Quick Roundup 189

Eric Daniels on Jamestown

This editorial by Eric Daniels on the 400th anniversary of Jamestown is worth a full read.

Though the Virginia Company found little gold and no sea route to Asia, they soon discovered something vastly more important--that economic opportunity lay wherever men were left free to work and create new wealth. In contrast to the rigid class structure and static economy of Jacobean England, America promised rewards based on individual merit. It was this spirit, and not the Puritan belief in cosmic predestination and unthinking duty to God, that attracted men to pursue their own earthly success in the New World.

"Here every man may be master and owner of his own labor and land," Smith noted in one of his many promotional books intended to attract new settlers to America. "If he have nothing but his hands," he boasted, "he may set up his trade, and by industry quickly grow rich." For Smith and the other early settlers of Jamestown, the profound significance of America lay in the possibility that a man could choose, pursue, and realize his own destiny--it lay in a new ideal of individual liberty. [bold added]

(HT: Thrutch)

Cosmic Jewish Zombie

Via HBL and a Google search, I found the following succinct description of Christianity:

The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree...

And that's the bedrock upon which America was founded!

Hmmm. Did I just give equal time to the religious right on my own blog?

Holiday from Reality

The Texas legislature may be getting ready to give drivers a summer "gas tax holiday".

Call it "tax-free gas" for the summer driving season, Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, D-San Antonio, said after the House tentatively approved his amendment 118-16.

But don't spend that savings just yet.

State senators also must vote for the measure before it can land on Gov. Rick Perry's desk. And they don't seem quite as enthusiastic.

The measure -- and the paper's helping to demagogue it -- is designed to make the Republicans look bad when they predictably oppose it.

Some in the GOP would rather reduce property taxes, which is laudable, but when coupled to their reluctance to significantly reduce spending, impractical.

The price of the GOP's inconsistency with regard to economic freedom is that it really cannot offer what we really need: permanent tax relief. It also sets itself up for the Democrats to make it look bad. So much for the idea, popular among today's politicians, that consistently upholding principles is "impractical"....

Rather than give me a "tax holiday", I'd far rather our politicians cease their apparently permanent holiday from reality. Cut spending. Pass a resolution protesting the decades of over-regulation of the energy industry by the federal government (which does much more to make gas expensive than the taxes). Do anything but pretend that the government is giving me some kind of break simply because it is lifting less from my wallet.

Five Years of Ego

Martin Lindeskog has been blogging for five years now! Happy Blogiversary, Martin!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Added some more commentary to the section on the "tax holiday".