On the Stackings....

[digitaldiscipline]

jay_lake turned up one of the numerous items discussing how people are shocked and appalled that people are "siding with" or "inspired by" Joe Stack. I think there's a distinction that is very obviously not being made, so...

I think Mr. Ohlemacher may be engaging in a whole bucket of strawmanism. I've read Stack's essay over a few times, and it's NOT that he believed the tax system didn't apply to him - it's that he believed, rightly or wrongly, that it didn't apply equally to big corporations and the very wealthy - they get off using loopholes that average citizens get reamed and penalized for having the gall to look up and attempt to employ (and *this* is where a lot of folks who agree with his stance, myself included, are making our agreement).

I may not like the way the government spends my money, or how much of it, but there are some services, typically those that won't ever be touched by the private sector (because there is almost certainly no way to make basic services a profitable endeavor), that I am okay with paying into.

If taxpayers got a list of options when we filed our taxes akin to the "do you want $3 of your taxes paid into the presidential election fund" or whatever that line item is, where we could say, "These monies cannot be / must be allocated to ______," think of how that would revolutionize the federal budget. Suddenly, the things that every single person thinks are important will get funded in proportion to the true national sentiment. Maybe not a direct proportion, but if it was done for, say, half of each person's taxes? Could be very, very interesting, and would certainly let the congresscritters know, unequivocally, what their constituents want.

Which means, naturally, that it'd never fucking happen.

Comments

[cheez-ball.livejournal.com]

My disagreement with the idolization if Stack is that he committed premeditated murder. He would never have needed to go to that particular IRS office because it didn't handle anything related to him; he just saw it while driving I-35 in Austin. He got into a Piper (which no one has said whether or not it belonged to him or if he rented it) and flew it into a building where 200 people he had never met were doing a job that had nothing to do with him. In the process he killed a Vietnam veteran who was well-loved and who had nothing to do with creating any of the government policies with which Stack had a problem.

After all that, nothing Stack ever wrote in any kind of manifesto matters to me. I'm alright with him choosing to kill himself; I'm not alright with his decision to murder others in the process. This end does not justify his means.