Elsewhere (39)
June 06, 2011
Darleen Click quotes William Voegeli on taxes and welfare:
One way to describe the difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals want government spending to be the independent variable that determines tax levels, and conservatives want government spending to be the dependent variable determined by taxes…
I’m a conservative because I think it's democratically healthy to confront the hard question about taxes first and directly, and then let our answer to that question determine the budget perimeter for our welfare state. It is democratically unhealthy to proceed the way liberals have habitually dealt with the problem, by promising generous programs that will “pay for themselves” or even “pay for themselves many times over,” and only later, after people have come to expect and depend on the stream of government benefits, fess up about the taxes required to sustain them.
Related: How much extra tax would you volunteer to pay?
Raedwald ponders Darwinism and the arts:
Milan Kundera termed the support of awful art by controlling political regimes the “absolute denial of shit.” By supporting and promoting the dreadful, the sense of common discrimination is dulled, the people gulled, and the power and voice of worthwhile and original art and culture suffocated beneath the drek of lesbian dance collectives and men who exhibit painted plaster casts of their penis. The deprivation of meritocracy from art and culture, the protection of the awful from Darwinian winnowing, the blurring of our power of discrimination, is all, Kundera says, an effort by the politically powerful to isolate the people from uncomfortable truths.
And the Devil runs a salty tongue over Caroline Lucas:
Lest we forget and imagine that Lucas is qualified to prognosticate on anything useful, your humble Devil would like to remind his faithful readers that Caroline earned her doctorate with a thesis entitled Writing for Women: a Study of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance.
As usual, feel free to add your own in the comments.