Tennesseefree.com

Chris Wage seems like a smart guy, in spite of the fact that he disagrees with me, a person who is almost always right, on just about every issue. To see what I am talking about, go to his site and type the words Glen Dean in the searchlet. That’s alright though, as far as I’m concerned. Nothing is personal in blogland. Now I am not saying that I didn’t take some of that personally. I did a few times, but I soon got over it and even apologized for my reaction.

One thing I like about Chris though, aside from his talent as a photographer, is that he is consistent. Although his principles are different than mine, I respect the fact that he has them. He isn’t a partisan Democrat, as much as he is a true believing liberal, and as much as I believe that his modern liberalism is contradictory to liberty, he still considers himself to be a libertarian of some sort. Also, he seems to really care about the downtrodden, rather than just seeing them as a way for the Democratic Party to gain power. Here is an example of what I am talking about. This snippet came from a post about the lottery.

It’s difficult to ignore, however, the enormous and well-established bodies of evidence that a lottery is one of the most regressive forms of revenue-generation there is. It’s morally bankrupt and not worth defending on either side of the political aisle.

To ignore that fact requires effort. I have written about my opposition to the lotter on many occasions. The typical reaction to my opposition is to just assume that since I am a Christian, that I want to deny people the right to gamble. That isn’t true, as I stated in this post, I don’t oppose the lottery because I want to keep people from gambling, I oppose it for two reasons:

1. It is a government enterprise, an example of government doing something that should be done in the private sector.
2. It is predatory in that it preys on the poorest and least educated of our society, and redistributes money from them to the middle and upper class.

Now obviously number two would be a moot point, if not for number one. Below is an excerpt from a post written in October of 2005.

The same people who run around talking about how much government should help the poor, are the very people who support a government lottery that preys on the poor. That alone proves that they don’t give a rat’s ass about poor people. What they care about is government and if government has to use a lottery to take money from its citizens, money that would have been spent in the private sector, then government has no problem taking it from poor people.

How can you tell me that you care about the poor and oppose regressive taxes with a straight face, and then support a government that preys on those people with the false hope of the lottery?

These same people also oppose phasing out the sales tax on food, and the lower class still lets them get away with it.

Sadly though, the lottery is here to stay. People like to play. Whatever!