196 Points of Light.

[Blogmaster's note: As far as I can tell, this is an internet scoop. Although a local radio station has reported the results of last night's Thayer election, they at this point do not show up anywhere online. I searched through both Google News and All The Web News.]

Yesterday, about this time, I was planning how to write the defeat post. It was to start with "Welcome to the Thayer Soviet."

I got nowhere with bringing the matter of the illegal electioneer (who two sources have identified as Mildred Cornelius, wife mother of Ron Cornelius, who is a member of the Thayer Community Betterment Association) to the attention of either the media or the government. If they were willing to do this, I wouldn't put it past them to gather votes in the graveyard so that they won.

So I began figuring out how I was going to keep from rewarding them with a single penny of my money paying for the tax increase. The current city sales tax is 1%; the increase would have upped it to 1.5%. To not pay any money on the sales tax increase, I would have had to decrease my spending in Thayer by 33%. Their half cent tax increase would have cost the Thayer economy several thousand dollars a year of my money. A large chunk of that would have been achieved through cutting out smoking and beer. I had my "final cigar" all ready to savor, sitting right beside my recliner, waiting to be lit.

Turns out, I didn't need to do all that figuring. The score was Capitalists 196, Socialists 115. My cigar turned into a Victory Cigar and I had a beer or four.

This evens the series to 1-1. The bad guys won the first game of the series, when they got a tax hike passed to build a new (and gawdawful ugly, I might add) Temple to Socialism.

But now the series is even. The only problem is, the series never ends.

I used to believe that once a capitalist, libertarian society is achieved, people would see how it's better for everyone and would stop trying to grow government and shrink liberty, and those of us who have fought the good fight all this time could finally be able to sit back and take a rest. I now see that it will never happen. There will ALWAYS be people who think generosity is when person A forces person B to give money to person C. There will always be people who think the problem is that we have too much liberty. The fight never ends.

And the bad thing is, on any given issue, the good guys have to win EVERY time it's brought up, but the bad guys only have to win ONCE to get it put into law. And on this particular issue, they only have to flip 41 people to get the result they want.

Already, the president of the TCBA is laying the groundwork to bring this up again, talking about how it failed due to a "lack of education about the issue."

No, it failed because it is a fundamentally flawed idea. You don't put a tax increase on the ballot without earmarking what it's to be spent for. And you put a sunset date on it, after which it goes to the voters whether or not to extend it.

You don't improve the city economy by sucking $175,000 out of it and giving it to the government.

You don't encourage business development by creating government bureaucracies; you do it by getting the government out of the way.

And finally, tax hikes are not by any stretch of the imagination "Community Betterment." You want an economic developer? Pay for it by cutting other spending, or better yet, by paying for it yourselves. Because we are SICK of rich people telling us "uneducated" types how that we don't pay enough taxes.