First I want to thank Donna for plugging my article on the so-called living wage, but I’d like to take issue with one point she makes in passing. Donna states that she ?can?t fault the group?s intention.? After years of taking this view I have come to the conclusion that it is the left?s intentions that need to be questioned. On issue after issue, from poverty to the environment, they promote policies that are inconsistent with their stated goals. This is the kind of thing that can go on for only so long before we have to start questioning whether or not they are lying about what they want to accomplish. The left consistently claims to be championing the poor while opposing all policies that have a chance of actually getting people out of poverty. Instead they support policies that at best can only be considered poverty maintenance programs and at worst poverty creation programs.

This is also true with respect to their undying support for higher and higher corporate income taxes. When confronted with the fact that corporations do not and cannot pay taxes and that such taxes are paid by workers, customers, and shareholders in pension plans and 401Ks (workers once again) they ignore it. They continue with their class warfare rhetoric about corporations not ?paying their fair share.? There cannot be anything ?good intentioned? about this. It is now my belief that the corporate income tax simply gives the left an opportunity to loot the very people they claim to represent while misleading them into believing that the tax is being imposed on their ?oppressors.?

There tends to be only one end that all of the left?s means seem to be consistent with, that is the expansion of government control over our economic lives. While higher taxes, corporate or otherwise, do not bring people out of poverty, they do transfer control of resources from private individuals to the government. Likewise, minimum wage laws do nothing to help the poorly educated and low skilled among us, but they do insure that there will be a permanent underclass of citizens who cannot find work and who need big government programs and the morally self aggrandizing to administer them.

There was a time when the left freely admitted that they were socialists and that their goal was a government controlled, collectivized society. Ah, the good old days. I just wish that once again they would be honest, put their true cards on the table, and let the great debate begin.