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It was true at one time in recent history: Sort of long read.
https://www.mackinac.org/10118

You're completely off-base on the Hillary thing. To help Hillary, Obama need to take the party further left. It relates to the concept of the Overton window , the range of ideas that the public sees as palatable "centrist" positions. If you drag the dialog of the extreme edge further, then it makes less extreme ideas seem more reasonable. The Democrats need to get on this, as the right has been doing this for some time. People like Limbaugh and Hannity push the edges out so their candidates don't have to.

By pushing "anti-business claptrap" Obama gives her room to distance herself from him, room she can use in the election as she sees fit.

Personally, I don't feel that closing tax loopholes exploited by multinationals is "anti-business", more like "pro-fairness", if you allow one business to cheat, you force all to cheat to stay competitive.

FYI, the US post office considers itself the owner of your mailbox. That's why it's a felony to steal somebody's mail - you're stealing from their property. The analogy is actually pretty accurate - the "post office" owns the mailbox and only the recipient can remove stuff from it without a court order.

Citations: http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=107;t=000617;p=0 and http://www.mackinac.org/5394. Both have a lot of people complaining about it but it seems to be true.

Regulations are exactly what is used to prevent competition. Local governments create monopolies through what are called franchise agreements. Unfortunately most people get confused about that and blame unregulated markets. (others don't even know what a free market is!)

Your an idiot without any idea of how the law works. So let me point you in the right direction with some links that didn't come from wikipedia.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/forfeiture
http://www.mackinac.org/1274
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/april-2012/money-laundering-and-asset-forfeiture
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/asset-forfeiture
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&cad=rja&ved=0CHcQFjAIOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.drugpolicy.org%2FdocUploads%2FAsset_Forfeiture_Briefing.pdf&ei=y6e5UofjNeGqyAGxxoHABQ&usg=AFQjCNH69cfy5T2Ayp8TL9L38XZJ4VPCcw&sig2=g3-gNZLWLpcJMyhtBipLCg

But hey, it's not like there isn't precedent going back centuries for doing this.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512253265073870

Even if he somehow could get out of the drug dealer and murder for hire charges he would still have the problem of proving how he legitimately got the money and why he didn't pay taxes on it. Penalties for failing to report tens of millions of dollars in income could easily put him in prison for a decades and would still result in the loss of the bitcoins because he can't prove any legitimate means why which he got them.

He admitted an entirely new set of felonies around taxes just to try to claim the bitcoins back. Again, he is one of the biggest idiots that the Internet has ever known.

In engineering classes about 30 years ago, I learned that road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of the weight per axle. Looks like it has not changed. Nothing says that the tax cannot be based on this model.

Note the not all road damage is a result of bending and flexing due to axle weight. You also get chemical changes (salt, water, oil, pollution), thermal cycling (daily and seasonal), topographical changes (a.k.a. earth quakes), and utilities dig-up. You also have non-damage items like mowing the grass, paying for lighting, interest on debt, etc. that must be considered a part of road maintenance. So, you really should not assign all of the maintenance costs to be based on axle weight if you really wanted to be fair about such things.

You may have noticed the signs on the back of trucks that mention something like, This vehicle pays $5,889 in road use taxes per year. According to this study in 2007 the average total tax burden was $13,889 total (for a 80,000 lb truck) and $397 per year for an automobile.

Consider that an 18 wheeler is over 20 times the weight of an average automobile (distributed over 5 axles, though not uniformly). So, ignoring the non-uniformities in automobile weight and axle weight distributions vehicle -- the axle weight related damage should be component should be roughly

(20/5)**4 : (1/2)**4 which equals 4**4 : 1/16 which equals 256 * 16 : 1 i.e., 4096:1

Considering only the 4th power rule component only, avg. damage for truck are roughly 4000 times that of a car. Actual studies show this is more like about 10000:1

it is probably a safe bet that trucks are proportionately undertaxed everywhere in the US.

