Why do right-wingers continually send me apocryphal stories, thinking that they’re going to change my mind?

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America. The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/Socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. while we continually lose our freedoms - just a little at a time.

You know, dude - what freedoms are being lost? Obama raises the top tax rates back to what they were under Clinton - and the insinuation is that the broad swath of America has somehow had it’s freedom infringed!

What a bunch of baloney.

In any event, I’m all for curtailing tobacco subsidies or farm subsidies in general. Try making that fly in “conservative” Lancaster County.

And why are the very people all bent out of shape about the loss of freedom under a “bigger” government now the very people who snarled that if you didn’t accept Bush’s expansion of the National Security State, you were a traitor?

What freedoms are being lost under Obama’s economic proposal? What freedom have I lost, as an American citizen, walking down the street of this town today? Does the Obama economic plan infringe upon my freedom of speech? Or association? Does his economic plan have anything to do with my freedom to own a firearm? Freedom of the press?

None of these freedoms are infringed by any plan to raise the top tax rate to what it was under Clinton. If we were all facing confiscatory tax rates - that might be one thing. We’re not. And so I have to conclude that the right invokes this “freedom” argument not because anyone is actually losing any freedom - but because invoking some poorly-defined higher cause is all they’ve got.