Hey! Government! Get out of my life!

April 10, 2009

Roger Emile Stouff
   I’ve about had it up to the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin.
   Government exists to protect, provide services and development, and that’s about it. All it was ever intended to do.
   But for decades now, government has intruded on our lives, from Prohibition on up.
   Completely sick of it.
   This is not a Democrat thing or a Republican thing. They all do it. George Bush Uno and Dos did it, Bill Clinton did it, Barrack Obama’s doing it, they all do it.
   Currently, I’m hacked off about tobacco taxes. Hear me out! Whether you smoke or not, this whole thing is a travesty, discriminatory and there should be a Boston tobacco party.
   I don’t smoke two-and-a-half packs of cigarettes a day like I used to, to get hit in the pocket book over it, but my beef is this:
   How in the hell do you justify billions of dollars in aid to corporations like GM and AIG, and then hit the average Joe with incredibly enormous tobacco taxes?
   It makes no sense.
   Let’s pick this apart. Smokers, they say, are a large burden on the public health care system. Therefore this tax is supposed to fund the SCHIP program, which is a child health care initiative.
   I’m sure all those child smokers will be grateful.
   In fact, the most recent evidence shows that smokers die sooner than non-smokers so are less of a burden. How ya like dem apples?
   In the second place, it will take more than 22 million new smokers, above those that exist right this minute, to fund the program for the next ten years at the levels it has been budgeted.
   Get this, too: About 20 percent of the nation smokes; most of those make under $40,000 a year. A large portion of those make far, far less.
   Therefore! It’s a tax on the middle-class and the poor while financial institution executives light their cigars with twenty-dollar bills.
   Plus, government is potentially putting tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people out of work, destroying a retail and wholesale base as well.
   But they’ll bail out GM and AIG.
   Then. Then! The state legislature may be considering a bill to tack another buck on a pack of cigarettes. Rep. Joe Harrison, who represents this area, is a co-author.
   Fine, then.
   Tack a gargantuan tax on fast food, too. Double the tax if you super-size it.
   Isn’t that fair? Aren’t fast food junkies a burden to the health care system?
   And what about mountain climbers? ATV riders? Should we tax four-wheelers, jet skis and hiking boots into oblivion?
   Listen, you can say what you want about tobacco users, but the simple fact is government does not need to be in your business like that. They’re getting into what you watch on television, read on the Internet, how you drive, how you raise your kids, all of it.
   Now. About those guns…
   We’ve heard the clichés so many times over the decades we just shrug them off. But that does not mean they are untrue.
   You take every gun away from every law-abiding citizen, they’ll be completely defenseless against the bad guys, who will have guns. There’s no way to stop them. England is a perfect example.
   That, ladies and gents, is indisputable. You cannot deny human nature: There be bad, and there be good, as Ray Bradbury said, and that’s how human beings are. You will be defending your home with a broomstick against a .44 magnum-wielding assailant.
   You will not be safer. You will be more at risk. Even if you melted down every single gun in existence, you can make bombs out of household chemicals; there are still knives, two-by-four pine, gasoline, axes, hatchets, spears, bows and arrows, cars, trucks, stones, tree limbs…the list goes on and on.
   The United States Supreme Court affirmed the constitutional right to bear arms last year.
   There’s talk of serial numbers on ammunition. Good grief. Are they all on crack up there?
   Let it go, morons. As another old cliché goes, the life you save might be your own.
   And furthermore…
   I sure do wish Bobby Jindal would research more before he goes mouthing off. That disparaging remark about “something called volcano monitoring” right before Alaska’s Mount Redoubt started spewing ash really makes us look clever down here, doesn’t it?
   Jindal’s proving to be a numbers-cruncher, just as I feared, with a tragic set of budget cuts. He fails to put a human face on those numbers.
   Government exists to provide services, protect the citizens and develop economically and structurally. Government has grown too arrogant and full of itself, and it smells suspicious.
   Government does not exist to undo the Constitution.
   Government does exist to protect our borders, and how miserably has it failed at that?
   Oh, and this double-taxation business at all levels, local on up. You pay your sales taxes, your property taxes and whatever else taxes, then they charge you fees for services???
   Good grief! What does government think it exists for? I’ll tell you: To self-perpetuate. Government these days exists for the sake of itself at your expense.
   Get out! Get out! Get out of my life, you bureaucratic post-turtles at all levels! Do what you were elected to do: Provide services, assist development, legislate responsibly and intelligently. Don’t try to dismantle the constitution, don’t try to legislate my moral values so long as I’m not hurting anyone else.
   Stop telling people how to raise their kids, that they can’t pray in a school or say the pledge; quit taxing us to death and sending bajillions of dollars in aid overseas, with our own unemployment skyrocketing…call me a callous cad, but I don’t give a jolly rip who’s hungry over there, when we have people living in cardboard boxes and foraging for food in trash bins right here on our own soil.
   Sure, I still applaud wilderness protections and – sensible! – environmental policy. At some point, some things government does may, indeed, step on some toes. It’s hard to argue with seatbelt and vehicle child restraint laws.
   But Prohibition failed in this country for very good reasons, and it’s happening all over again. Government never seems to learn. Is Democracy dead? Will we march single-file like cattle to the slaughter?
   Probably. That’s the sad part of it. Democracy is dead. We suck it all up and don’t fight back. It’s us, not government, that’s really to blame after all.