.com tax safe harbor. 

I assure you no is paying me. I am not pro-tax, but I do support everyone working under the same set of rules. How is it just for Amazon to get a "safe harbor" exemption from collecting sales tax, which is an effective 7% price advantage, just because they can afford to hire lobbyist to go and negotiate the preferential treatment from the legislature. 

Don't we live in a country that was founded on equal treatment under the law? It is suggested that the 1249 jobs is worth it. I don't think we should gloss over injustice based on supposed benefits. That is situational morality. I don't think we, as conservatives, should justify situational morality. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. 

Standing on principle is what separates us from the liberals. I hope Amazon comes to Lexington... I have lived in Lexington nearly my whole life. But I can't sacrifice principle for benefit. If so, how would I be any different from those who ask for more government control and regulation for the supposed benefit it would bring. 

Some say, as you allude to, that regardless of where Amazon locates, they still won't by collecting SC sales tax. That may be true, but if they locate in South Carolina and make use of our infrastructure, police, fire department, trash facilities, etc. and not be required to suffer under the same price disadvantage that every other retailer is required to... that of the extra 7% increase in price due to sales tax they collect. 

How is that fair or just? I agree that taxes need to go away. But they need to go away for everyone equally. Not just for the well connected. Thanks for writing with your concerns and allowing me to respond! 

Best regards,

My Reply:

Dear Mr. xxxxxxxxxxxx,

I want to thank you for taking the time to answer my email. I appreciate your willingness to discuss this issue with me.

Like most conservatives, I am dubious about any policy position based solely on “fairness”, especially when they are applied to taxation. I will, for the sake of our debate, ignore the fact that nothing about taxation is "fair", “just” or “moral”. At its core, taxation amounts to forced confiscation of one’s private property by the state, generally with the purpose of giving it to someone else. A necessary evil, some taxation is needed, but equating the Amazon bill to some concept of “equal justice” is as flawed as justifying a progressive income tax simply by opining that the wealth earned by individuals making more than 250,000 is less important to them and therefore, taking more from them is the “fair” thing to do.

Conservative political policies are generally based on logic and reason. We learn lessons from the past and apply that knowledge to our political positions in order to “conserve” liberty and freedom. To say “because it is not right”, “because it isn’t fair” or “because it is the right thing to do” are not arguments based on logic or reason. This is the folly of the liberal. They do what they “feel” is right. Healthcare Reform is a prime example. In doing what they “felt was right”, they ignored the will of the people, increased healthcare costs on all of us and ignored the logical and reasonable arguments against such legislation. Now, as we have seen, those arguments against such legislation are being proven with each passing day. Logic tells us that if this legislation were sound, the Obama administration would not need to issue over one thousand waivers to prevent workers from losing their coverage. The “moral” argument from the left is that 5% of the population now has healthcare insurance (or will have it) who did not have it before and therefore, the cost increase to the rest of us is “justified”.

Without applying this arbitrary notion that the Amazon sales tax exemption bill is not “fair” or “moral”, how do you justify your opposition to it? 

Perhaps you feel the state legislature is “picking winners and losers”? Isn’t that what economic incentives are all about? Should we give up our right-to-work status so that we will not be “picking winners or losers” on a national scale? Does your measure of "morality" and "fairness" stop at our state borders? I’m fairly certain that the "fairness" debate would not go our way if the people of Washington State were the arbiters of “fairness” when it comes to that particular incentive to locate businesses to our state. I’m sure the unions in Washington State would agree with your declaration: “I do support everyone working under the same set of rules.”

I concur that standing on principle is what separates us from the liberals. I just have not seen which principle it is that would dictate we oppose the Amazon legislation. In fact, my understanding of conservative principles tells me that corporations are much more than just income sources for the state. They are not evil, soulless behemoths who just want to crush the “little people” in order to make a profit. This is another unreasonable, illogical position taken by the left. Corporations are simply groups of individuals: executives, shareholders and employees working for mutual benefit of the entire company. They enhance and enrich our communities… they do not rob them and crush them under their boots as liberals would have us believe. To reduce them to faceless, nameless entities less deserving of liberty than the average citizen is to prescribe to the propaganda of the left.

