The Left in this country is tax-crazy. Since the passage of the federal income tax in 1913 they have sought a way to tax anything and everything that promises to raise enough revenue to line their socialistic pockets while simultaneously providing them yet one more ounce of control over the lives of the American people. Although they often sell their tax schemes through class-warfare tactics, “justifying” taking from one to give to another by showing that “there is far too great a discrepancy between the haves and the have-nots,” they are not above taxing us on a non-social matter like the environment (and not above stretching this issue a bit to make harming the environment the equivalent of harming the poor).

As a matter of fact, it is in the name of the environment that they have made some of their greatest gains. And the danger is that the Left feeds on itself. Each new tax they pass is immediately followed by a loonier tax proposal. And now, onerous and asinine taxes such the decades old gas-guzzler tax on the big cars we love to drive and the proposed windfall profits tax on the oil companies that provide the fuel for those cars are being “one-upped” by the Left’s “unofficial” pursuit of a flatulence tax.

That’s right, the Left wants to tax cow and pig flatulence as a way to “regulate” the emission of greenhouse gases (Michael Savage couldn’t have been more correct in his assertion that “liberalism is a mental disorder”).

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Barack Obama continues to promise tax cuts for everyone making under $250,000 a year and tax increases for those who make above that figure annually. He is unapologetic in his proposed use of this policy to “spread the wealth around.” And while we are correct to see this as nothing less than a bald attempt to redistribute wealth, we miss the boat if that’s all we see. Lower and Middle class families who plan to benefit from this policy at the expense of others need to understand that the generosity of the upper class is going to disappear once already confiscatory taxes turn into highway robbery.

That this is so is not just common sense, although common sense should suffice. The effects of high tax rates upon a people’s charitable spirit has been seen again and again by free market economists and historians who look honestly enough at history to see that low tax rates spur generosity while excruciating rates close otherwise open purses.

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When I first heard the news that Harold ISD, a small school district in North Texas, decided to allow their teachers to carry guns on campus this coming school year, “that feeling” came over me which used to come over me when Ronald Reagan gave speeches on liberty and American exceptionalism. In what I can only describe as a flood of emotion approaching inexpressibility, I thought again and again of the scene from Braveheart where Mel Gibson’s William Wallace screamed “Freedom!” I thought of 1775, when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms… make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants,” and I was thrilled that now, in 2008, brave Texans have decided the assailants have had the advantage for long enough.

As this nation was being birthed, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed,” and Patrick Henry that “the great objective is that every man be armed.” Yet instead of recognizing the wisdom of these words and abiding by them, we have largely remained idle amidst the emergence of public areas in our society where firearms are declared off limits. This has translated into providing armed predators with unarmed people upon whom to prey.

Nowhere has the foolishness of these “gun free” areas been more evident than in our public schools. In 1990, the Gun-free School Zones Act was passed by President George H.W. Bush, only to be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. It was resurrected by President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, and by 1996 a broader version of it was in place as the law of the land. (Ironically, it was at this same time that shootings in public schools became a broader problem as well.)

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Slowly but surely, Americans have learned to stop thinking. If you do not believe this, walk through any crowded area in your city during the next few days and watch closely as people mill about. The experiment will be especially telling if you go to a place where thought once thrived – the Church or the university. The awe inspiring hope of Puritan John Witherspoon, who believed America was chosen by God to be “a shining city on a hill,” is gone. The optimism of Ronald Reagan, who believed that America had “a rendezvous with destiny,” is lost. The fortitude of George Washington, who said “the Constitution is the guide which I never will abandon,” is softened and overlooked due the fact that many of us have never read or considered the Constitution.

We pride ourselves in our “education.” We take comfort in the “advances” we have made over those who went before us and mock the “backwardness” of our ancestors, even of those white landowners who signed the Declaration of Independence. Ironically, those white landowners of the late 18th century were probably far better educated that we are in the early 21st. For instance, while some of us know how to clean a gun, our Founders knew not only that but also how to make a gun. And while all of us know what cigars and cigarettes are, the Founding Fathers in Virginia and the Carolinas could have taught us how to plant, grow, and harvest tobacco. They could have explained the proper type of barns to construct in order to allow harvested tobacco to cure correctly. Thereafter, they could have explained the different grades of cured tobacco and how combinations of differing grades in cigarettes would provide varying flavors.

This knowledge would not have been esoteric in the Founder’s generations as it is in ours; broad sweeps of the population would have been familiar with it. The amount of knowledge they stored in their minds was simply vast compared to ours.

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