The Immorality if Sin Taxes

A Joke: In South Carolina, taxes on cigarettes go to fix the roads. Let's light up and fix these bumpy roads!

Sin Taxes Create Sinful Government Incentives
Presently, corrective taxes are all the rage in policy circles and academic institutions. Although a corrective or "sin" tax may encourage someone to do less of a bad thing, the process creates the wrong incentives for government because the government profits comparatively more from the sin than other taxed activities, or, it profits more from bad behavior than from good behavior. For instance, the government would benefit more from heavily taxed whiskey than from ordinarily taxed orange juice.

The tax penalty a smoker incurs that induces him to buy fewer cigarettes could be considered a moral good if we ignore any principle of liberty* and if the story ended there. But the story does not end there. The government takes revenue derived from a bad activity and then uses it for, let's assume, a good activity like reservoir maintenance or road repair. Doing good things with money gotten from bad activity becomes bad when the incentive to do more good things requires that there be more bad behavior to tax. A sin tax is not a total gain because even though the disincentive to smoke may be a plus, the incentive to do good things with revenue reliant on bad behavior is a negative. Even further, sin taxes are slightly immoral insofar as their objective is to create a greater good, because they inherently fail a little and are therefore a little deceitful. A sin tax is therefore slightly sinful itself.

Consider a sin tax on carbon emissions. The more carbon emissions, the more revenue, the more of an incentive government has for more emissions, and hence the more useless leveraging without actual moral improvement.

Perhaps by utilitarian means, one could argue that the bad government incentives pale in comparison with the good incentives that encourage people to sin less. But, this analysis fails the higher scrutiny used in most Catholic understandings of morality. In order for an act to be considered moral, it must be good in its intentions, action, and results. So even if we assume sin taxes are good in their intent and results by utilitarian reasoning, we have shown earlier that they inherently fail to be good in their action because their action is sustained in part by bad behavior, and this bad behavior cannot be said to be good.

In sum, government cannot create morality via taxation without absorbing some immorality itself, and the overall morality it may create fails to be moral under a Catholic pretext, to the extent that some might even say sin taxes are immoral.
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*We would also assume that the government knows best.

Libyan Rebels Murder Black Africans

And the US GOVERNMENT is helping the rebels. The US war effort in Libya is unconstitutional because congress has the power to declar a non-defensive war, but congress has not been consulted. Unfortunately, most congressmen are not complaining about the unconstitutional actions of Hillary Clinton, NATO, and the UN. Meanwhile, the Clinton-backed rebels are murdering black Africans. All the while Obama seems like a passive observer. http://senseofevents.blogspot.com/2011/03/libyan-rebel-atrocities.html

Homosexual Movement's Vocabulary Imperialism

Many formerly straight words have been co-opted for use by the gay movement.

Words
partner, partnership, ally (at King's College), silence, gay, pride, queer, straight, orientation, closet, union.

Concepts
rainbow, equality (or equal), rights, marriage.

The rainbow has even been "enlisp-ed" into an army of words and symbols being used in the effort to normalize homosexuality. By abstracting homosexuality from its essence--a sexual attraction--and by getting people to associate it psychologically with positive things--like a rainbow--that are totally unrelated to said attraction, activists attempt to effect a positive psychological association where there was none.

According to anthropologists, there has never been a culture that has sought to verbally equivocate a man-man physical relationship with a man-woman one, until the modern "liberal" Western culture. In the past, man-man relationships were never considered for normalization or family building, and thus there is no word equivalent to "marriage" to describe them. Rather than come up with a new, appropriately different word to describe the man-man sexual relationship, activists have sought the one already in use known as marriage.

Therefore, no word developed naturally to describe homosexual relationships, and the ascription of "marriage" to them is an artificial borrowing from straight culture.

Perhaps the hope is that by calling a monogamous man-man sexual relationship 'marriage', the stubborn resistors who reject the normality of man-man sexual relationships will soon lose their nerve and acquiesce to the language. Just as in Animal Farm, the hope is that future generations will conform their beliefs to the language.

But language cannot obscure reality. The meaning of words must return to their equilibrium of accurate description.

So even if there is total victory for the homosexual movement, and every human being alive accepts the idea of man-man sexual partnership being called marriage, marriage will then be used to describe two radically different types of unions. Hence man-man relationships will always be distinguished from man-woman ones on some level.

Even today, "gay" marriage is distinguished from regular marriage.

Imperialism for naught.