As to your opposition to the influence peddling of our legislators, I agree whole-heartadly. However, it is not Amazon who has spent the vast majority of money on this particular legislation. It is “The Alliance for Main Street Fairness”. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Target have dumped millions into this special interest group to shrink Amazon's market share and to influence legislation not just in our state, but across the country, despite the misleading and dishonest name they have chosen for themselves. It is this influence peddling that benefits no one but themselves. They do not care about the unemployed people in our state or the poor economic conditions in the area which Amazon wants to build. Turning a blind eye to these lobbyists while condemning Amazon for lobbying is an odd position to take when the very basis of your position is “fairness”.

Again, I appreciate your willingness to debate this issue and I hope you will reconsider the position you have taken. As conservatives, we may disagree, but we are willing to discuss and debate rather than demonize and dehumanize those who oppose our positions. Treating Amazon as a soulless, bottom feeding source of tax revenue for the state rather than an employer and boon to our community wobbles towards that favored tactic of the left. A tactic I would rather not see associated with the Tea Party, especially when it used against the wealth creating businesses and free market principles we should be defending.  

Thanks,

Christopher Martin

Progressivism: If not by Candlelight

To me, Conservatism is an attitude about learning the lessons of the past. A philosophical attitude of caution because the history of the world is one of tyranny, poverty and suffering. Conservatism wants to, literally “conserve” the freedom and liberty we enjoy as a result of the great experiment undertaken by our founding fathers. An experiment that has as its heart, the theory that individuals can manage their lives far better than any government of monarchy, meritocracy or dictatorship. Only the most deluded malcontent would not concede that this great American experiment has been extremely successful.

Societies directly opposed to this notion have come and gone, leaving nothing more than dusty pages in historical tomes and the bones of citizens who never had a chance to experience the incredible freedoms Americans take for granted every day. The freedom to worship how we see fit, the freedom to both share and prosper from our ideas (both absurd and ingenious), the freedom to openly congregate and criticize our government and the freedom to participate in a free market. These are examples of activities the vast majority of the population of the world can never participate in.

Opposed to Conservatism, Progressivism is an attitude about an imagined future. A Utopian future where social justice and economic justice is attained through government regulation and state ownership of all wealth generation, or at least, total state regulation of wealth generating enterprise. Disregarded is the notion that the means and proposed form of governments to achieve this utopia have been proven disastrous, flawed and unworkable time and time again. The Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, China and North Korea stand as recent examples of the failures of Socialism. Of course, many claim that these “Marxist” forms of Socialism is not the form of Socialism they want to implement. They believe the only reason that socialism has failed in every attempt (murdering and impoverishing countless billions along the way) is because it “wasn’t done the right way”. Some even claim to support a form of “capitalist socialism” (an idiosyncrasy, to be sure).

The truth is: there is no right way to achieve the “social justice” and “economic equality” promised by Socialism. Governments cannot forcefully pull people up from poverty and squalor… they can only bring everyone else down to equal levels of poverty and squalor through forced confiscation of wealth and private property. Government can guarantee only equal JUSTICE, and even that is dependant on human nature and the morality of those select few whom write and enforce the laws. There must be checks and balances on those who enforce the laws, and those who write the laws. The framers of our Constitution and Bill of Rights recognized this weakness in human nature and the ease which power can corrupt. This is why they implemented a separation of legislative, judicial and executive powers unlike any system implemented before. These checks and balances were essentially a recognition that centralized power inevitably leads to tyranny, a lesson the founders learned through the study of history and philosophy. Socialism has ultimately lead to centralization (and inevitably, tyranny) every time it has ever been tried.

