It’s good when a political opponent gives you keen insight into his thinking, or rather the lack thereof. Mike Rosen played a message yesterday (1st hour) that a Democrat voter left on his voice mail. In the course of his message the caller said he was looking forward to seeing Mike and all his rich friends pay what they “truly do deserve to pay, having the right to live in a country that provides you such wealth.”

You see it, don’t you? The country provides the rich with their wealth. The people who happen to be blessed enough to have earned enough to qualify for the upper echelons of the tax schedule, don’t work for their wealth. The people who “deserve to pay” deserve to pay because they must give back some portion of what the country has “provided” them.

Think of what it means to be “provided” or to have something “provided” to you. When you were a child, you parents “provided” and you did nothing for what they provided. If you are now an adult with children, you “provide” for your children; and your children do nothing for what you provide. In both cases the recipient (i.e., the child) is utterly passive in relation to the provision.

On this caller’s view, my money is simply “provided”. I don’t have it because I work 50 hours per week for an employer who pays me. And my employer doesn’t have the money to pay me because he sells a product which someone needs or wants. No, my employer, as it turns out, has the money to pay me simply because our country has “provided” him with it. There he sits on his behind while the money, some of which he turns round and "provides" me, just rolls in from the country’s coffers!

The sort of thinking that could actually lead to such a conclusion would defy logical analysis. But then, leftists don't really think their way through problems; they prefer to emote their way. And when you insist on thinking rather than emoting they respond by crtiticizing you for reducing human being to numbers.

Not only that. But isn’t this caller really saying, in a way, that we must pay for our rights? The rich, he says, deserve to pay more in taxes for the right to live in a country that provides them the wealth out of which those taxes are paid.

So, the non-rich get their rights for free, and the rich (however that term is defined) pay for theirs.