Lately, I have been seeing various pro-Palestine posters and stickers taped to stop signs and streetlights around my town. One such example is the below poster, which was displayed at the pond near my house:
The first thing that stood out to me upon reading the poster was that the pro-Palestine groups or individuals who put this up poster chose, in arguing against using tax dollars to fund Israel’s weapons, to list different expenses that the tax dollars could be spent on instead, rather than arguing that the tax dollars simply be returned to the people from whom they were taken.
I guess there is nothing wrong with providing households with public housing or solar electricity, as long as the selection process is fair. Same with elementary school teachers and N95 masks.
But I’m puzzled that the flyer mentions specifically that 326 children could be provided with healthcare. Why isn’t providing adults with health services considered a worthy goal? Health services are something that apply to all ages equally, after all.
And advocating that tax money be used to cancel the student loan debt of 24 people is even more problematic. Canceling student loan debt is discriminatory and unfair. People made sacrifices to save up for college under the assumption that if they didn’t, they would have to take out loans and pay the money back. When loan debt is canceled, people who saved up are stuck having paid for college, while those who chose not to save are rewarded by having college made free. You simply cannot make a product free after some people have already paid for it, because that makes the product free for some people and not others. I would much rather see tax money spent on weapons for Israel, or almost anything for that matter, than this.
As I alluded to earlier, the best argument against spending $939,024 on Israel’s weapons is the fact that the government could instead simply return this money to taxpayers, or even better, not collect it in the first place. This solution is the simplest and fairest one. Allowing people to keep more of their own money benefits everyone, not just politically favored demographic categories. Why doesn’t the poster advocate for this instead?
Probably because benefiting politically favored demographic categories is exactly what the left values.
To end this post on a somewhat happy note, it seems that another Malden resident isn’t a fan of the pro-Palestine posters either. This is what happened to an identical poster on a nearby light post: