Maybe it’s my snarky sense of humor, but I greatly enjoy when statists accidentally promote free markets and small government.
It seems to happens quite a bit at the New York Times.
- A New York Times columnist, for instance, pushed for a tax-hiking fiscal agreement back in 2011 based on a chart showing that the only successful budget deal was the one that cut taxes.
- The following year, another New York Times columnist accidentally demonstrated that politicians are trying to curtail tax competition because they want to increase overall tax burdens.
- In a major story on the pension system in the Netherlands this year, the New York Times inadvertently acknowledged that genuine private savings is the best route to obtain a secure retirement.
But it’s not just people who write for the New York Times.
- The International Monetary Fund accidentally confirmed that the value-added tax is a revenue machine to finance bigger government and heavier tax burdens.
- A statist in Illinois tried to argue that higher taxes don’t enable higher spending, but his argument was based on the fact that politicians raised taxes so they wouldn’t have to cut spending.
- And a journalist at Mother Jones accidentally showed that lower levels of government spending are correlated with greater job creation.
Now we have something else to add to the list. Some advocates of federally subsidized abortion inadvertently and unwittingly have endorsed the notion that there shouldn’t be any taxpayer handouts to the nation’s largest abortion provider.
I don’t know if either Planned Parenthood or Congressman Bera are oblivious, entitled, or mendacious, but this retweeted quote really deserves some sort of prize. They obviously want to promote the status quo of federal subsidies for the organization, but the call to “take gov’t out of the exam room” accidentally makes the libertarian case that government money shouldn’t be involved.
What makes this especially amusing is that Congressman Bera is a doctrinaire statist, receiving an “F” on his spending record from the National Taxpayers Union.
Needless to say, both the Congressman and Planned Parenthood obviously do want the handouts. They simply don’t want any oversight or attention on how the money is spent. But it’s nice that they both inadvertently endorsed the right approach.