On average, a typical 80,000 pound GVW tractor-trailer truck pays $13,889 per year in truck highway taxes according to the above data. A hypothetical auto owner driving 20,000 miles per year at 25 mpg, and paying $100 in registration fees, ends up paying about $397 per year. So on average, looking at federal and state taxes, a tractor-trailer combination trucks pay about 35 times what a typical auto would pay based on national averages. [source]

Lastly, your wiki link is unclear. You have gone from "road wear" to "bridge damage". WTF? Please use references that study more than just one cost. I referenced cost multipliers of 2.5, 7, 31, and 409 and supplied a reference suggesting trucks pay 35 times as much (typically) in taxes/fees. You have nothing to complain about. Find some other bullshit excuse to bitch about SUVs (that are really closer to the "car" side in this debate as weight is concerned).

Paperwork. Tracking how you handle any of those limits is an additional hurdle for every company, but is generally a smaller piece of the budget for big ones. Mandating that you share equipment you install is a cost, which requires an internal layer of bureaucracy to handle. Not allowing you to put in your own equipment at all is a major barrier to starting up your own company.

I think you missed my point though. Even stipulating that some regulations are on net good (I may or may not agree with a given regulation) increasing the cost of entry is a cost of those regulations which must be accounted for. Costs are bad, even if the corresponding benefits are greater. I am NOT claiming that all regulation is on net bad, merely pointing out that most of those regulations tend to serve the interests of large companies better than small ones. Anti-monopoly regulation is only necessary as a corrective for other regulations. Non-abusive monopolies aren't problems, abusive monopolies create an incentive to compete.

Moore has definitely taken a more combative approach.

In fact, in a recent speech, Moore decried copyright "radical extremists" with a "babyish" attitude toward copyright.

Notice the same phrase?

Same phrase, same PR firm's that organize all the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) sounds bites, talking points, strategies for lobbyists and bought politicians alike. All extremely well crafted to incite emotional response (in this case, Balanced Copyright Proponent == Extremist, associates with Terrorists) in the minds of listeners, against any balanced copyright point of view. Unfortunately the label loving public will most probably lap it up and believe it.

you've got to have a real solid maintenance plan in place or you'll pretty quickly end up with impassable roads. It's not expensive to maintain them (gravel isn't expensive)--but it is labor-intensive.

I believe the state already has a large, captive workforce: Convict Labor. While Michigan's prisons can't supply all the labor needed to maintain the roads, it can lower the cost of maintenance by supplementing its Public Works or Dept of Transportation workers with low-cost convict labor.

And it's a win-win situation. In most prisons, inmates want to work. In 2000, Michigan was paying convict labor $7.00/hour. Inmates get to spend time outside the confines of the prison, engage in productive physical activity, and learn job skills and work discipline that can translate into real jobs when they are released. The state offsets the cost of imprisonment by saving on the cost of road maintenance and recapturing some of the convict's wages to offset the cost of imprisonment. It's also reported that prisoners participating in similar prison labor programs are much better behaved than the average. (Information sources: http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=4476),

A lot of young adults go to prison on drug charges or related crimes having never held a job of any significance. They usually come out of prison withno job skills, no car to get to a job, no place to live, no money to get a car or a place to live, and a criminal record that makes it virtually impossible to get a job that can provide a living wage. Faced with this situation it's inevitable that most will go back to selling drugs or theft as a matter of survival.

But if an inmate can work on public works projects such as maintaining roads, and earn wages during their imprisonment -- even if below minimum wage levels -- they have a chance to have enough money saved upon release to buy a cheap used car, legally register and insure it, and get an apartment, without resorting to criminal enterprise. And they also have skills, experience and a work discipline they can capitalize on to find work in an marketplace that can be more forgiving of a criminal record than most others.

[Government does little...]
Other than provide the safety regulations to minimize the risk the product harms you, the advertising regulations to minimize the chance you are scammed, etc, etc. Your commercial transaction occurs in a complicated environment, much of which is government funded, much of which serves to protect you (nominally, obviously you can debate the efficacy).

We don't need safety regulations. The liability under law (using a "reasonable company" standard, i.e. would a reasonable company have shipped a product like this or is this obviously unsafe?) is enough. (So, we do need some sort of legal system to enforce the concept of liability. That's a legitimate job of government.)

