{"id":3010,"date":"2016-03-27T08:37:06","date_gmt":"2016-03-27T15:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=3010"},"modified":"2016-05-01T08:11:03","modified_gmt":"2016-05-01T15:11:03","slug":"well-tell-you-who-you-can-vote-for-the-ones-who-have-already-sold-us-out-of-course","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/?p=3010","title":{"rendered":"We’ll tell you who you can vote for (the ones who have already sold you out, of course)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"whome-300x153\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Arnold Knightly, editor of the Pahrump Valley Times (which is owned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper that\u2019s gotten rid of all its own libertarian columnists and editorial writers) recently ran an Op-ed by our friend Thomas Knapp, via the good offices of the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, challenging the old canard about \u201cnot wasting your vote\u201d on anyone but the interchangeable Republicrats, since of course \u201cNo one else can win.\u201d On March 25, I sent in a response: <\/em><\/p>\n

To the editor:<\/p>\n

Thanks for running Thomas Knapp\u2019s Op-ed, \u201cThey Don\u2019t Own Your Vote,\u201d March 23. Mr. Knapp makes a good point.<\/p>\n

As Richard Nixon\u2019s (late) domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told reporter Dan Baum for his cover story in the current issue of Harper\u2019s, that gang re-launched the failed \u201cDrug War\u201d in the 1970s because \u201cWe knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. . . . We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”<\/p>\n

By now, surely a big plurality of us are fed up with a \u201cDrug War\u201d that\u2019s locked up a million non-violent Americans in our jails and prisons; encouraged our police forces to look and act like some over-armed, Third World junta anxious to don combat garb and bust down our doors in the middle of the night; turned our inner cities into violent hellholes, and left under-medicated cancer patients writhing in pain -\u2013 all without reducing by one iota the consumption of a bunch of medically useful plant extracts that were perfectly legal in a far more peaceful America 100 years ago.<\/p>\n

If -\u2013 instead of being conned into voting for one of two nearly identical lawyers-on-the-take who plan no change except to seize and spend even more of our wealth on this nonsense -\u2013 all the Americans who are qualified to vote, voted for a candidate who vowed to repeal every one of our drug laws (and who vowed to jail cops when they lie on their search warrant affidavits and kill our innocent neighbors in their beds), could such a candidate win a three-way race with 34 percent of the vote? It\u2019s certainly possible.<\/p>\n

The income tax was supposed to \u201csock it to the millionaires.\u201d (We hate millionaires. Why should they<\/strong> be allowed to get rich creating high-paying jobs providing products people want?) But the rich guys\u2019 lobbyists have spent a century ginning up an incomprehensible tax code that allows most millionaires to skate free, writing off their three-martini lunches. Instead, it\u2019s the \u201cworking poor\u201d who waste millions of person-hours every year baring our financial souls to Big Brother. And why? So Washington can seize any \u201cexcess\u201d earnings that we might have used to invest in a small business, creating our own new jobs.<\/p>\n

(The real<\/strong> extractions from the millionaires now come in the form of the big \u201ccampaign contribution\u201d bribes they have to pay so their lobbyists can get in the doors in Washington. Only if they try \u201cnot to play\u201d are there suddenly investigations into their alleged \u201cmonopoly practices.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Yet the personal income tax generates only about 40 percent of federal revenues. Without it, Washington might — might<\/em> — have to shrink to about the size it was 20 years ago. Did anyone think our federal government was \u201ctoo small,\u201d 20 years ago? Would we cry bitter tears if they had to lay off some narcotics agents, FBI snipers, and Desert Tortoise Inspectors? Or maybe withdraw our troops from a few dozen of the 100 foreign countries they now occupy, making people there hate us the way we used to hate the Redcoats?<\/p>\n

If -\u2013 instead of being conned into voting for one of two nearly identical lawyers-on-the-take who plan no change except to seize and spend even more of our hard-earned wealth -\u2013 all the Americans who are qualified to vote, voted for a candidate who vowed to repeal the income tax (not \u201creform\u201d it again, but get rid of it), could such a candidate win a three-way race with 34 percent of the vote?<\/p>\n

\"48163776.cached\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Mind you, all this is providing one of our esteemed \u201cIntelligence\u201d agencies wouldn\u2019t immediately get busy, trying to eliminate such a candidate. But it still seems worth a try.<\/p>\n

The reason we veer ever closer to regulatory tyranny and an oppressive police state is that the shrinking number of Americans who still vote, keep voting for \u201cthe lesser of two tyrants,\u201d based on a bunch of scary TV coverage funded by the big corporate outfits who know they\u2019ll do fine, no matter which \u201cvetted\u201d tyrant we choose.<\/p>\n

\"swat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And we do that because we don\u2019t want to \u201cthrow away our vote\u201d on an \u201cunderfunded\u201d candidate who promises us nothing but less government and more liberty?<\/p>\n

— V.S.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Arnold Knightly, editor of the Pahrump Valley Times (which is owned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a newspaper that\u2019s gotten rid of all its own libertarian columnists and editorial writers) recently ran an Op-ed by our friend Thomas Knapp, via the good offices of the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism, challenging the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[63,13,5,22,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-drug-war","category-elections","category-media","category-taxation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-My","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3010"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3018,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3010\/revisions\/3018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}