Can't Nail Me: To reply, at long last, to Sandefur, and hopefully affirm that some conservatives are, in fact, financially conservative:

I believe Sandefur knows of my intentions to someday write an alternate version of the Robin Hood tale in which Robin and his merry men are portrayed as incompetent muscle-heads who rob traveler after traveler of money that was destined to perform one good work or another--save sick children, pay mortgages on churches, that sort of thing. It probably will never get written, since stories need plot and conflict and all of those fun things but it does illustrate my feelings on the matter.

Robbing the rich to give to the poor is not heroic. It is wrong.

Involuntary redistribution of wealth is not generosity. It is communism and theft.

It shocks me that the left can call President Bush's Patriot Act oppressive, when they themselves would declare that everything you own belongs to them, that they get first dibs on all of it, and only once they have decided they have taken enough are you allowed the remainder. That's oppression. That's fascism.

I hope that puts it plainly enough for Mr. Sandefur.

Now, with that said, I stand by what I said before--if individual states wish to do it, I do not believe there is anything in the constitution to stop them from doing so. I am also opposed to gambling and abortion, but I do not believe there is anything in the Constitution to prevent states from opposing me on these issues, either.

I also believe that people, in their hearts, are more generous than the left thinks they are. If the federal government, today, put the responsibility for tending to the poor of this country back on the people, the people would rise to the occasion. And if the federal government put the tax money back in the pockets of the people they are currently using to fund the welfare state, the people could wisely place it in much more effective and efficiently run local institutions that could get people back on their feet in ways the folks in their ivory towers and government labyrinths could only dream of.