As an example, I would cheer if we could get the FDA completely cut from government. Make it illegal to knowingly ship junk or even mis-labeled drugs, allow private companies to certify the drugs, and leave things the Hell alone. If a cancer patient wants to smoke marijuana to feel better after chemotherapy, that's fine with me. Hell, if some loser wants to smoke marijuana for no reason other than to get stoned, that's fine with me too. (Why is weed illegal and alcohol legal? Random acts of history, no other reason.)

You may scoff at the idea of private companies certifying drugs. But we already have a private company certifying electric appliances for safety: Underwriters' Labs. Have you ever seen a "UL Listed" tag? Did you know that there is no government agency that does this certification, because the UL system works perfectly well? I know that if I were buying drugs to put into my body, I'd want them certified by some reputable company, or perhaps several reputable companies. You may not think it would work, but I disagree.

Again, I agree with you that lying in ads should be illegal. That's a legitimate job of government. But again it's a self-correcting problem: if I sue you for lying in your ads, and when I win you have to pay a bunch of money, you are motivated to not lie. We don't need a bunch of government agencies regulating the ads.

I absolutely believe that government could be a fraction of the size it is now, and we would all be healthy, happy, and prosperous. The major problem is that people seem so willing to grow government and so fearful to ever prune it back.

In general, I don't think there are many government services that you can fund on a pay-per-use basis. Fire department? Are you kidding? Many places in the country, they have to put your fire out to keep it from spreading to your neighbors

Funny you should mention this, because there are areas in the USA even today where private fire departments are all they have. You pay your fire insurance, and if your house is on fire, they put it out. If you didn't pay, they let your house burn down, but they keep the fire from spreading to your paid-up neighbors. This is exactly the sort of thing that is self-regulating and can work for private pay-as-you-go, non-government solutions.

http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=565

On the other hand, while the anarcho-capitalist folks believe that a similar system would work for police and the courts, I don't buy it. How can the cops deter crime just for the paid-up customers? Yeah, if you didn't pay up, they could just let a burglar in your house escape, but realistically they will grab that burglar and put him behind bars, which will lower crime for everyone, paid up or not. I think police and courts are a valid purpose of government. And, I'm conservative enough to think that the public fire departments we already have are working out pretty well, so I'm in no hurry to cut them. But history shows that fire departments are something we could privatise, no problem.

Like you, I am a fan of libraries, and I like having the government run those.

But I wish the government was much smaller and interfered much less in the free market. (And for the record, bailing out big companies who made stupid decisions does count as interference in the free market. Let the overly-risky companies burn, and let the careful companies reap the rewards of their care.)

Regulation, regulation, and some more regulation.

One thing you can always count on is the ineptitude of government.

That being said... The President of the US actually has very little to do with the economic health of the nation. See below:
SeekingAlpha
American Spectator
Mackinac Center

Further, most experts agree that the *actual* problem of this current market collapse stems to four things:
#1 - The CRA expansion in 1995, which put 30% more people on the housing market than there should have been, creating an incredible sellers' market in which housing, which previously had roughly paced inflation, spiraled up until people were looking at "house value" increases of over 200%.

#2 - The change in the Fed's policy when Alan Greenspan was appointed chair, which changed from relatively aggressive use of the Fed Funds Rate to deflate economic bubbles and contain damage (the cause of the late-'80s "recession" for example) to allowing bubbles to grow and grow under the idea that lowering the Fed Funds Rate after the fact would "clean up the mess" and that there would be "better growth" under the bubble... unfortunately economic bubbles are more like cysts or abcesses than blisters.

#3 - The abrupt change between a far-too-liberal and far-too-conservative method of valuing a lot of mortgages. Prior to the Enron debacle and Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, the "valuation" of many of these loans (which were being used to back other securities which in turn backed more securities) was at 100% of the loan hidden in "tier 3" assets (e.g. "things we can't put a price on at this second so we'll estimate it and get back to you later) on most companies' balance sheets. This is called "mark-to-model."

Post-SOX (and coming to today because it takes years for large companies to bring everything in line with new reforms like that), the companies were required to mark the mortgages to their actual market worth (e.g. what they could get if someone bought the mortgage from them this minute). Unfortunately, since they were all being massively marked down as someone tried to PUT a market worth to them, there were suddenly MASSIVE amounts of these loans on the market, and as a result they were getting marked down to literally pennies on the dollar. This shift to "mark-to-market" accounting on the loans is what pulled the rug out from underneath a lot of other securities whose backing could be traced back to them, as well as requiring the banks (which had been using these loans as collateral on the balance sheets) to start holding back a lot more capital to service their existing accounts.

