Post by will on Jun 30, 2012 11:23:15 GMT -5
Colorado Springs is on fire right now. We all know that. The fed is coordinating efforts to contain the fires, and appears to be doing a pretty good job in spite of the challenges and failures inherent in fighting a huge forest fire.
Colorado Springs is also the place that decided they would rather cut taxes than have public services. With local resources, paid for by local funds, they would be headed for the prairie, with no way to stop the fires, or even slow them down.
So, I wonder what they think of the commons now. After all, the efforts being expended on putting out this fire far exceed the federal taxes they have paid in the last year, most likely. That means the rest of us are subsidizing them. In a pure, libertarian loonieland, the rest of the country would own Colorado Springs until they bought it back from us, or perhaps we would just let it burn, because it's not our problem and we shouldn't have to pay for it.
Another aspect of this is the whole states rights thing that the right is so in love with for the time being. If the fed were the right size to drown in a bathtub, then the fed couldn't coordinate much of anything. It would be entirely up to the State of Colorado to deal with this problem. They would have to pay fire crews and smoke jumpers from other states to come to Colorado to fight this thing. That's happening now, but with federal funding available, the entire burden doesn't fall upon Colorado taxpayers. It falls on all of us. Is this fair? Of course not, by the usual teabagger rhetoric.
So, here is another, bright, obvious example of why the doctrinaire right, teabagging fools, and libertarians are just greedy cowards or utterly misinformed. This example of the obvious will be ignored or spun some other way, but the logic of it is inescapable if you have the ability to count from one to ten in the same sequence more than once in a row without screwing it up.
Colorado Springs is also the place that decided they would rather cut taxes than have public services. With local resources, paid for by local funds, they would be headed for the prairie, with no way to stop the fires, or even slow them down.
So, I wonder what they think of the commons now. After all, the efforts being expended on putting out this fire far exceed the federal taxes they have paid in the last year, most likely. That means the rest of us are subsidizing them. In a pure, libertarian loonieland, the rest of the country would own Colorado Springs until they bought it back from us, or perhaps we would just let it burn, because it's not our problem and we shouldn't have to pay for it.
Another aspect of this is the whole states rights thing that the right is so in love with for the time being. If the fed were the right size to drown in a bathtub, then the fed couldn't coordinate much of anything. It would be entirely up to the State of Colorado to deal with this problem. They would have to pay fire crews and smoke jumpers from other states to come to Colorado to fight this thing. That's happening now, but with federal funding available, the entire burden doesn't fall upon Colorado taxpayers. It falls on all of us. Is this fair? Of course not, by the usual teabagger rhetoric.
So, here is another, bright, obvious example of why the doctrinaire right, teabagging fools, and libertarians are just greedy cowards or utterly misinformed. This example of the obvious will be ignored or spun some other way, but the logic of it is inescapable if you have the ability to count from one to ten in the same sequence more than once in a row without screwing it up.
