Real ID: Slamming KY's Liberty Door
When it came to KY's budget, watching the new governor stand up to criticism until it was a done deal with no special session was a joy. The Monday Morning Video was hysterical and ballsy. Matt can be fearless. We knew that.
[Cue the "I <3 Mitch McConnell" video from just after Matt won the election which is no longer online. If you saw it, you would know that "hysterical" and "ballsy" are understatements.]
In the bigger picture, however, I'm with the liberty holdouts on critiquing Bevin's performance to date. Budget deal or no, freedom and constitutional limits on legislative powers matter most. On those issues, Bevin fails big-time. He supports and will sign the Kentucky Real ID, one of the most liberty-bashing bills I've seen in my lifetime.
I have been unwavering in my support of Bevin since he ran for the Senate. He spoke openly about liberty issues: about farm food freedom, about the right to eat and drink what you choose, the right to share and barter with your neighbor sans government permission, about the failures of the drug war, all issues of huge importance to me.
Liberty comes down to answering the question: who owns your body? Bevin seemed to know the answer and spoke it out loud.
During the governor's race, friendships suffered over the Comer/Bevin debate. I am not a Comer fan. I didn't support him before Bevin got into the race, I wouldn't have voted for him in any event and I don't support him in the congressional race. He's a statist and a career politician wanna-be.
Not only did Comer single-handedly ruin hemp for the vast majority of Kentucky farmers and business people for the immediate future -- unless you are a friend of Comer's who can get a license or work for one of his crony corporate hemp monopolies -- but his hemp industry ruined the prospects for medical Cannabis in KY. Those corporate monopolies have invested millions of dollars in the Kentucky CBD business that medical MJ would ruin in about 2 seconds. I find it painfully ironic that hemp lobbies heavily against medical MJ.
But I digress. Back to Bevin.
It pains me to watch the new liberty governor support a bill like Real ID when I NEVER thought he would in a million years. I seriously feel like I walked through the looking glass. P3s and the Local Option Sales Tax are both horrible bills as far as the taxpayer goes. I never believed he would support either. Yet he supports BOTH! Do I feel betrayed? Oh, yes. My bad, really. I believed what he said.
Either Matt misrepresented himself or I saw him through rose-colored glasses. Either way, KY is not going to be the liberty beacon I gleefully envisioned. We MAY have a balanced budget, but not only will taxpayers feel the financial burden of paying that debt, we'll be doing so with the noose a great deal tighter around our necks.
I don't call this progress.
The Pension Crisis Noose
The unmentionable detail in the pension crisis debacle is that it was created by politicians in a massive "legal" vote-buying scheme. I didn't promise teachers and cops a fantastic retirement at taxpayer expense. Politicians did. Then they stole it all from the fund taxpayers paid into!
Over time, the vote-buying politicians left office, so no one to blame for the creation. Still, it's now "a debt we must pay"? Legally, I guess. But morally? Ethically? The politicians who set it up and the ones who stole from the fund should pay it back, not me and my children and grandchildren. Who decided that payback scheme? Oh, right. The same politicians who created the mess.
(Hey, what about the current pension fund for KY legislators, the one Jamie Comer helped create? Why don't we the taxpayers get to raid THAT to re-fund the other? Harrumph. Just another rational idea KY politicians will ignore.)
But I digress. Back to Bevin.
The minute Matt actually signs Real ID, my support for him is withdrawn. I'll retire back to my little homestead and dread the day some official will demand to see my papers or take a digital thumbprint or DNA swab to be instantly uploaded to the central database to prove my status. If something doesn't add up, I'll be whisked away until I can prove my innocence.
Anybody who thinks that's not coming needs to study history. Actual history, not the stuff taught in public schools.
I thought Matt was going to help make KY a liberty beacon for the rest of the US to salivate over. Well, the signing of Real ID into law will crush that dream forever. Instead, he's lining us up like sheep to be counted, numbered and sheared. I did not see this coming.
P.S. Some legislators claim Real ID is voluntary. Really? That is so lame. Do they mean like KY's seat belt law and the federal income tax, both of which started out as “voluntary”? Politicians who pass laws of force and intimidation need to stop using the word "voluntary" because it's a lie.