. . . and how the future is here. Now.
Today, soda and junk food. Tomorrow, once the flood gates to such taxation is opened, whatever new or next “vice” the party in power can conjure to socially demonize.
It is selective. It is deprivation of choice by governmental coercion. It is the worst form of nannystatism.
President Obama can afford to pay the increased taxes on his cigarettes. After all, once he was elected to the Senate, his wife got a 260% raise. Plus, if Obama ever gets into a financial scrape, he can always promise to pump out another set of memoirs — and get a nice advance on the project.
The rest of us? Not so much. Remarkably, the progressive ideology that pretends to fight class warfare is directly responsibly for the kinds of policies that create such warfare.
Bad as all that is, though, let’s not lose sight of what I’ve long suggested is the natural endpoint of such thinking: that government, once it controls healthcare and is confronted with the fact that it needs to find ways to cut benefits to stay solvent and continue to overpay “management” bureaucrats, will have every motivation to tell you what to eat, how much to sleep, and when and for how long to exercise.
So really. Can national morning calisthenics be far behind?
And I’m not being hyperbolic, either: when many of us made the arguments that food taxes would naturally follow from the war being waged on cigarettes, we were dismissed with a wave of the hand as cranks engaging in slippery slope fallacies.
Well, welcome to your lube job, America. See you at the bottom of the slope.
Me, I’m grabbing some guns, my husband, and all our martial-arts gear; we’re going to move into the Goldsteins’ neighborhood and create a hippie militia compound. The guys will do MMA together while the girls talk about clothes, take care of the little one, and put lead in the air. It’ll be wholesome.
Later in the evening, my husband will accuse me of waxing too polysyllabic; I’ll point him in Jeff’s direction and then walk out into the snow to smoke a cigar.
I’m already working on the sign, complete with at least one backward “S”: ALL FEDS WILL BE SHOT ON SITE.
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Aren’t you guys going to correct my spelling? It’s like you don’t care any more.
Remember to avoid strong drink. It can cause you to shoot at tax collectors…and miss.