Here's where the current edition of Conservatism will take you...

A shout-out to "Xithras" at Democratic Underground for this.

Why are some of us unsympathetic to these types? Because we live with them every day. We see them flaunt their destructive ways, we watch as they protest and scream for the shutdown of our "socialist" school systems, the revocation of environmental laws, and the unraveling of the social contracts upon which our society is built. These people are anti-tax, anti-government, and anti-society. If they had their way, ALL fire departments would adopt a "fee for use" system. So yes, I unapologetically admit to a bit of schadenfreude when one of them sees their house burn to the ground, as their libertarian fantasies rear up and bite them in the ass.

I've seen it, I've lived it, and I'm all out of sympathy.

I live just outside of the smallish unincorporated city of Salida California, a dirty little burg of about 18,000 people just north of Modesto California. It's the heart of California's conservative wonderland, the California Central Valley. This is an area where even the Democrats run to the right of each other in an attempt to pick up votes.

Salida, a city of 18,000 people, has no municipal fire department. It's fire services are provided by the surrounding county. It has no city government. It's government services are provided by the surrounding county. It has no police department. It is patrolled by a single sheriff's deputy, provided by the county. The town also has no high schools, and foists its kids off on nearby Modesto to finish their educations (to their credit, Modesto just opened a brand new $100 million dollar high school in Salida, to provide the educational opportunities that its residents won't). Why doesn't a city of 18,000 people provide these fundamental services on their own? To answer that, I'm going to provide a simple example.

Salida has street lights. To run those street lights, the people of Salida formed the Salida Lighting District many decades ago. While they were happy to form the district, they refused to pay for it. The town, which only had about 1500 people at the time, didn't have the resources to fund it, so the county stepped in and covered that too.

In 2001 the Salida Lighting District ran into a serious problem. Escalating electrical costs, combined with aging and deteriorating equipment in many areas, were driving operational costs through the roof. Rapid growth had also caused the town to explode and transform from a tiny farm town into a full blown city. It's appeal? "No city taxes here!" was an actual selling point used on some neighborhoods when they were going up!

Unfortunately for Salida, the economy was also in the tank in 2001, and the county was broke. So it came up with a plan. A simple assessment to fund the district and keep the street lights on. The assessment, in total, would have added about ONE DOLLAR a month to the average persons property taxes. $15 a year, per home, is all they needed to keep the lights on. The residents were OUTRAGED. They held protests along the main street, blanketed the community with flyers and campaign posters slamming the proposal, and saturated the local airwaves with their talking points about how the government was "oppressing" them through taxation, which they see as a form of slavery ("They can take your land and property if you don't pay! You are not free if you have to PAY the government for the right to be left alone! Taxes = Socialism!").

Would you like to guess how the people of Salida finally voted? You guessed it. Those streets were DARK. And you should have HEARD the residents whine when their crime rates shot up, when their cars started vanishing from their driveways, and when vandalism went through the roof. Of course, they couldn't blame themselves for the new crime. Nooo...they blamed the "lazy" sheriffs department for not patrolling more, and "soft on crime liberals" for not locking away criminals for longer terms. No matter how bad things got, it was ALWAYS the "liberals" fault.

Today the lights are back on, funded by the county. I pay to power the lights to protect their homes, even though they have consistently refused to do so.

So, yes, I'm not particularly sympathetic when I hear about someone getting bit by their own greed. Does that make me a bad liberal? Maybe, but it also makes me human.

Supporting these libertarian freeloaders, in my book, is like enabling a junkie. You may make their lives easier and more pleasant, but your enabling behavior is simply feeding their addiction. Like all addicts, they need to hit bottom and admit that their lifestyle has to change before they're going to be willing to do so. While our natural liberal inclination is to step in and help them, I genuinely believe that we're just making the problem worse when we do so. Libertarians and tea baggers are junkies, addicted to an idea and supporting a social model that is fundamentally unsustainable in a modern society. Yes, it's tragic that this guy lost his house because he wouldn't pay for fire protection, or that the people of Salida lost their cars and had their houses vandalized because they wouldn't pay for street lights, but we solve NOTHING by swooping in like superheroes to save the day. To them, we're still the enemy, and their addiction continues unabated.

Should I Sell mine for nothing?

Massive props to my mother's cousin Delores, who sent this in an e-mail:
NOTE: the reference to www.politifact.com is something I added in.

I have something valuable that I do not wish to sell. I have not listed it on Craig’s List nor put an ad in the paper. Yet every day I am bombarded by those who wish to buy it. Even foreign corporations are using the Chamber of Commerce as a go-between to purchase what I have. Some of the buyers introduce themselves but most do not. Why they want to remain anonymous I do not know. I feel no shame in possessing this asset yet there must be some shame associated with BUYING one.

As you may have guessed, it is my vote that everyone wants to buy. The funny thing is that if I were willing to sell it I would not receive anything for it. Where all this money goes I do not know but I do know that the seller doesn’t receive anything.

Perhaps you also have been approached in this way. If you simply accept the buyers’ word for how your vote should be cast then you are both lazy and a fool. Do foreign corporations REALLY want what is best for YOU? Do anonymous strangers? Why would they?

You can find out the truth about what they say by simply going to places such as FactCheck.org, or poltifact.com. You can check on someone’s voting record at VoteSmart.org. Or you can simply sell your vote and then complain about the results of having done so.

Thank God for giving us brains. Pray that everyone uses theirs to know what they are voting for - what is true and what is not.