How NOT to protest school taxes

[KBCraig]

A rather extreme tax protest. I was surprised to learn of it; I'd never heard the story before.

Not recommended as an effective course of action.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

[aries]

Wow interesting find

[Russell Kanning]

The lesson is to never trust school board members.

[Michael Fisher]

 

Even if a man loses his farm, his livelihood, everything he has ever known... why can't he just forgive?

Why must he respond to the violence of the state with even more violence? Why must the cycle of evil be continued? The result of this man's pain, unforgiveness, anger, and finally revenge is so disastrously evil and blindly stupid as to be unconscionable. It caused more taxes to pay for another school, more lost farms, and more widely-distributed misery - that is to say nothing of the pain of the families of the dead and injured.

Thanks to people like that man - who would have been a great anti-government ally if he had chosen morality over anger - we have more regulations, higher taxes, gigantic government, increased violence, and a general public disdain for liberty.

We need to find people like this before they take revenge, show them a more effective way of activism, and channel their energy into more productive means of winning liberty. We need to tap into victims of statism wherever they are to be found, in any state of mind they're in, and bring them into our state of mind.

[Michael Fisher]

The Amish forgave the murderer after the recent massacre of Amish children. They even helped raise money for the man's wife.

Let that be a lesson to us as well as all of those who were whining for making schools even more like prisons and cracking down on firearms ownership in response.

[David]

He invented the car bomb.  And to think we blame the middle easteners.   

<<We need to find people like this before they take revenge, show them a more effective way of activism, and channel their energy into more productive means of winning liberty. We need to tap into victims of statism wherever they are to be found, in any state of mind they're in, and bring them into our state of mind.>>

Your'e right Michael.  Dr. King feared the result of unchanneled anger among black males.  The protests, while unpopular with the racists, probably reduced the overall level of reaction violence.  It gave resentful blacks a form of outlet. 
It truelly is a tragedy, that they went from demanding their liberty to demanding entitlements. 
Had they stuck with liberty, their contribution to real liberty would be right up there with the Founders.  The racists would never admit it, oh well. 

[lildog]

See now if liberals we able to ban guns we wouldn't have problems like that... er wait a minute, he blew up the school.   

[FrankChodorov]

It truelly is a tragedy, that they went from demanding their liberty to demanding entitlements. 
Had they stuck with liberty, their contribution to real liberty would be right up there with the Founders.  The racists would never admit it, oh well. 

interestingly in his last book he proposed exactly what Jason Sorens proposed at his Porcfest address - a guaranteed income for ALL.

excerpt:

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.

Earlier in this century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual's abilities and talents. In the simplistic thinking of that day the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber.

We have come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands it does not eliminate all poverty.

We have come to the point where we must make the nonproducer a consumer or we will find ourselves drowning in a sea of consumer goods. We have so energetically mastered production that we now must give attention to distribution. Though there have been increases in purchasing power, they have lagged behind increases in production. Those at the lowest economic level, the poor white and Negro, the aged and chronically ill, are traditionally unorganized and therefore have little ability to force the necessary growth in their income. They stagnate or become even poorer in relation to the larger society.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be two-fold. We must create full employment or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available.

In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote, in Progress and Poverty:

    "The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously increased."

to read the rest of MLK words:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/mlk/king/words/poverty.html

[David]

It is sad Frank.  He was a statist, and a strong believer in social 'justice'. 
I write a lot about him because he was the chief spokesman for the most successful nonviolent pushback against gov't in our country's history.  But he was definately not a libertarian minded person. 

[FrankChodorov]

It is sad Frank.  He was a statist, and a strong believer in social 'justice'

the mistake he made was to think you could address government granted privilege with more statism.

the opposite of social justice is privilege (private law).

you can't have social justice if you treat some unequal in the eyes of the law...the only reason to even grant privilege is because it enhances the common good but inevitably all privilege shifts costs off of those who benefit and onto society in the form of negative externalities and the balance from enhancing the common good starts hurting the common good.

the key is to understand exactly where the balance is and how to properly address it...

[Rochelle]

How sad And people like to think that school violence is the result of modern movies and computer games.

At least they had the right response back then:

Unlike the Columbine High School massacre, there was no legislative response, either by the state or federal governments, aimed at preventing a recurrence, although pyrotol was quietly taken off the market.