There needed to be a middle ground in this, but there wasn't.

#4 - The 1999 dissolution of the 1933 Glass-Steagall reforms, which had previously prevented investment banks from owning other financial institutions, caused much of the "piling-on" of securities backed by other securities backed by other securities backed by... well, it turned out, nearly-worthless (in the mark-to-market sense) loans.

The only part Bush plays in this is that he (a) signed SOX (which passed nearly damn unanimously from the Congress and could easily have been a Veto Override anyways) and (b) he let Greenspan, and then Greenspan's hand-picked successor, run the Fed.

P.S. I'm not a fan of Bush by any means, but fair's fair - he doesn't get the blame for this one and I'm a bit disappointed in the person who posted this and the person who posted an ill-considered, ill-thought, ill-informed rant on this contest.

>the romans didn't have welfare, and it didn't fall because of welfare.

Sorry, but you're way off.

"When Julius Caesar came to power in 48 B.C., he found 320,000 persons on government grain relief. Temporarily slowing the welfare state bandwagon, he ordered the welfare rolls cut to 200,000. Within a half-century, the rolls were back up to well over 300,000.

Government Bread

A real landmark in the course of events came in the year 274 A.D. Emperor Aurelian, wishing to provide cradle-to-grave care for the citizenry, declared the right to relief to be hereditary. Those whose parents received government benefits were entitled as a matter of right to benefits as well. Aurelian gave welfare recipients government-baked bread (instead of the old practice of giving them wheat and letting them bake their own bread) and added free salt, pork, and olive oil. Not surprisingly, the ranks of the unproductive grew fatter, and the ranks of the productive grew thinner.

Surely, many Romans opposed the welfare state and held fast to the old virtues of work, thrift and self-reliance. Just as surely, some of these sturdy people gave in and began to feed at the public trough in the belief that if they didn't get it, somebody else would. That attitude only hastened the slide into bankruptcy..."

From http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=3

The thing with google is that it is, at present, one of the most liberating constructs ever created. It allows the access to relatively unfiltered information, and allows the reader to infer what is real and what is not. However, google is primarily a advertising egent, and therefore has the power to influence reality. If every ad for the search Sicko is an attack on the movie, then the reality will be shifted to the idea that the movie has no basis in reality. And this is why what google is doing is evil. If what the industry is saying is valid, then people will point to those finding and those finding will move up in rank. By offering to package ads, google is no better than the link farms that are increasingly making the search engine useless.

Sorry, but anyone who chooses to work for the IRS is also a jerk in my eyes.

How do you feel about the IRS ruining boxer Joe Louis' life? They refused to let him deduct the proceeds of two fights that he donated to the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II.

But Joe obeyed and didn't cause any trouble. That's what's important, right? Obedience?

http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7229

"Historians with an ideological axe to grind against the market usually ignore an authoritative 1906 report of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Animal Husbandry. Its investigators provided a point-by-point refutation of the worst of Sinclair's allegations, some of which they labeled as 'willful and deliberate misrepresentations of fact,' 'atrocious exaggeration,' and 'not at all characteristic.'"

Don't take it from the commies and the hippies; just read the official documents, or any lobby group manifest for that matter:

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/economicimp acts/execsummary.html

http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=7850

http://www.cei.org/gencon/003,05907.cfm

What is needed, apparently, is some way to manage to sell that to the unions, or, at the least, a way to muzzle the union on this issue.

It would dead simple to muzzle the unions simply by enforcing the Beck Decision

My personal conspiracy theory is that the executive branch will do all it can to enforce Beck ahead of the 2008 elections in an attempt to cut the legs out from under the DNC.

Of course, everyone always talks about conservation. However, I say it starts with an individual. You can be pro energy conversation, but if YOU don't put in the effort, why would you expect anyone else to?

Conservation policies pushed by governments are usually wasteful and are more problematic. It takes more enegy and money to recycle almost everything than to make/harvest it again.

