Consider nature. Not the placid nature that Constable painted, but nature as Tennyson saw it, "red in tooth and claw." To glimpse a state of nature as Hobbes imagined it, where human life is "nasty, brutish and short," visit the Whole Foods store on River Road in Bethesda, Md. There... you will see proof of this social equation: Four Priuses plus three parking spaces equal angry anarchy.
But the (Republican) nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.
Increasingly, the income tax is codified envy. A VAT is the political class' recourse when the resources of the minority that is targeted by the envious are insufficient to finance ravenous government.
Because a VAT would shred Barack Obama's promise not to increase any tax on households with incomes less than $250,000, he must hope the deficit reduction commission he created will provide cover for his apostasy.
