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| Farmer Horace Bunce down in Tennessee rubbed a couple of his warm brain cells together one day maybe when he was thrashing...
Out poured some pretty good reasoning on good tax - bad tax, ja.
As farmers, we are multi-taskers..LOL This is good!
Farmer Bunce figured out a long time ago the tyranny in bureaucracy and here I sit rubbing a couple of my warm brain cells together thinking about the corn market..LOL
Sometimes I have discovered by thinking long and hard about other things while perched on the tractor seat for uninterrupted hours at a time, I can come back to "marketing" and think clearer, ja. Any of you that a-way?
I have a gut feeling China will buy corn right before Christmas... Gottlieb
This role of government as “the sole agent and the only arbiter of [the people’s] happiness” is nothing new, though Obamacare has pushed it to a new level. As I said at the beginning of this column, there is something almost satanically appealing about the power to spend other people’s money in a bid to make yourself look beneficent. Nor can a politician easily resist the tears of a newborn’s mother or the plaintive cries of a family left homeless by fire.
That last example brings to mind the question asked of Rep. Davy Crockett by a Tennessee farmer in the 1820s:
“Where do you find in the Constitution any authority to give away the public money in charity?”
Crockett, you see, had given in to the noble impulse to help those less fortunate than ourselves and had voted to spend federal funds for the relief of families that had been left homeless as the result of a ravaging fire in Georgetown. He never gave a thought to whether such a payment was constitutional or not, but just did it because it felt good. It took his constituent’s question to make Crockett examine his own conscience and realize he had erred by authorizing the payment of $20,000 for those homeless families.
As Horace Bunce, the Tennessee farmer, explained to Crockett:
“The power of collecting and disbursing money at pleasure is the most dangerous power that can be entrusted to man... [W]hile you are contributing to relieve one, you are drawing it from thousands who are even worse off than he. If you had the right to give anything, the amount was simply a matter of discretion with you, and you had as much right to give $20,000,000 as $20,000. If you have the right to give to one, you have the right to give to all; and, as the Constitution neither defines charity nor stipulates the amount, you are at liberty to give to any and everything which you may believe, or profess to believe, is a charity, and to any amount you may think proper. You will very easily perceive, what a wide door this would open for fraud and corruption and favoritism, on the one hand, and for robbing the people on the other.”
If it was not evident in the 1820s, it is most certainly self-evident now. With a bow to Lord Acton, “Money seduces, and other people’s money seduces absolutely.” As Horace Bunce predicted, the federal government has become nothing more than a conduit for redistribution of wealth. To deny that truth is to live in a fairy-tale world where America remains the champion of freedom and the economic engine of the world.
If we ARE the economic engine of the world, we are permanently stuck in first gear, thanks to the crush of regulations, mandates and red tape that Congress has imposed on business. And if we ARE the champion of freedom, it is the freedom to do what we are told to do by the federal government or else pay a fine, tax or penalty (or whatever Justice Roberts decides to call it this time).
http://www.dailyinterlake.com/opinion/columns/frank/article_e046cce...
Edited by Gottlieb 11/10/2013 08:44
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Tennessee farmer figured this out...(from the 1820's..relevant today-taxing
