This is part two of a reaction I started Tuesday to a blog that reacted to my blog that reacted to the blog of Jack Craver of Isthmus. (I think that’s five prepositional phrases without commas.)

Craver asked in the comments section of my blog:

What tax rates do you propose as appropriate for the state on corporate and individual income?

What services do you believe the state should provide with that tax revenue? Which services go beyond what you believe to be essential services and into the arena of “leftist” government? Would it include BadgerCare?

Glad you asked, Jack! Answer number 1A: The appropriate corporate income tax rate is zero. One reason is that, as readers of this blog know, businesses don’t pay taxes; their customers pay business taxes in the cost of a product or service. Business taxes serve only to obscure the actual cost of government, and taxpayers should know exactly how much they’re being required to pay to fund government. There are three things for which businesses use profits — to reinvest back into the business; to increase compensation for employees; or to return to the business’ owners as dividends. Any of those is preferable to the trash can known as government. And if there are no taxes, there are no tax breaks, and there is no money spent on campaign contributions to encourage or discourage tax breaks.

As for question 1B, the easy answer would be “lower than Craver wants,” but I don’t know what the correct tax rate is other than whatever tax rates (and taxes) are necessary to fund the correct functions of government. The purpose of government, generally, is to perform the correct functions of government, which does not mean employing people (except as to perform the correct functions of government), or redistributing income, or effecting trendy social change that doesn’t have a basis in our inalienable rights.

What are those “correct functions of government?” Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus, economic conservative and social libertarian, identified three and only three functions of the federal government: “defending our shores, delivering our mail and staying the hell out of our lives.” (If only.) The state Constitution lists such government functions as enforcing the law, education (schools and universities), and purchase and/or construction of “land, waters, property, highways, railways, buildings, equipment or facilities for public purposes” — to wit, “public highways,” “airports or other aeronautical projects,” “veterans’ housing,” “port facilities,” “railways and other railroad facilities,” and “the forests of the state.” (The Constitution, however, says the state may fund the aforementioned list; the word shall only comes up on the subject of education.)

That seems to be a pretty good list. Which means there’s a lot that state and local government now does that isn’t on that list, or not to the extent spending on that government function is occurring today. When asked about waste in government, Sen. Frank Lasee (R–De Pere) used to bring up rails-to-trails spending — converting abandoned rail beds to bicycle paths — not because it wasn’t a worthy function of government, but because it isn’t worthy to the level of exceeding all other states in rails-to-trails spending. The state Constitution allows using public debt to purchase land, but at the rate of $60 million per year, with zero economic return? (The aforementioned Knowles–Nelson Stewardship Fund spending is down from $86 million per year under the previous governor and Legislature.) The Constitution does not require the existence of a State Patrol responsible for writing traffic tickets instead of conducting actual law enforcement. And where is the employment of executive assistants — who are political appointees for department secretaries — a core function of government?

What about economic development, including downtown revitalization? The answer lies in another question: How much government-funded economic development takes place to undo the effects of bad public policy? (The practical question, on the other hand, is how much government-funded economic development has to take place because other goverments are doing government-funded economic development.)

Craver tries to bait me by asking about BadgerCare, and I imagine he’d be interested in if I’d be interested in getting rid of, say, unemployment insurance, Social Security, or other social programs. His asking that question demonstrates the left’s utter contempt for anything that would limit the role of government in our lives, such as our founding documents. To them, the U.S. and state Constitution are nothing more than scratchings on parchment written by dead white men.

(Craver also asked what I meant in my reference to former Supreme Court Justice Louis “Loophole Louie” Butler, who got his nickname from his time as a Milwaukee public defender. What I meant was that any Supreme Court justice who ruled as he did in the lead paint case — that it was OK to sue a company that manufactured lead-based paint without proof that that company manufactured the lead-based paint that was involved in the lawsuit should be not just thrown off the Supreme Court — and Butler lost two Supreme Court races — but disbarred.)

