Friday, December 4, 2009

Letter to the editor of the Denver Post 11/29/09

Below is a short LTE I wrote to the Denver Post in regards to THIS op-ed piece. The article is entitled "Salazar Right to Rebuff Critics." The article is about interior Secretary Ken Salazar position on the oil and gas industry, and critics pegging him as an anti-driller.

Be wary whenever you hear a politician claim what they are doing is for the “public good,” or for the good of the “taxpayer.” Salazar stated that trade groups don’t own public lands; taxpayers do. What exactly does that mean? Who specifically is the ‘taxpayer,’ and how does anyone know what’s best for them? An important thing to understand is that there is no such thing as a public. The public is merely made up of individuals. You cannot have a public commodity or a publicly own anything, because this concept “public” is simply an abstract term denoting a group of individuals. The question we must ask is if these policies help me as an individual?

By using this term “taxpayer” Salazar is asking for a free-for-all in his ability to trade political favors. After all, as long as he can say it is in the “public good” he can get away with almost anything. America’s constitution is designed to protect individual rights, not public rights; which is a contradiction in terms.

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