Recycling subsidies don't work.. They are wasteful. The only recycling program that pays for itself is aluminum cans. People will pay you for those. Everything else, is a failure

Seriously. The anoynmous posters could be teachers union employees assigned to slander CSUSA for all we know, and if that's what CSUSA suspects their lawsuit threat suddenly make a lot more sense. (In Michigan, the MEA union is nicknamed the "Michigan Mafia". They have a curiosuly low regard for free speech too.)

American politicians on the stump are fond of citing Canada's socialized health care system as a superior alternative to the mixture of public and private health spending in the United States. Such rhetoric may attract votes, but we Canadians, trapped in a broken and deteriorating system, have reasons to disagree.

In 1967, when Canada adopted the British socialist model, our country was near the top of international rankings for the effectiveness of our medical spending. The U.N.'s World Health Organization now places Canada about 30th on that list.

If you knew any history you'd know that massive government spending (mainly on WWII, also on various New Deal programs) is what ended the Great Depression

Wrong. FDR's "progressive" policies exacerbated the depression. Hoover deserves much of the blame as well; not because he was an uber-capitalist who refused to intervene, exactly the opposite.

(these days the Repubs spend like drunken sailors too)

Sadly true, which creates a problem for those of us who support individual freedom and limited government, yet who see the Libertarian Party as a bunch of nutjobs.

If you knew any history you'd know that massive government spending (mainly on WWII, also on various New Deal programs) is what ended the Great Depression

Wrong. FDR's "progressive" policies exacerbated the depression. Hoover deserves much of the blame as well; not because he was an uber-capitalist who refused to intervene, exactly the opposite.

(these days the Repubs spend like drunken sailors too)

Sadly true, which creates a problem for those of us who support individual freedom and limited government, yet who see the Libertarian Party as a bunch of nutjobs.

Typical drek.

Considering that public education already spends twice as much (on the average) per child than private education, and achieves comparatively poor results, yes, I consider it a very bad investment.

This link backs your assertion, but does indicate that the stats are misleading. Also, if you followed my lotto links, you'd see that New Jersey Lottery actually sends money to private schools to the tune of $57 million a year. Another good link.

As to performance, I think you're being tainted by the media. Are there bad public schools? Yes, that's clear. These are the schools covered in the media all the time. Are there good public schools? Yes. This is frequently glossed over.

Another crucial, crucial element that is frequently forgotten in the private v. public school debate is this: Private schools qualify their students. Public schools get the rest. If a private school doesn't want a bad student, they're out. Real easy for them. You can't throw a student who is having problems out of public school, you have to deal with the problem. When you get to pick and choose who you are going to teach, your students are going to be better. Duh.

There are a lot of poor parents who could send their children to a good private school for what they spend on lottery tickets. Instead, they send their children to inner-city slum schools and create another generation of dependency on public assistance programs.

You think there are people spending 5-10 grand a year on lotto? When their annual income, if they're lucky, is 30k? You have a seriously distorted view of how the poor live in this country. Maybe you should try living on some of the public assistance programs and see how much fun it is "freeloading" off of everyone else.

I'll refer to the research of the Economic Policy Institute about the minimum wage.

I'll see your policy wonk think tank and raise you 1, 2, 3 4 5. I'm sure you could do the same. Once you get beyond the simple laws of economics (like supply and demand) to more complex theories I challenge you to find any two economists that really agree with each other. "If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three opinions." - Winston Churchill

Don't overuse the simple model of supply and demand, especially when issues like pricing, competition, floors, and perception are involved. The most useful models are far, far more complex.

The reality of course is far more complex than a simple graph of supply and demand. Unfortunately I don't see any evidence that any of the multitude of competing, contradicting complex models put out by a wide array of economists are any better. As I said economics is NOT really a science, they try and I think there is a good body of fundamental, basic insights into the basic behavior of economies. But as economic models become more complex the more controversial they are, there is no consensus aside from intellectual fads that wax and wane over time. Polls of economists over the years seem to indicate a great deal of agreement on the basics (like the law of supply and demand AND it's application to the minimum wage and price controls generally) while there is no agreement on the complex theories that purport to trump those basic rules. ("when done 'right', under certain conditions, at this time but not this other time, please forget that my last economic forecast was utterly wrong - I can explain that" etc. etc. etc.)