North Korea currently employs the purest form of Marxist Socialism readily evident on the planet. One need only examine the remarkable photo embedded below to determine the horrific results of such systems of government. It is a nighttime satellite image of the Korean peninsula. The dark, desolate expanse in the north is North Korea. 

South Korea, by no means an example of capitalism in its purest form, but capitalist, none-the-less, glows with a bright light that brilliantly illustrates the differences of the two societies. The North Korean government has placed such an emphasis on military might that the people are not allowed to enjoy the safety that comes with something as simple as a reprieve from the darkness of night. The people have no say because the Communist government knows better than the proletariat: what is good for the “community”. The wasteful expenditure of costly energy for simple comfort when everyone should be sleeping anyways cannot be justified when nuclear arms are needed to combat the evil Capitalists in America.

In an embarrassing moment of teleprompter-less sincerity during his campaign, our progressive president willingly espoused the need to ensure “wealth is evenly distributed” to “Joe the Plumber”. Make no mistake; this professed need to “redistribute the wealth” has the same deep philosophical and Marxist ancestry as the Communist government policy that has millions of North Koreans shivering in the darkness with no hope to ever partake in an activity as simple as reading at night, if not by candlelight.

Shaping the Debate

I love the fact that Juan Williams works for Fox News. His commentary and input gives Fox News programs a balance of viewpoints lacking on other news networks. Juan has always been one of the few liberals in the mainstream media that actually attempts to explain liberal ideology. One cannot fault Juan when his attempted explanations usually come across as rationally weak. Modern liberalism has little basis in reason or logic which makes it very difficult to make a coherent argument in favor of your position, but he does at least make the attempt. His approach of true and open dialog is somewhat rare for pundits on the left. Most on his side of the debate resort to leveling unfounded allegations and ugly smears at those who disagree with them because it is easier to demonize a political opponent than it is to convince others of the superiority of your own ideas.

Thursday night during the Republican presidential nominee debate, however, Juan resorted to a tried and true tactic often employed by the left. That is: posing cliché, personal faith questions to conservatives and Republicans that are rarely asked of candidates of the other side.

This is something you can expect to see a lot more of as the debates move on to other, more “mainstream” settings. “Do you believe in God” or “Do you believe in evolution” or some other question of personal faith. The unasked, but blatantly implied question being “are you one of those ignorant, extremist, conservative Christians who want to ban abortions and don’t believe in evolution?”

I eagerly anticipate the day when a candidate does not attempt to dodge the question. I believe they would garner a great deal of respect and support from the American people if they attacked the question head-on and with complete honesty.

First, they should reject the premise of the question.

You are asking if I am a Christian? I say without any hesitation and with pride that, yes, I am a devout Christian who believes in the salvation offered by Jesus Christ through his death and resurrection. If you wish to know that, just ask it. The sneaky, insinuating manner in which so many ask that question belies the true intentions behind it. You believe the American people will immediately draw the conclusion that I am an ignorant person who does not believe in evolution, same sex marriage or that I believe that a woman should not have the “right to choose”.

Well, I reject the premise of your question. For decades now, liberals and the left leaning mainstream media has been allowed to frame the debates surrounding these questions.

For instance, they've shaped the abortion debate into a debate about a woman's right to choose what she does with her body. That's not what it is about for myself and millions of other religious people in this country. It was never about women's rights. The debate should have been wether abortion was murder or not. After all, I don't think any person, liberal or conservative, atheist or religious would say that murder is not wrong.

Think about it, even Mr. Obama said in a 2008 debate that “no one is pro-abortion”. He said that abortion should be the last resort and that it was a “deeply moral choice” for individuals to make. If a fetus is simply a soulless lump of tissue and flesh, why would it be a moral choice? Why should it be the last resort if the debate is only about a woman's right to choose? Religious people have problems with murder... not woman's rights, as the left has been allowed to frame the debate.