And now for Craver’s grand vision:

Instead of talking superficially about “raising” and “cutting” taxes and programs, why don’t we talk about what the appropriate tax rates are for the services we expect? If we had that debate, there would be honest disagreement about what the government should provide, but at least voters would have a better idea of the system their politicians stand for.

If such a dialogue existed in America, I don’t think there would be any question that there is no meaningful left-wing power in the country. If there were, there would be a serious push for fundamental change to our economic system. Socialism, communism, the works. In fact, in the U.S. we only have one member of Congress who calls himself a “Democratic Socialist,” and there are a few Democrats who talk seriously about even developing a welfare state that rivals that of other Western countries. The health care plan the GOP denounces as an end to America as we know it was a carbon copy of the plan the Republican Party introduced less than 20 years ago. It’s not a “government takeover,” it’s simply a government handout to corporations — something both parties have proudly supported throughout history.

You don’t have to be a subscriber to Madison commie propaganda to believe the Democratic Party is not in the business of advancing leftism. You simply have to read a history book. I’m sure nobody is prouder of that fact than the people on the right who have been running the show for the past 30 years. Thanks to Ronald Reagan and his disciples, we don’t have a left and a right in this country. We have a center-right and a far right. And then we have some liberals watching from the bleachers.

It doesn’t always have to be that way, however. The political character of a country can change overnight, often with horrifying results (ever heard of Nazism?). People who ridicule the suggestion that Democrats could not win by running further to the left either have no sense of history or are willfully ignoring it. Over the past 100 years American political values have changed drastically many times. We’ve gone from no income tax to a top marginal rate of 92% and then back down to 35%. We’ve gone from segregation to a black president. Soon we’ll have gay marriage, not just because people have gradually accepted it on their own, but because enough people in politics and media talked about it that people began to see the issue differently.

Today’s liberals generally hate markets, but perhaps the reason why “Democrats could not win by running further to the left” is because Democrats have figured out that being more leftist than they already are is a non-starter among voters. (If you think about it, voting is the ultimate market.) The purpose of a political party, after all, is to get its candidates elected and keep them in office. American voters have had the choice, since before World War II, of Wisconsin’s own Fighting Bob La Follette, Henry Wallace, Adlai Stevenson, Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy, Dennis Kucinich and others more left-wing than either the Democratic presidential nominee or the ultimate presidential winner and chose otherwise. (Barack Obama did not become president because of his ideology. In fact, his poor poll numbers probably could be described at least in part as voter remorse.) Ronald Reagan probably drove the GOP to the right, but voters decided to move the country rightward. If Craver and his fellow travelers don’t like that, well, to quote a former coworker of mine, it sucks to be them.

If left-wing ideas would be more popular if only those ignorant voters (such as those who voted the wrong way according to Isthmus Nov.  2) realized how wonderful those ideas are, then, for instance, Obamacare would not be polling as poorly as it is. (For that matter, Democrats in Recallarama would be campaigning on restoring public employee collective bargaining “rights,” but they’re not, are they?) Maybe voters outside the People’s Republic of Madison are smarter than Craver seems to think. Some may even realize that monthly U.S. job growth since Obama signed health care deform into law is one-tenth what it was before Obamacare became law. And liberals have yet to satisfactorily explain why, with enough exceptions for you to be able to count using both your hands, liberal talk has been smothered on commercial radio by conservative talk.

Craver’s blog mentions three presidents — Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower — as, he claims, liberal icons in the White House. (Which would have come as a surprise to Eisenhower. Then again, by today’s standards, Richard Nixon was a liberal. Which makes him an even worse president than people think.) I know of no non-socialist economist who would claim the economic system the U.S. had in World War II as the ideal. I’m also unaware of any liberal who believes detaining tens of thousands of Americans based on the shape of their eyes represents the highest of liberal ideals. And as lefty as Roosevelt and Truman may comparatively have been in their day, they ultimately fail the leftist test because they believed in our country and defending it from its enemies. The reaction of the American left to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s and radical Islam in this century says all you need to know about whether the left would ever actually fight to defend this country from foreign enemies.

