{"id":13407,"date":"2012-03-15T12:47:20","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T16:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=13407"},"modified":"2012-03-15T15:17:22","modified_gmt":"2012-03-15T19:17:22","slug":"putting-a-face-to-the-ruin-of-the-death-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/13407\/putting-a-face-to-the-ruin-of-the-death-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting a Face to the Ruin of the Death Tax"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conservatives could probably learn a thing or two from Saul Alinsky. Bear with me here. While Alinsky may have promoted thuggish means in the service of repugnant ends, it doesn’t mean the man didn’t have some genuine insights into political strategy that — applied with a dose of morality — could help the right.<\/p>\n

One of Alinsky’s tactics (to be specific, it’s actually part of the 11th rule for radicals)<\/a> is to personalize attacks on your opposition (i.e., go after a specific individual rather than an abstract entity). This also works, however, in reverse. When you’re trying to portray the suffering caused by big government, use a human interest example rather than generically inveighing against state excesses.<\/p>\n

My friends over at the Beacon Center of Tennessee (I worked there back when it was the Tennessee Center for Policy Research) have put this principle to great use in a new video that makes both the moral and economic case for abolishing the Volunteer State’s death tax. In the story of Roger Blackwood, a 77 year old Tennessee farmer whose family stands to lose the products of his life’s work because of the estate tax, they’ve found a compelling narrative that underscores an important point: the estate tax amounts to the outright theft of a family’s legacy. This is, by my lights, utterly brilliant:<\/p>\n

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Conservatives could probably learn a thing or two from Saul Alinsky. Bear with me here. While Alinsky may have promoted thuggish means in the service of repugnant ends, it doesn’t mean the man didn’t have some genuine insights into political strategy that — applied with a dose of morality — could help the right. One […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3432,575,3431,1870,71,2326],"class_list":["post-13407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-beacon-center-of-tennessee","tag-death-tax","tag-estate-tax","tag-saul-alinsky","tag-taxes","tag-tennessee"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13407"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13431,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13407\/revisions\/13431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}