No matter how they undercut the military, no matter what loathing they pour upon America’s system and elected adminsitration and capitalist system and history, no matter what horrors they’ve coddled as they do so, it’s established that one dare not call any liberal “unpatriotic”, for fear of being called an ugly angry conservative.

But apparently, if you’re a major-league leftyblogger, wanting to keep more of the money you earn not only makes you unpatriotic, but it means you hate democracy.

It’s not a coincidence that Grover Norquist, the architect of the right-wing ascension to power, runs an organization called Americans for Tax Reform.  People like Norquist, who are charlatans at heart and deeply unpatriotic and immoral, use the complexity in the tax code that they help to create to persuade Americans that taxes are bad.  This is also true in states all over the country, where it is the unpredictability of property tax burdens and not the amount that causes schools to go wanting for funding.

Our tax code is the DNA of our nation’s moral compass.  I am proud to pay taxes because I take pride in America, and paying some tiny burden to keep our society running is an extremely small price to pay for being able to call myself an American citizen.  The old expression ‘you get what you pay for’ is apt for all sorts of situations.  People tend to express what they value in how much they are willing to pay for it.  I am willing and feel privileged for the right to pay for my country.  The right-wing is embittered to do so, if they do so at all.  And that, more than anything, says something about how much they value this experiment called America

No, Matt Stoller; as Thomas Jefferson himself averred, keeping a lid on the size, power and appetite of government is fundamentally American and itself deeply patriotic; our founding fathers believed that government was not so much an enemy (let’s be realistic) as a animal that needed to be kept tame.

But much more important for this “experiment called America” is the ability and willingness to accept that dissent and difference aren’t themselves base and evil. 

Not to do so is a form of moral retardation that is itself deeply antithetical to what this country is about.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Blogs, Culture War, Liberty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.