Budget Watch Nevada

What does charity mean to you? To most people, it means giving money or time VOLUNTARILY to a cause you believe in strongly. To legislators, charity means FORCING you and me to pay higher taxes to give money to the bureaucrats in programs and agencies that THEY believe in strongly.

See the difference? One is accomplished through love and true generosity; one is done through special-interest nepotism and coercion.

We at Budget Watch Nevada are a philanthropy-loving, non-coercive group. We like to highlight examples of private sector, private citizen solutions to perceived public problems or issues. Take books for children, for example.

While some legislators are trying to fleece the taxpayers by allowing school districts to spend unused/unneeded DSA dollars on new library books outside of the normal library books budget (thus spending up to the maximum possible even when districts don’t need it for textbooks) local student groups and citizens are simply taking matters into their own hands when they see a need. As reported in the R-J, Las Vegas-area schools and students, along with individual and corporate sponsors, raised $30,000 and collected over 23,000 books to distribute to youngsters. A non-profit group called Spread the Word Nevada coordinated the activities.

Lesson to legislators: we don’t need you and your omnipotent government to do EVERYTHING for us. Sorry to disappoint you.

Mark Warden

Post Script: I dare say that most students would be better off reading some of the books in my library, with authors such as Ayn Rand, Robert Kiyosaki, John Ross, Andrew Carnegie, Adam Smith, Harry Browne, Henry Hazlitt, Stephen Covey, and Milton Friedman than much of the statist gobbledygook they currently get in classrooms. I’d be happy to donate them (again, voluntarily) to school libraries or summer programs for children and teenagers.