Tax Me More Fund

This Politically Dissident column originally appeared in The Exponent (University of Alabama in Huntsville), Vol. 33, No. 22 (February 28, 2002). Digitized issue: UAH LOUIS archive. Reproduced here courtesy of that archive.

“Tax Me More” Fund donations as of 2002/02/24: $5

Alabamians recently acquired another opportunity for taxation, albeit voluntary: the Libertarian Party of Alabama recently registered the Tax Me More Fund PAC. According to the TMMF website (www.taxmemore.homestead.com), donations will either go to the state’s Education Trust Fund or to cover certain overhead costs. As I’ve mentioned earlier in this space, Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee—also famous for cutting costs for Arkansas taxpayers by moving into a triple-wide during the renovation of the governor’s mansion—set up a Tax Me More fund in Arkansas to expose statist hypocrisy. The overwhelming generosity of Arkansans and The Exponent readership (and soon all Alabamians) shows that people feel they’re paying their fair share; it’s someone else who needs to pony up. Socialists, it seems, have no shame.

Shays-Meehan, the campaign finance reform bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, managed to win approval despite open opposition from the House’s Republican leadership. Debate in the Senate (not yet complete at the time of this writing) should be interesting, with the key question being whether Daschle can find sixty votes to defeat a filibuster. Odds makers expect that President Bush will sign a bill if one makes it to his desk. “Frankenstein” McCain’s monster—the bill would ban issue ads sixty days prior to an election—is the worst assault on the Constitution since the Alien and Sedition Acts, which criminalized public criticism of elected officials. During the 2000 campaign, then-Governor Bush often thumped his chest about nominating strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, so the president ought to consider trying strict constructionism for himself. Clearly, the proposed bans would violate the First Amendment, and the incumbent protection measures would only make politicians even more arrogant and unresponsive. Republicans and Democrats, it seems, have no shame.

Our softball league at work doesn’t start until April, but Jeremy Cameron was kind enough to pitch a watermelon in a letter to the Editor last week. Cameron denied the claim that CCW laws reduce violent crime, even in the face of contradictory evidence. When Florida became a right-to-carry state, the demagogues predicted blood in the streets, but the murder rate dropped by about twenty percent over the next five years even though the national murder rate was trending up. Cameron was so close when he wrote, “A criminal obviously is not all that concerned about the law anyway, and a potential victim could always be carrying a gun—regardless of CCW laws.” No, criminals don’t care about the law: consider that places such as Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles or New York, places with strict “gun control” laws, also have horrid violent crime levels.

As Cameron observed, even an all-out ban wouldn’t eliminate all carrying, but certainly he can agree that carrying would be down drastically in the face of such a law. Most egregious was Cameron’s assertion that repealing laws prohibiting murder would be pro-liberty. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” Permitting murder wouldn’t be a pro-liberty stance, and, of course, our correspondent knows it. Jeremy Cameron, it seems, has no shame.