The debate over evolution and the public school's teaching of alternative scientific explanations for the origins of life has suffered a similar fate. Many claim that conservatives just want to turn schools into religious recruitment centers by introducing the theory of intelligent design into the school's curriculum. This notion is absurd. In fact, the debate over intelligent design has been shaped by those who have taken up an almost religious devotion to the theory of evolution.

Questions about the differences in macro evolution and micro evolution aside, asking if one “believes in evolution” or if one “believes in evolution as the origin of life” are two very different questions. Even the most ardent atheists should admit that despite the title of Darwin's book, evolution doesn't address the questions about the ultimate origin of all life.

Even the world's most learned men are seemingly reduced to far-fetched speculation when asked where the very first organism at the very base of the evolutionary tree came from, given the astronomical odds against a perfect mix of chemicals and conditions in the primordial ooze. Scientists haven’t been able to replicate this in well-equipped labs with the perfect conditions carefully constructed and the exact chemicals placed in the manufactured “primordial ooze”. Such an organism would have also had to have popped into existence immediately with the ability to reproduce, further reducing the odds of coincidental creation. As seen in Ben Stein’s documentary, “Expelled”, even renowned atheist and scientist Richard Dawkins could come up with no better explanation than “alien seeding”. Alien seeding would constitute “intelligent design”, by the way.

Of course, I would have only gotten to the end of my first paragraph before the harsh buzz of the moderator's bell reminded me that I only had 90 seconds to answer... but, hopefully, my point is made.

I didn't really get to same-sex marriage, but that deserves a blog all on it's own. My position on that may surprise some and merits some exposition.

For too long, we conservatives have allowed liberals to shape the debate in their terms. We cannot afford to do this any longer. We must remember that the large majority of Americans share our principals and sensibilities. Poll after poll has shown this to be true. We truly are the silent majority and as long as we coherently articulate our positions, the only way we can lose is if we allow others to define our policies and core beliefs, as they will surely try to do. That is the only way they can win and they know it.

OBL Raid Story Inconsistencies...

Lots of people are asking questions about why the story seems to change almost daily.

At first, Osama used a woman as a human shield and shot at the Seals... and then he didn't.

Then there was a furious shoot-out... now, only the courier even had a gun.

At first, the famous pins-and-needles picture of the "situation room" depicted  administration officials witnessing the events unfold first-hand... and then they had no live video at all during the raid.

One major inconsistency I've seen no one else point out: there were no phone lines, no Internet and Bin Laden was so paranoid about electronic surveillance that he didn't trust computers, nor did he allow anyone to use one around him. So where did the "hard drives" and "computers" come from that Leon Penneta says Seal Team Six confiscated?

Don't get me wrong... I'm not one of these conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones who doesn't think they really got OBL in the raid. I don't believe the Obama administration is THAT deceitful. I do wonder why the administration can't seem to get their stories straight. I think it's probably more likely that they did not find any real intelligence on the raid, but want to be able to claim that information was gathered from sources other than Bush era interrogations.

Just conjecture on my part, but this is why it is said that if you tell the truth from the start, you don't have to worry about remembering what you said later.

The Lost Art of the Follow-Up Question (Part 1)

My new weekly series of quick suggestions for followup questions for the journalists who seem to have forgotten how to ask them since Jan 2009.

Today when asked about the release of the Osama bin Laden “death” photos, President Obama and White House officials finally (after a great deal of rather characteristic indecisiveness) shot those plans down citing a weariness in giving an additional propaganda tool that could put our deployed servicemen and women in further danger and a reluctance to insult “Muslim sensibilities”. 

Example Follow up question:

Why the sudden consternation over angering Muslims and endangering deployed service men and women? Over the past two and a half years, you've already leaked photos of alleged “Al-Qaeda detainee abuses” under the Bush administration, secret legal memos defending the legality of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (also conveniently damaging the prior administration) and you even managed to leak the names of those lawyers and judges who wrote said memos. These "enhanced interrogation" techniques were key in tracking down OBL as Leon Pennetta now admits. 

