Another Dem Congressman on tapeFollow

Not necessarily every time. I'll certainly look askance at anything Breitbart posts after the recent shenanigans.

That woman was a loon. Taxation is not slavery, and taxation is one of the "few" things that the constitution enables the government to do.

I don't blame him for being a little stunned by the obviously loaded and completely off-base question, really.

But... was he wrong...? The government does make a lot of laws about your private live. You can't kill people. You can't rape people. You can only have one spouse (and that spouse has to be of the opposite sex). The government controls what you get through your television via the FCC. They stop you from beating or starving your kid. You can't take people's stuff. You can't take people's money.

Am I a slave to the world's children because I'm being taxed for the schools? Am I a slave to the driving populace because I'm taxed to help pay for roads? I guess we're all slaves to the military in a big way. We're slaves to the government, since we pay their salaries...

So how was he wrong?

She goes a bit far with the whole slavery bit, but she's more or less right. She clearly has an understanding of the difference between negative and positive rights.



I don't think he understood the principle of rights she was talking about. While she leaps to the worst example in terms of constitutional amendments, he clearly didn't have a clue that government doesn't actually have endless power to regulate (or shouldn't anyway).



Yes. But in each (most?) cases the restrictions placed on the people are intended to prevent them from infringing on the rights of other people, not to provide other people with a benefit.



Protecting someone's right.



Protecting someone's right.



Limitation on a set of benefits, not a limit of rights at all. You don't have a right to get benefits from the government. Ergo, placing restrictions on who qualifies for said benefits isn't a violation of rights. Now, taking property from people to pay for those benefits *is* a violation of rights, so you'd have been better going in that direction.



Sure. It's a common/public area law though. It's about my willingness to accept the loss of liberty to run around naked with peanut butter smeared on my body in exchange for protection of the sorts of liberties that really matter (like free speech, protection of my property, etc). We all accept social norm rules as part of joining a society, and this is no different.



Yup. Still all preventing you from infringing a right held by someone else (life, and property respectively).



Yup. Taxation is a tricky one IMO. Technically, any tax is an infringement of our rights. The degree to which said taxes pay for things which protect our rights is the measuring stick we should use though. A military protects our rights. Police forces protect our rights. Other things are really just benefits. We can decide to pay for them or not. They're not required though, and we should always be *very* cautious when making spending decisions about them.


Not understanding the difference between rights and benefits tends to make it difficult to correctly assess which spending is "necessary" and which is just fluff, and further which taxes are acceptable and which aren't. The point the woman was making (well except for the slavery bit), is that being required to pay taxes for something which is a benefit by simply labeling that thing a "right" turns the entire process upside down. The same tactic can be used to call anything a "right", and thus result in no limit to what the government can do.

Which is essentially what the congressman said and why the reaction to it was so strong.



Because he clearly failed to grasp the difference I talked about. That's stupid when it's done by a random citizen, but it's dangerous when it's done by an elected official. Assuming you care about such things of course...

So, in other words, he's not wrong.

That's what I figured.

I have no idea what the woman in question was saying since I never bothered clicking the lolbreibart link but unless she was arguing that a case should be allowed to proceed to a trial, I think you're misunderstanding what the judge said.

Why can't idiots on a message board (namely you and Varrus, but let's throw gbaji in there, too) actually show where the liberal is wrong?

Please don't invite him to try again. It's incoherent enough already without him adding to it.