Big Oil slaps back at the Government Pimp

Rendell's mission to be alienate everyone in PA continues.

Paradoxically, I think Ed Rendell would have been a fabulous businessman. I say this because he is so innately, reflexively acquisitive. From gambling to driving to Marcellus Shale, he has a keen eye for identifying captive consumers and bleeding their money. Such a talent is, if not the engine of capitalism, at least its transmission. The uniquely creative conceive the products that could change the world, but they are rarely the ones who figure out how to turn it into money. (For instance, the next thing Bill Gates invents will be the first.) Rendell is of the second sort; I imagine that as a child he squeezed blandest lemonade in Philadelphia but always set his stand up at the highest-traffic corner.

But that's the catch, and it's the point that the so-called "moderate Democrats" can't seem to grasp. Government is not a business. When business seeks to grow, expand or conquer new markets, it only succeeds by the consent of the populus, and so the populus benefits. When goverment seeks the same ends, it does so conscriptively, and the populus is deprived.

Moderate Dems earn their moderate cred by speaking the shibboleths of the free market. When they propose a grand government project, they don't speak of sentimental egalitarianism or elite aesthetics. Instead they advertise to us the lush revenues that the program will generate. Along the same lines, Rendell-style politicians tend to favor consumption taxes, and they justify them with the defense that, hey, if you don't want to pay it, don't buy into the program. I will concede that taxes levied upon consumption are incrementally pro-market than those levied upon wealth; the problem, though, is that government is only entrusted with the performance of irreducible tasks. If a state raises prices on something under its power, the consumer has no other choices (e.g. the Turnpike). Consumption taxes are consequently not only ill-advised but often immoral--or, in the case of Rendell's oil tax, just plain illegal.

The natural end of this brand of governance has just manifested itself in Pennsylvania. We are America's newest codependents to the demon of state-sanctioned gaming. Once you justify reckless government initiatives based on some accountants conjecture about the resulting revenue, habits that once appeared as vices begin to look like "emerging markets." I selected the term Government Pimp deliberately, and I mean it. If tomorrow Pennsylvanians stopped drinking, smoking and gambling, Harrisburg couldn't pay its electrical bill. Meanwhile, these taxes continue to attract less money than we were promised while politicians incur more debt than they projected. Is it so outlandish to picture Pennsylvania, a generation or two in the future, legalizing prostitution and several drugs on the theory that the tax revenue will finally allow us to pay our pensions?

And hey, if you don't want to pay it, don't buy the product.