Dead Bodies and Tax Dollars

Conservative Contradictions, Volume 1: Dead Bodies and Tax Dollars

Compassionate conservatives praise our country's veterans. They defer to the veterans, and bow to the veterans, and may some day give universal health care to the veterans as a show of thanks.

The reason of course is that veterans make a relatively tremendous sacrifice: they give their bodies and their lives to their nation's cause. Young people are encouraged to fight for their country, while they still have able bodies to contribute. The tree of liberty from time to time is refreshed with the blood of martyrs. The loftiest act is to die or kill for your country.

Meanwhile the issue of taxes seems to give off a stench. Taxes are an evil burden. Taxes are a horrible pox on rich people, so it goes, and should therefore be abolished as much as possible. Dying is not so great a burden, and is subject to glorification at every available opportunity. Men and teenagers should give their lives in the name of their country, even by way of conscription, but they should never be forced to give their money.

In other words:  giving your life is strongly promoted, but giving your money in the form of taxes is never to be considered. A no no. A curse.

Big Government will misuse tax dollars, and put the money toward their selfish pet projects, and demand more and more money because they spend it so inefficiently and unwisely. The military complex however will never mishandle men and women's lives. They will only use human lives for strictly noble and well-organized purposes, and not waste a single one, ever.

The lives of the military's men and women will be contributed toward helping the down-trodden people of a foreign nation across the sea-- Iraq (although the argument for military intervention originally had nothing to do with with helping or "freeing" the people there). However, a single American citizen who is in dire straits and needs a few tax dollars from a rich fellow's coffers should never be granted it. Helping him only makes him worse off.

The reality is that killing is such a grisly unnatural act that it must be surrounded by glory and slogans for anybody to consider doing it. Secondly, the richest people are also the most cowardly because they have the most to lose. They must arrange for somebody to die in their place at war. Thus they call taxes on their money a vile thing, but death during war-time a beautiful thing. Consequently we are presented with the contradictory and very loud loud idea that giving your life is heroic while giving your cash is intolerable.

Conservatives have fragile egos. The possibility that peoples lives are wasted is too painful to recognize or resolve. A perfectly analogous pattern of waste-- claims about taxes-- on the other hand, can be found flowing through the air at any second of any day.

Next Edition: All institutions (big government) are self-serving wasteful inefficient and corrupt. But the military (the most costly and potentially destructive institution in human history) is unimpugnable.