The American Spectator

: /p> p>Mr. Peters article does a nice job debunking the Big Oil myth, but he is too generous to Big Government. He documents government gouging in the form of end-user and highway taxes. He fails to note the gouging starts at the wellhead and is exacted throughout the production and distribution chain as well: severance taxes, wellhead taxes, pipeline taxes, import taxes, franchise taxes, property taxes on assets, taxes on labor, road usage taxes, ad nauseam. These taxes are also built into the price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump. An accurate accounting of this part of the government’s take as well as the end-user taxes is necessary to fully appreciate the avarice of the garden variety politico. The phrase “Government Greed” is redundant. br> — Bud Hammons /p>

Mr. Peters is correct on the issue of taxes. Nothing but living itself is taxed as heavily as gasoline. Merely living, in North Carolina for example, is taxed very highly. I am retired and am extorted to pay 47% of my income in taxes to Lincoln County, North Carolina, some special taxing districts, and the federal government. This percentage does not include the increased taxes I will pay as a result of the tax cuts that were not renewed by our socialist radicals now controlling Congress. Aside from walking and gardening, all I do is live.

But I digress. Back to gasoline. The taxes on gasoline are not so much about raising revenue as they are about shaping behavior. Liberals hate automobiles in the hands of everyman. Cars provide uncontrolled mobility. This may give rise to ideas of nonconformity and thoughts of self-worth. One has only to look at the earnestness with which Mr. Gore exhorts us to conserve…conserve, from the driver’s seat of one of his half dozen or so SUVs, while his house is using $35,000 of electricity per year. Mr. Gore, happily, offsets his usage by buying some amorphous credits from himself. This is the liberal model for government: “We tell you what you are permitted to do and you do it. We are entitled to rule you, and are very burdened and stressed by meeting your needs. And so we needn’t have with any rules for us.”

Liberals like the Moscow model of old. Huge chauffeur-driven black behemoths, streaming smoke, going like hell through empty streets carrying…. you guessed it! The liberal ruling class. The rest of us can wait for buses and trains. No matter the time wasted, the cost in efficiency and productivity. Only liberals ought to have access to cars.

If one looks at the use to which these so-called road taxes are put one would find an increasing percentage of them are being used to fund underused and outrageously overpriced public transit systems. (I recall years ago when the government of then Dade County, Florida, was building its Metro rail system — the actual cost was perhaps quadruple the estimate — and Ronald Reagan said with what was spent on that, the government could have purchased a limo for each rider. His guess later proved false. The government could have purchased only a new Lincoln Continental for each rider — every two years for his or her natural life.)

So like everything else about our system of taxation refined over the last 75 years by liberals who are greatly enamored of the European socialist system, gasoline taxes are designed to move us closer to the ideals of Karl Marx.

p>And one must wonder — they seem to be succeeding. br> — Jay Molyneaux br> Denver, North Carolina