...And what's yours is mine

Trying to make this quick. Just one question as the US Senate and House are in the process of debating how to fund socialized medicine....

Ever occur to you -- and especially to those in congress -- that my income, your income, your neighbor's income, doesn't belong to the federal government? That is to say, our incomes are our own private property and it's not any government's decision how we spend it or what else we do with it.

Seriously, where does congress get the authority to tell us what to do with our own hard-earned cash? Where do they get the right -- or even the necessary information -- to tell each of us what we each need to live our lives?

The government does need to be funded. For the first 133 years or so of the republic, it was funded by tariffs -- taxes on imports. In 1912, the Constitution was amended to allow an income tax, which had been prohibited by the Framers as granting government too much power over citizens. And just as they suspected, with the income tax, ordinary citizens now have to fight in order to keep even half of our earnings.

Another facet of anti-private property thinking is the way the Comrade, among others, states that "we" pay too much for health care.

Who's "we"? I suspect we each pay what we believe we need to pay or we do without.

These jerks are taking 280 million individual souls and lumping us into one big collective. That's the very basis of marxism. It denies the existence and the rights of the individual. It's a fiction based on statistics. It doesn't recognize human life or individuality; it only turns each of us into a unit of production or consumption.

In reality, the marxist "we" does not exist. We are individuals and not just carbon copies (literal "carbon" copies) of each other. And our incomes don't belong to anyone but ourselves. We, as individuals, are the ones who earn it. We, as individuals, own it. We have the right, endowed by the Creator, to dispose of it as we, as individuals, wish.

I mean, what reasonable citizen would go next door and just take his neighbor's car? Or stop somebody coming out of the bank on payday and demand 15% of their paycheck. That's what these legislators are doing. No respect for property rights.

And, increasingly, they refuse to even let us know their intentions. We can't even review pending legislation. What is congress for, what is its purpose, if not to review pending legislation? Otherwise, they're just one more useless expense.

Recognition of private property and defense of private property rights has always been a sacrosanct tenet of the US government. Private property is an indispensable element of political freedom.

The concept of private property also invalidates everything the Comrade, his minions, and the 111th congress are cooking up right now to thrust upon American citizens.

Very simply -- they're behaving like criminals, even by their own rules.

Congress includes some people in positions of grandeur, like Charlie Rangel, who apparently has consistently reported only about half of his income and hasn't even paid the assessed taxes on that. How come he gets away with it, and even gets to chair the House Ways & Means Committee, which writes tax bills?

And Pazzo Pelosi was on TV today defending Rangel. No surprise there. Birds of a feather, honor among thieves and all that.

Didn't this nation once fight a war over all of this kind of thing? I thought that was what the American Revolution was all about.

Here's one enduring solution: cash. And I suggest you report as much of your income as Charlie Rangel does -- if that.