In any event even the complex models that attempt to show price controls on labor as being an exception to the basic rules of supply and demand that the vast majority of economists would agree apply to every other commodity are valid only at the margins. Perhaps a slight increase in the minimum wage would have no ill effects but I think even the most liberal economist would agree that an outrageous increase (say to $100 per hour just for an extreme example) would have a bad effect on employment. Where then is the cut-off, or the tipping point where the advantages for the poor outweigh the disadvantages? Is there even such a tipping point or does the ill effect just get smaller until it is masked by the various other effects that are also operating on the unemployment rate (or just easier to explain away as being due to other factors). If President Clinton raised the minimum wage marginally during a time of economic expansion and nearly "full employment" would we even notice the ill effects (unemployment was low, but would it have been lower still)? Would raising minimum wages during the early stages of a jobless recovery see the same absence (or masking) of ill effects? Would raising the minimum wage from $5.15/hr to a "living wage" often asserted to be $14/hr - well over double the current rate - have the same non-existent or negligible ill effects?

I think the basic laws of economics are fundamentally sound and underlie the immense complexity often masks them and provide numerous APPARENT counter-examples. I have no such confidence in various complex theories that attempt to show that these counter-examples are themselves the rule rather than the exception and that we can now ignore the old fundamental rules.

Standard oil offered the best prices to consumers, without predatory pricing.

Here are a few links.

This ties in quite nicely with the overall discussion here, IMO. I believe there has been an accelerating trend in the last 10-15 years, maybe more, of using temp employees. Elimination of union jobs and proliferation of temp hiring is equipping many companies with disposable workforces, allowing the consequences of varying economic conditions to be borne by the workers in terms of firings/layoffs instead of owners/management having to manage the company with skill and finesse when the hard times roll around.

Here is a interesting background on the (often incredibly violent, from both sides) history of the labour movement in the U.S.; the labour/union movement has played roles in establishing the 8-hour workday, the 5-day work week, ending child labour, ending sweatshop labour, and increasing/legally mandating (OSHA) workplace safety

In brief, the disadvantages of unions are:

1. The loss of individuality. When a union is certified as the exclusive employee representative in a workplace, employees become members of an overall bargaining unit in which the majority rules. The ruling majority may not be sympathetic with each individual's specific employment needs or aspirations.
2. The cost to employees. Most collective bargaining agreements require all employees to support the union financially as a condition of their continued employment.
3. Exclusive representation. This power carries with it a duty of fair representation that requires the union to negotiate fairly on behalf of all employees in the "bargaining unit," whether they are union members or not.

"One last disadvantage to union membership is that members can be fined or otherwise disciplined by their union for engaging in activities, which, in the union's opinion, are 'unbecoming' of union members or which violate the union's constitution and by-laws. . . ."

You mean that these students created an SUV that nearly doubled its fuel economy without jeapordizing the safety of the entire nation?

I've just read this link... Excuse me but this is hilarious. Just because a car weighs two tons and reaches the height of a man would mean that it's safe?

The two persons who wrote this article obviously don't know about Euro NCAP, which destroys their argumentation altogether. FYI, the best performing car at Euro NCAP tests until now is a sedan. And if you browse a little through test results, you'll see that what they call "knee-scraping subcompacts" perform equally well than any other categories on average. So long for "the bigger the safer".

Oh, and said sedan consumes less than the hypermodified truck which is the subject of this article... which destroys their argumentation even further. It consumes less than what US lawmakers want to impose for 2013, even. In fact, most cars sold in Europe these days improve on these limits. Hey, we pay nearly 5 times as much as you for the precious liquid!

Really, the US have LOTS to learn from Europe when it comes to cars.

We'd better keep this a secret, or else all those senators and lobbyists that killed the bill to raise CAFE standards would look pretty stupid right now!

The first article talks about the constitutions limitations on taxes and what they should be spent on.

The second one says that just because you have a grand idea (tm) does not mean that others (via taxes) should be forced to pay for it. If it is such a grand idea, people will pay for it anyway (via commerce).

Go here for more information...
http://www.mackinac.org/3832