Tax Scrooges?

The Progressive Pulse should stay away from ad hominem generalizations like this.

First of all, "Scrooge" is not an appropriate allusion here. What was considered morally reprehensible about Scrooge is that he exercised free choice in withholding his resources to help others. But when the government uses the monopoly of force to extract resources to be used on projects they deem important or moral–and carried out in monopolistic fashion, Schrooge’s choice is taken away from individuals. So government changes the moral dynamic. People who object to paying taxes usually don’t object to helping the poor, the mentally ill, or children in school. In fact, members of the so-called POG (Party of Greed), object to the means, the manner, and the non-voluntariness. They object to bureaucratic waste, to cost and to failed projects that never deliver what they promise. They object to the dependency and subsistence poverty it creates in the poor.  And they object to the failures that the massively expensive public school monopoly repeat daily. 

A little economics might help Annette Plummer get around that big heart of hers. As she herself says: "A breakdown of our state budget shows that approximately 60% of the budget goes to education. One fourth of the budget is spent on health and human services to care for poor children and the disabled, blind or mental ill in our state."  Sixty percent on education?  That is preposterously wasteful. And for every one of those billions Ms. Plummer feels entitled to up there on her moral highground with all the tax collectors, bureaucrats and police, I hope she realizes that private citizens could have spent that self-same money on a vibrant market of education AND voluntary social entrepreneurship. (See also how civil society is crowded out by government.)