No Labels

Whenever I hear someone piously state that they don't believe in labels, I immediately suspect a leftist bent.

"I'm just interested in what works."

Well, I'm not.  Mostly because "what works" is contextual.  What works for what and for whom?

What works for protecting my life, liberty, and property from others ... probably the simplest way to put it for me, when it comes to Government.  Anything else should come through other private persons and social institutions, ideally.

Now we've woven a bunch of extraneous government into the fabric of our lives over the years, and only the hard core Libertarians are for yanking that rug out from under people whole cloth.  But we do have to change the way we do things going ... and I hate to use this word, but I'll be damned if I let them hijack it...

Forward.

Forward is also a relative term, as it can literally mean any direction, as long as it's the direction the person using it wants to go.  Which is why it is so popular among politicians, and especially self-described "progressives".  Because "Progress" and "Forward" both suffer the same contextual bias.

But back to "No Labels".

Frankly, I don't care whether this one was started by a right leaning group or a left-leaning group (it was surely started by one or the other to appeal to people who don't tend to lean at all) ... but this post is in response to an article touting this "No Labels" meme -- which again, makes me immediately suspect.

Labels are useful.  If you won't call something what it is, there's something lacking in you.

Ah, the new No Labels™ label. :-)

We'll be sure not to use that label, as it must be forbidden in its mission statement, somewhere. ;-)

I want them to work together, too, but I want them to work together within the confines of our Constitution, and with a healthy respect for our founders' vision and how it's actually supposed to work.

"It’s tax cuts that we can no longer afford and spending programs that are growing far faster than our ability to pay for them." 

 But mostly it's spending programs that are growing far faster than our ability to pay for them on things that are not supposed to be in the purview of the Federal Government. And you can only "not afford" tax cuts if you think that you MUST spend money whether or not you collect it. When I get a pay cut, I it's not that I "can't afford the pay cut". The pay cut makes it so I can't afford that new flat panel TV. The fact that it doesn't work this way for the government ... *is* the problem.

 And it's really not that simple anyway, on the tax cuts. The "Tax Cuts Cost Money" meme makes two aggregious assumptions. One, that the money already belongs to the government in the first place, and two, that the economy is a static pie. It is not. The pie grows (and occasionally shrinks ... often due to bad taxing and spending policies by the government). If the pie grows and I tax at the same rate, I get more money. If I make a tax cut in response to that ... I might get the same amount of money I got before the pie's last growth spurt. So "tax cuts cost" isn't necessarily true.

Add to that the fact that certain tax cuts can often spur pie growth, the right tax cuts can actually increase the revenue brought in at that lower tax rate. It's happened plenty of times. Obama even acknowledged it in one of the 2008 debates, but he basically said he didn't care. He's more interested in making people pay his vision of what a "fair share" is ... for his favorite programs ... than he is in actually collecting enough money to pay for them, or revisiting whether or not we should have those programs at all. It's a bass ackward way of looking at it, and yes, both parties do it. But this guy has clearly turned it up to 11.