'It's not your money' GOP Rep. says of bailout cash

I ordinarly don't believe that kicking people out of the Republican party for alleged apostasy on a number of "litmus test" issues is necessarily a good thing.

But in this case - as Ed Morrissey writes - I would definitely make an exception:

Rep. Joe Knollenberg is a Republican — from Michigan, naturally enough for the auto bailout — who believes that tax money doesn’t come from taxpayers.  “It’s not your money,” he tells Neil Cavuto.  It belongs to Congress, and they’ll do whatever they want with it.  And what they want to do is take it from taxpayers to “prop up” failing businesses instead of forcing them to become competitive.

This is nothing more or less than Republican redistributionism.  We criticized Barack Obama for this during the campaign, but we see here the GOP version of the same kind of flabby, European-style Social Democrat policies of government intervention in markets.  The only difference is the beneficiaries.  Obama wants to take money from those who succeed and give it to those who don’t on a class basis, while Knollenberg and his ilk want to take money from everyone and subsidize corporate failure.

Small wonder that voters chose Obama’s version of redistributionism over Knollenberg’s in the last election.

Precisely the point, Mr. Morrissey. Voters lacked a clear choice between McCain and Obama and went with the good looking young guy rather than the old curmudgeon. It may have been that simple in the end.

Nobody believes that Republicans are the party of low tax, small government anymore. Nor should they. As long as we have representatives like Mr. Knollenberg sounding like Obama at his worst, the voters will take the real deal redistributionists in the Democratic party over the fake ones in the GOP.

Tax money is the people's money. It is their property. We have consented to give our property to the government and have it returned as a tangible benefit; national defense, protection of our water supply, even feeding and housing those who really need help. We must make it plain to the Congress that we do not consent to our property being used to benefit fat cat auto executives who have failed and greedy unions who will use the money to fund political campaigns.

Republicans who don't understand this should be shown the door the next time they ask for our vote.