Getting the Government You Vote For

It's works for me so long as someone else bears the burden.

Sometimes you run across a quote that you just can't pass up. This one comes from Austin, Texas. Austin is a university town (U of T), the artsy town, and the state capital, which means it is home to the highest echelons of the highly paid, secure and fringe benefit laden state bureaucracy, and populated with wall to wall know-it-all moral relativists who can find a demon to justify blocking any fiscally, economically or commercially viable market and efficiency based outcome and spending unlimited funds to do so. These are smart and creative people who know better what is good for a person than any individual can ever know for him or herself.. Whenever stuff doesn't work, costs too much, collapses of its own weight, or generates enormous "unintended consequences," why that is just some other evil person's fault who they will make sure to target and make pay in the next round of collectivism.

The relativists vote to concentrate power and expand the collective, to deputize crony capitalists (for local government, this typically means commercial real estate interests whose economic power is concentrated these days in a relative handful of national REITs) who go along with the crowd, and to punish those who don't, without judging when and how the collective and its mercenaries will ultimately come back to bite and consume them. Here is how the Austin vote went the last presidential election -- more or less opposite the state as a whole.

With 100 percent of the states precincts reporting, Obama won more than 60 percent of the vote in Travis County, home to Austin, the state's most liberal city. Romney trailed with just over 36 percent of the vote.

These are the really smart people who are prone to vote for a person based on his or her identity and little or nothing else, not because that's the right thing to do, of course, but they just know in their scientific bones that everyone who doesn't vote their way is an evil misogynist, racist, greedy capitalist, privileged white guy or whatever, who unites with others to vote the opposite way base on another spurious set of identities. 

Now, here is the quote.

“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year.

The collective's tax and spend policies are gentrifying
Gretchen Gardner out of her 23 year long residence.

“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”

Uh, that would be you lady, the brainless, navel gazing, power aggrandizing, reflexive voter who asked for this. Duh!!!!