Craver and readers who disagree with my philosophical bent may dismiss what I’ve written yesterday and today as the rantings of a relative of Joseph Goebbels. My views are my own, but I think my views represent the mainstream of political thought outside the People’s Republic of Madison than Craver’s do. The people I know and associate with — whether conservative, moderate or liberal — are not obsessed with politics, focus on their own lives instead of trying to control others’ lives, and seek to improve where they live by doing the work themselves instead of waiting for government to show up and bail them out.

Maybe Craver is right after all when he claims that there is no real American left. But if there isn’t, it’s because in the marketplace of ideas, the left lost, and deserved to lose, and deserves to keep losing.

Last week I wrote about the tensions between the Democratic Party and those who believe the Democratic Party isn’t liberal enough.

I excerpted a piece from Jack Craver of Isthmus and WTDY radio in Madison, a piece that combined contempt of the American voter, Democrats, and basically anyone else who isn’t as left-wing as Craver is.

Well, it turns out Craver must at least once in a while read this blog, because he decided to devote one of his columns to what I wrote about him.

First, some introduction: As a native of the People’s Republic of Madison and a UW graduate, I have read Isthmus on and off far longer than Craver has worked for Isthmus. My background with the weekly goes back to the days when it employed a writer with the pen name of Ursula, whose “Ursula Understands” column answered questions about relationships that few would even think to ask. And until his decision to work elsewhere, I was the occasional non-liberal foil for Isthmus’ Bill Lueders on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Week in Review program.

The proof that Isthmus has fulfilled its role in the Madison media landscape is demonstrated by The Capital Times’ decision to end daily publication and convert itself into a free tabloid that looks to many readers like Isthmus with a different name, though with similar stupid politics. Isthmus also has from time to time thrown a bone to its non-lefty readers by including columns from such people as Bob Williams, a Stevens Point PR executive who was part of Gov. Lee Sherman Dreyfus’ braintrust, Charlie Sykes (yes, that Charlie Sykes) and now David Blaska, who is that rarest of things — a former Capital  Times reporter and state employee who, as he describes himself, “swims upstream like a heretical flagellate among the collectivist majority.” The nice thing about publications like Isthmus is that you can read their entertainment writing and, if you are so inclined, skim or skip the left-wing crap in the front of the publication.

As for my hometown, I come by my antipathy for Madison honestly — by experience. Between events like the Madison teacher strike, watching tuition money wasted by instructors’ taking my time to pass on, unbidden, their own political beliefs, and the idiotic protest du jour on days of non-inclement weather on the Library Mall, I came to the conclusion that Dreyfus’ observation that Madison is 30 (now 77) square miles surrounded by reality is a gross understatement. It was a revelation when I left Madison and discovered people who didn’t reflexively hate people who shared my political beliefs and besides that had normal non-esoteric interests. (The newspaper’s quote of the week once came from the husband of one of our account  representatives: “Never mind Nicaragua; I want sweet corn!”) Then again, if I want to go back to the old days, I don’t have to go back to Madison; I need only go to Facebook.

Craver starts by bringing up an irrelevant comparison (for purposes of what I wrote) of Gov. James Doyle and his elected predecessor, Tommy Thompson. But there is no question that Thompson was no one’s idea of a fiscal conservative while he was in office. In the 1990s, with economic performance that made writers look for a phrase that sounded like “Roaring ’20s,” you could have your cake and eat it too, with both tax cuts and basically unrestrained spending. The term “structural deficit” may have existed before the 1990s, but it certainly got attention while Thompson was in office, but with tax revenues increasing every year despite tax cuts, well, few people and even fewer voters cared.

Craver also demonstrates most journalists’ affinity for math — not much — with this error:

Doyle spent most of his tenure trying to manage the structural deficit that Tommy Thompson created through his drastic expansion of state government spending on prisons, schools, health care and tax rebates. Doyle, who was raised in the “People’s Republic of Madison,” did what any other radical would do in the face of a budget deficit: Cut state jobs, furloughed state workers, closed a couple corporate loopholes, and raised taxes on incomes over $300,000 by..wait for it…one percent. The stuff of Lenin all right.

