Brantley Suggests Tea Party Groups Deserved IRS Scrutiny, then suggests Hobbs Heartless

Leftists are statists, like big-government conservatives, and as such they are scary.   They represent a group of people who are a threat to the property and freedom of their neighbors when they are anywhere near government power and influence.  Sadly, they are in possession of such power and influence.  Thus our freedom and our property have indeed become increasingly threatened.

In reaction to the statists both left and right who were and are giving trillions of dollars worth of subsidies to the world's financial elites, a bunch of regular Americans got together and formed Tea Parties.   Many Tea Party groups have since been co-opted and become mere appendages of one half of the system whose outrages precipitated their development in the first place.  Still, the roots of the movement itself sprung from an instinctive understanding that neither D.C. based political club was listening to them.

When people learned that the IRS was singling out groups with "Patriot" and "Tea Party" type names for special scrutiny/intrusive harassment, people across the political spectrum were outraged.    And they should have been, even though the IRS has been used by both halves of the cabal in a similar fashion since the 1970s.   That broad outrage shows us just how extreme, how far outside the boundaries of respectful civil discourse, that Max Brantley is when he suggested that Tea Party groups deserved the special scrutiny/harassment they got from the IRS.

According to Max, they had it coming because they were "overtly political", and of course we would not want groups that are overtly political to be out from under the thumb of the IRS, because then the system could not use the threat of the IRS as a tool to keep such groups from threatening the system!   In Max's twisted view of the world, only leftist action groups are entitled to be untaxed because only they really promote "the social welfare" by promoting left wing policies and candidates.   Promoting limited government policies is his mind is by definition against the "social welfare" so groups which form to limit the role of government in our lives should be forced to be at the mercy of that government's IRS.

Do the Republicans and Democrats pay taxes on the donations they get?   Do the donors get to write off contributions on their taxes?   Then Tea Party groups, and their counterparts on the left, should be able to as well.    Justice John Marshall spelled it early in our history when he wrote "the power to tax involves the power to destroy."  The system should not have the power to destroy groups whose purpose is to reform it, regardless of their vision.  

Of course, as a localist, I realize the ultimate solution is for individuals and groups of individuals should not be directly taxable by the federal government, but that's for another day.  The main point here is to call out leftists for their anti-freedom agenda and heartless suggestion that somehow their political opponents "had it coming."  Barbaric.

But Max does not think he is a bad person for suggesting they deserved IRS targeting.   Rather, he thinks that State Representative Debra Hobbs of Rogers is a bad person.  Incredibly, on the same day that he revealed his ample backside on the IRS story, he declared Hobbs the winner of a "Worst Person in the World Award."

What did Hobbs do to earn such scorn?   The company who runs the testing for the GED program has upped their fees from $20 a person to $120 a person.   The state has always picked up the cost for people who want to take the GED, but Hobbs was among the majority of legislators who balked at paying the sharp increase.  She suggested that the test-takers share in the cost.  

I have an even better suggestion which Hobbs might agree with.  Let's dump the company that is laying the massive cost increase on us and keep the old test for the GED which only costs about $20 to administer.   The extra costs involve computerizing the test and aligning it to the federal education standards called "Common Core."   This is a scam.  We are being charged six times the price for a dumbed-down test.  I approve of the legislature's decision, led by Hobbs, not to roll over for the massive increase, and hope it leads to Arkansas adopting their own non-Common Core GED test which they can administer for a much more reasonable price.   That way everyone wins except the crony capitalists overcharging for their tests and the educrats trying to impose globalized, inferior standards on our education system.