No good deed goes…anywhere for very long.

I’m talking about our beloved District 30 State Rep. Mark Miloscia. Good man and certainly the biggest “vote getter” in Federal Way. His pro-life stance confounds the abortion-loving politicians on his side of the aisle who owe the bulk of their campaign cash to blood money.

I’ve enjoyed a friendship with Mark, partially born of our shared faith as devout Catholics and partially born from my respect for him. He has at every invitation taken me up on long coffee talks about politics, and he genuinely believes in his modern liberal economic principles, namely that poverty is the fault of successful people and that a proper role of government is to impose controls on the appetites of man (my words, not his).

So, initially I was grateful to see that Mark was one of the Democrats who voted against House Bill 6130 overturning I-960. Last week, the Senate Democrats voted to overturn this initiative, defying the will of the voters who continue to demand that Olympia trim its spending.

Now that the reality of what this latest vote means is sinking in, I’m afraid Mark’s vote against it means very little. Essentially, the Democrats in Olympia have now given themselves leeway to pass a state income tax by a simple majority. For clarification, the Democrats in Olympia and the U.S. Congress are more properly understood as collectivists, not liberals.

Liberalism, properly speaking, is actually best expressed through conservative economic principles. Liberalism emerged as a response to the divine right of kings imposing arbitrary rule against citizens. Liberalism, in the historic political sense, was the philosophy that championed individual liberty, as in the sanctity of every individual life. Liberalism emerged as a corrective to government power.

Government (whether we’re talking monarchy, democracy or constitutional republic) always tends toward its own growth in power. As our founders described so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, governments inevitably grow to the point of imposing collective goals upon individuals, to the point of squelching a citizen’s right to pursue happiness and prosperity according to his or her individual dreams and situations, demanding deference to “the collective,” and submission to the bureaucracy that presents itself as “the common good.”

The bureaucracy has become so big, so slow and so stupid that it often feels impossible to fight, which causes a depressive effect on the human spirit. In a healthy free society, though, such oppression incurs anger, and that is exactly what is happening to each individual voter.

Voters are feeling a sense of righteous anger born out of their exhaustion and their sense of indignation. The fruits of their labor have been raided and preyed upon by those in power who funnel the public treasury toward their friends, expanding their offices, their bureaucracies and the goals of special interests who fund their campaigns (death industry, environmentalists, teacher unions and public service unions).

Mark Miloscia has had to campaign without the benefit of some of these special interests, most notably teachers union money and the blood money from the abortion industry. He is an unconventional Democrat. Still, though, I am not sure I admire the middle road he has taken.

Our times today demand conviction. Other than his stance on abortion, I am not sure where Miloscia stands with regard to the rights of taxpayers to determine how their money is spent. He has been an advocate of transparency and performance audits, but was also an advocate of the federal stimulus, which to date has been used as a giant slush fund to keep pet projects funded and to rescue various states from their deficit spending. His views often stand at odds with the goals and actions of his party. I can admire this, but at some point it becomes confusing. This would be a good year to join the independents who are swinging to the right. Just a thought.

This is for certain. The taxpayer is tired of being taken for granted, ignored, obstructed, harassed and patronized. We are tired of being blamed for the social ills that are more properly linked to the breakdown of the family and sexual promiscuity than to some kind of phantom “corporate greed.”

We are tired of capitalism being misrepresented as a zero sum game. When Bill Gates made his first billion dollars, he opened the doors for the success of thousands more people, yielding more prosperity, not taking from someone else’s. The success of Microsoft has created more wealth and jobs. It has not taken anything from the poor. Capitalism is not a single pie that gets divided up into ever smaller pieces, but it is about making more pies, creating pie-making jobs and attracting more pie customers. It creates…it builds on human ingenuity and creativity.

In contrast, the public treasury is a single pie that drains wealth from the private sector and chooses winners and losers. Collectivism is the only true zero sum game. The government can only give what it has first taken. The problem is, liberty and the taxpayer always lose.