Barry Hess
My Turn
May. 31, 2006 12:00 AM

(printed in the Arizona Republic) 

Only my sadness held back the hysterics elicited by Jon Talton's column "Decline and fall of Mesa" (Opinions, May 21).

As I read his words, I could hear the tantrums of a 4-year-old who didn't get his way or who came to the realization that "his" opinion was completely irrelevant.

When the good residents of Mesa rebuked the attempt by politicians to tax their property and put a huge number of senior citizens over the economic edge, the writer wished to make Mesa disappear. He correctly identified the libertarian effort to constrain public "servants" to their assigned tasks and to follow the law of the constitutional charter, but he still missed the point completely.

Where Talton went terribly awry was in assuming that his concept of building pretty places at the expense of the quality of life of those called upon to pay for such whims had any moral, rational, legal or honest leg on which to stand.

Because the people of Mesa finally took a stand against marauding politicians, the writer's ire leads him into a rant of damn near casting an evil spell, an ancient curse or a pox upon them. The reader can hear him screeching like his tail got caught in the door as he gasps that libraries and museums would be shut down and the indefinable "poor" would have to foot an imaginary burden somehow created by the people doing nothing - the usual bogus liberal chant.

Maybe someone should tell this history-deficient comic character that our library system and most museums were set up and paid for privately. That's the reason they used to be so good.

He laments that no one in his liberal world seemed to notice that Mesa residents took Nancy Reagan's sage advice to "Just say no!" to self-destruction and finally took a principled stand.

The laughs just keep coming as he forwards the nonsensical notion that there might be a shred of truth to the supposition that light-rail has even one redeeming benefit . . . except for those on the receiving end of the people's money to build such boondoggles.

Should we tell him that before construction has even started on this misguided adventure in social experimentation, it's already heading toward $100 million in cost overruns?

Should we tell him that these aren't "cost overruns," they were well known to the planners who simply decided to not tell the public it was going to be a lot more expensive then the politicians told us?

Not content to whine about the rejection of new property taxes and the light-rail scam, the writer goes on to suggest that universities should resemble the Taj Mahal, not a useful facility, and then into a litany of his frustrations with people in whom the spark of individual freedom and respect for private property rights still smolders.

The one that stands out is this assertion: "The free-lunch promise of the anti-tax right remains seductive. Gone is the American presumption that with property ownership comes special obligations to the community. It only delivers failure."

This media spinmanship is a real knee-slapper since he is the one from the "free lunch" (at everyone else's expense) crowd who doesn't seem to grasp that there never has been a single definable example where respect for individual property rights has been a "failure."

All of our current problems stem from the practices of the Republican/Democratic party he holds in such high esteem. And his deliberate lies can't change that.

The punch line was the "special obligations" thing. It cracked me up because what made America unique unto the entire world was that there was no such thing as a "special" or "unspoken" obligation of property ownership.

We were founded as a nation of law. If it ain't written down, it doesn't exist. I'd be curious to know where this "special obligation" is written and exactly what it might be.

Yep, this column makes it clear that the funny pages are more useful than the opinions of a writer who must certainly be using a pseudonym. I'd recognize the style and substance of Karl Marx anywhere.

I say: "Yeaaah! Mesa, the city that doesn't want to go down the economic tubes."