After the latest round of triple-digit heat, I’m considering putting in a larger air conditioner.
An environmentalist-type colleague of mine took great pains to point this out as proof positive that we pro-corporate, conservative types are killing the planet by contributing to global warming.
“This is the desert. It’s supposed to be hot,” I responded. So long as I pay the bill, what’s the problem, and whose business is it but mine?
This, of course, led to another curious conversation about my contributions to terrorism, environmental degradation and the reason the Raiders keep moving between Oakland and Los Angeles—or something to that effect.
It was only a scant eight months ago that Reno received the heaviest amount of snow I’ve seen in 15 years. I believe I shoveled more snow last winter than in all the other winters that I’ve lived here.
Where was global warming last December?
And if my Sherman Tank SUV is contributing to all of the aforesaid, isn’t everyone on the road also contributing?
“You drive a Honda, aren’t you also contributing to the same effects?” I asked him. “What makes one environmentally (or morally) superior by only spending $5 compared to my $10? The money you spend at the pumps goes to the same place mine does, except I contribute more in taxes (which could be used to help alleviate said global warming).”
This somehow morphed into a discussion over the recent bankruptcy-reform bill that Congress enacted, which takes effect in October. Democrats ran around claiming poor people were being victimized by the evil (and wealthier) credit card companies. (Democratic Lie No. 612: The wealthy are evil—unless they are donating to a Democratic politician’s campaign.)
My first question is this: Can you show me where a credit card company has held a gun to someone’s head to force them to buy stuff at 24 percent interest?
My second question: What is so terribly wrong about making it difficult for people to avoid paying their legal debts?
In any event, let’s recognize that bankruptcy will still be available for people, but smart people don’t need it.
If you disagree, recall one Orenthal James Simpson. OJ Simpson is the former football player turned actor and, I believe, unconvicted double murderer who successfully avoided conviction for killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her boyfriend Ron Goldman.
Yet in the civil trial, he got smacked with a $30-million-plus wrongful-death verdict.
In civil court, a defendant—in most cases—can file bankruptcy and discharge the award, but OJ hasn’t done that. The reality is that he probably can’t.
One of the pitfalls of bankruptcy is that you must disclose all of your assets to the court before your debts can be dismissed.
The rumor mill in my circles was that he had, at one point, squirreled money away in the Isle of Guernsey. Guernsey, for the uninitiated, is one of the many low-tax, high-privacy havens around the world where smart people with even smarter accountants legitimately squirrel money away from wealth-redistributing Democrats and trial attorneys. (The Cayman Islands for example, has some 500 banks and trust companies alone.)
People with their “stuff” together fear little in life. All others vote Democratic.
For every tax, regulation and law that Democrats try to pass to run some inane socialist program, there are people digging trenches and using strategies to protect their money that politicians have never dreamed of.
After all, they never know when they might need a way to pay for another air conditioner.