Democrats created a new tax bracket of 7.75 percent, above the old highest tax bracket of 6.75 percent.  That is not one percent, because 7.75 divided by 6.75 equals 1.148. In other words, Doyle and Democrats didn’t increase taxes by 1 percent, they increased taxes by 15 percent for income beyond $221,670 for single people and $295,550 for married people filing jointly. That group, I suppose, fits into what Democrats and their apparatchiks are calling the “super rich,” although they’re really not.

Craver makes a valid point that he buries in more left-wing cant:

Doyle did about the least amount one could expect a governor to do to change the current system. He slightly expanded BadgerCare for the poor, he very slightly increased taxes on the rich, and he slightly decreased the size of government. He maintained the status quo. What would you call somebody who does that? Maybe ol’ Webster can help us out. Here’s a word that seems to match: Conservative: Tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions.

If you want to claim that the terms “conservative” and “liberal” really don’t fit today’s ideologies, fine. The term “liberal” used to have “classical” before it, which describes those of us who believe in the individual rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. By that definition, today’s liberals aren’t liberals at all (except in such areas of personal freedom as drug use and abortion rights). Perhaps Craver prefers the term “neo-socialists.”

Doyle did, remember, start his term (and our sentence with him) in the Executive Residence by pledging “We should not, we must not, and I will not raise taxes,” before raising taxes $2.1 billion. (I’m surprised Craver didn’t make the obligatory George “Read My Lips” Bush reference, a pledge whose reversal went a long way to getting Bush fired by the voters.) The point that goes without acknowledgment or explanation on the left side is why, when Doyle increased taxes and nibbled at the margins of government growth (as if any taxpayer noticed), this state ended up with government finances worse on a proportional basis than only our neighbors to the immediate south, Illinois.

Craver makes another good point that he buries in rhetoric against me and, well, everyone else:

What is most irksome about Prestegard’s post, however, is that he uses relative terms, such as “raising/lowering taxes” to describe political philosophies. This is unfortunately an aspect of political rhetoric we see on both sides of the political spectrum, but it has become especially prevalent on the right, where candidates cannot talk about taxes — only about their wish to not to raise them.

For instance, as much as Republicans howled about the $5 billion Doyle tax hike, they still haven’t repealed them. Why not? Well, they’ve got a budget to balance. But according to their logic, they haven’t raised taxes. (Although they’ve made a few symbolic tax cuts and other corporate taxes that will go into effect in future years.)

Candidates on the right can’t talk about taxes? The fumes where Craver works must be getting really thick. Republican elected officials and candidates at every level talk about taxes all the time. One of the interesting facets of the looming default of our federal government, or whatever the media’s going to call it in the next week, is the issue of raising taxes vs. not raising taxes vs. reforming taxes as part of a debt ceiling deal. In the latter case, the approach the GOP has favored since the days of President Ronald Reagan has been to reduce rates and reduce or eliminate exemptions and deductions. In that case, some taxes would go up, but most would go down.

In that scenario, would demagogic politicians or candidates accuse Republicans of raising taxes because one tax went up even if 10 went down — even if the total tax take decreased? Of course. Accusing politicians of demagoguery is like accusing water of being wet. Political courage is in short supply.

If I asked a Republican (and I’d have to, because I am not a Republican) why they didn’t cut taxes, they probably would say that they had to balance the budget after the billions of dollars of deficits that are the legacy of the Doyle administration and the previous party that controlled the Legislature. (Note that Reagan cut existing taxes in 1981 before the tax reform of 1986.) If Walker and the GOP don’t substantially cut taxes by the 2014 election, voters will be justified in asking themselves why they voted for a party that didn’t do something about our ridiculously high (for what we get) state and local taxes.

This has gone on so long already that a second part seems appropriate. Tune in tomorrow, same bat time, same bat channel.