In short: If Seal Team Six would have put underwear on bin Laden's head, would the photo have been released?  

Justice is Done

First up, I’ll say what I think of the Bin Laden “hit”. Thank God Mr. Obama had the courage to order the kill, regardless of what his motivation may have been. Bill Clinton did not have that courage and several years after such an order could have prevented it, Bin Laden ordered over 3,000 innocent American civilians killed simply because they were Americans.

Mr. Obama rightfully fulfilled Bush’s pledge that those responsible would be hunted down and brought to justice, no matter where they hid. Those who would do harm to America’s citizenry must be shown that the results of such despicable deeds will result in retribution most terrible. The top priority for our leaders in the federal government should first and foremost be the protection of the citizens. Bin Laden’s demise was the ultimate collection of a debt whose repayment had been long past-due. The collectors of that debt, men and women in the CIA, FBI and US military who have worked for the past three administrations towards that goal. Despite the president's claim that HE had made Bin Laden the CIA's top priority; by being the number one most wanted on the FBI's list for almost two decades, Bin Laden had already been THE top priority target since the Clinton Administration when he spearheaded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 which killed six American citizens and then the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in Africa that killed another two hundred and twenty four.

The appalling aspect of this last chapter of the Bin Laden saga is the fawning adoration of the Obama administration by the mainstream media and how the left has framed the story.

For the past two and a half years, this administration has done everything it can to distance itself from the Bush administration. “Apologizing” for America’s stubborn resolve to hunt down terrorists everywhere and the secretive nature of our Intelligence Agencies had become almost a joke in its repetitiveness. It was like those particular speech paragraphs and media blurbs were being used over and over again in “copy and paste” like fashion.

They had even gone so far as to block the Justice Department’s lawyers from the defense of the officials of the Bush administration in an unprecedented display of partisan, political pandering to the anti-war left. One of the duties of the Justice Department is to defend federal officials from such lawsuits, no matter which party those officials belonged too. The Clinton Justice Department defended Bush Sr. officials; Reagan Officials defended Carter officials… etc. That is what the Justice Department is supposed to do. To throw Bush officials to the proverbial litigational wolves was blatant disregard for the constitutional duties of the Executive Branch and Justice Department and obviously a blatant political ploy designed to placate the ant-war leftists, extremist Muslim groups and Bush hating elements of the left (which is to say, almost the entire Democratic Party).

The constant calls of the left for the prosecution of Bush administration officials for “crimes against humanity” and “human rights” violations of Guantanamo Bay detainees had become permanent footnotes in the Bush Administration’s legacy. Now that the current administration has capitalized on these Bush era policies of rendition, “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “cowboy diplomacy”, will we ever see this legacy revised? Will the historical foot notes be amended? Don’t hold your breath.

For the past three years, citing “due process”, Mr. Obama and the Justice Department has pursued civilian trials for Al Qaeda prisoners in “Gitmo”, opting to grant them the same protections granted to US citizens in the bill of rights. This, while carrying on their war against Al Qaeda via drone strikes to Al Qaeda bases in remote locations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Apparently, if you are Al Qaeda but were caught under Bush, you deserve due-process. If you are Al Qaeda but have not been caught during Mr. Obama's reign, you deserve death without a trial via high-tech weaponry. This question remains unasked in the mainstream media.

In one of the best examples of hypocrisy, just two years ago, Keith Olbermann, frequent guest of the current president at press club parties and “unofficial White house sit-downs” and vocal spokesman for liberals, declared that the secretive JSOC and Seal Team Six military programs were nothing more than Dick Cheney’s “assassination ring”. Yesterday, he tweeted an eager and cheerful “congratulations” to this same organization for its key part in carrying out the mission in Pakistan.

The left's frantic, self-aggrandizing and convenient amnesia really does show their desperation for any bump they can get in the approval polls.