Photo Credit: Weasel Zippers

Debbie at Right Truth notes that "For many years now, American citizens have been slowly giving up their freedoms."

Debbie is quite right. The IRS is proof of this concept. When Congress passed the 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 permanently establishing the federal income tax, only the wealthy paid any taxes, that is, those making $3,000 a year had to pay one percent of their income in taxes.

However, slowly, slowly that rate increased until by 1944, the income tax rate for the top bracket (those earning over $200,000) was an egregiously obscene 94%. (1)

Similarly we have seen increasing restrictions on our freedoms over the years, especially through The Excessive Proliferation of Criminal Laws. Some of my readers may recall that Our government now wants to regulate Goat Herders.

This slow erosion of freedoms reminds me of a story my father often repeated to me: he told me that if I wanted to persuade someone to do something that they did not want to do, then get them to make small, incremental, seemingly innocuous actions until they ended up doing precisely what I wanted all along.

My father said to me:

"Let's say you want to get someone to jump from the 8th floor of a building down to street level; well, the simple thing is to take him and shove him from the 8th floor down to the 7th. At the 7th floor, help him stand up, dust him off, and shove him down to the 6th floor."

At the 6th floor, help him stand up, dust him off, and shove him down to the 5th floor. Keep doing this until you finally shove him to the ground floor, dust him off, and there he is on the street level, and aside from a few wrinkles in his suit, safe and sound."

Had you shoved him from the 8th floor directly to street level, he would have died. People cannot handle extreme changes, but they'll barely notice minor changes."

America is now one floor away from hitting its lowest level. Karl Marx predicted that Capitalism would inevitably produce class warfare which would lead to its self-destruction and its replacement by socialism. Which is perhaps why Obama is encouraging class warfare by pushing for higher taxes. He is after all, a Marxist.