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Tom Messina owns a restaurant. Or at least he thought he did.

For the past 20 years, Messina has operated Tom's Diner on Colfax Avenue in downtown Denver, Colorado. Running the popular 24-hour restaurant—located just a few blocks from the Colorado state capital—is demanding work that Messina is looking to move on from as he nears retirement age.

"I'm a restaurateur who's worked his life flipping pancakes and selling eggs," says Messina. "I have a beautiful family I want to spend time with. I just turned 60 and I want to do something else."

Messina's plan had always been to finance his retirement by selling his restaurant. That dream looked like it would become a reality earlier this year when Alberta Company offered him $4.8 million for his property, which the Colorado-based developer plans to turn into an 8-story apartment building complete with shops on the ground floor.

The price was right for Messina and Alberta's plans fit perfectly with Denver's 2010 rezoning of the property, which marked it as part of an urban center neighborhood fit for denser, mixed-use development.

Everything was going swimmingly until Denver's historic preservationists got wind of Messina's evil plan to sell his property and retire after two decades of serving Denver residents in order for new business owners and residents to work and live where his diner currently sits.

When Alberta Company applied for what is known as a Certificate of Non-Historic Status, which would allow the building to be demolished and redeveloped, five community members assisted by the local preservationist nonprofit Historic Denver filed an application to designate Messina's restaurant a historic landmark. If granted, this landmark status would prevent the building's redevelopment into apartments, drastically reducing the value of Messina's property.

In their 30-plus page application to the city, these activists argued that Messina's restaurant—first built in 1967 as part of the now-extinct White Spots restaurant chain—is a classic example of mid-century Googie architecture and thus worthy of protection.

The same application notes that seven White Spot restaurants were built in the Denver-area in the 1960s. Three of them are still standing, including another one on the same avenue as Messina's restaurant. Nevertheless, these preservationists argue that Messina's building is a particularly good example of Googie tilted roofs and expansive glass windows.

These same activists note that a 2008/2009 survey marked Tom's Diner as eligible for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places, and the Historic Denver Guidebook includes an entry on the building.

In a July 16 report, city planning staff recommended that Messina's building be given landmark status. The following week, the city's Landmark Preservation Commission, at a public hearing where Messina pleaded with them to leave his property alone, voted unanimously to recommend landmarking the restaurant. The landmark application now goes to the city council, which will make a final determination.

Messina describes that decision as "kick in the gut." The value he might lose from a landmark designation, he says, would jeopardize the retirement he's worked so hard for.

"I'm sure people can imagine how it would feel," he tells Reason. "You plan for something and you think it's yours to do as you wish and then this pops up."

In the run-up to the city council's decision, preservation activists have said they want to work out a mutually beneficial arrangement that will allow Messina to sell his building while saving the building aesthetic they value so much.

"We met with Tom today to present him with some creative and viable solutions. We know this is a life-changing opportunity for him, which is why our focus is on a solution that meets his needs and protects the identity and history of the Colfax corridor," Jessica Caouette, one of the five people who signed onto the landmarking application, said in a statement posted to her Facebook page last week.

Messina says that he's had several meetings with activists where they've presented him with alternate designs for his property that would have apartments go on the vacant parts of his lot while leaving the current restaurant structure intact.

But building only on the 60 percent of his land unoccupied by the diner, says Messina, would still greatly reduce its value. And that's assuming he could even find a developer who'd be willing to build what activists are looking for.

In addition to the personal cost this would visit on Messina, it would also deprive Denver—which is rapidly becoming one of the country's most expensive cities—of additional housing.

The city council is scheduled to discuss the landmark application for Messina's property next week and will vote on whether to grant it later in the month.

Using historic landmark designations to prevent unwanted development is not uncommon, and is often done over the objections of the property owner in question. Similar cases include the Strand bookstore in New York City and the fight over the Showbox concert venue in Seattle.

For Messina, the issue boils down to the fact that this is his building, and he should get to decide what happens to it, not a city council or neighborhood activists. He tells Reason "that something I've worked for my entire life could be decided this way is very unsettling."

Last fall and winter, Jessica Barron and Kenny Wylie let one of their teenaged son's friends, who described himself as homeless, stay at their house in Granite City, Illinois. At first the teenager, Jason Lynch, slept at the house intermittently; later, as the weather got colder, he often was there several nights a week. Barron and Wylie's reward for that act of kindness, if the city has its way, will be government-ordered eviction from their home.

After Lynch broke into a local restaurant last May, the city invoked its "crime-free housing" ordinance, which demands eviction when "any member of lessee's household" commits a crime. In this case, the crime did not happen at the rental property, and Barron and Wylie did not participate in it, know about it ahead of time, or help Lynch evade the police afterward. In fact, Barron turned Lynch in after she found him hiding in her basement. But none of that matters under Granite City's ordinance, which holds tenants strictly liable for the crimes of household members, including temporary residents like Lynch.

"This effort to make an innocent family homeless violates the federal Constitution at a bedrock level," the Institute for Justice argues in a federal lawsuit it filed yesterday on behalf of Barron, Wylie, and their landlord, Bill Campbell, who does not want to evict them. The complaint says the crime-free housing ordinance violates their due process rights, the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection, the Fifth Amendment's ban on taking property for "public use" without "just compensation," and freedom of association, which is protected by the First Amendment.

Barron and Wylie, who have three teenaged children, have been living in the house at 1632 Maple Street in Granite City for two years. They had planned to buy it eventually under a rent-to-own contract with Campbell. But the city is demanding that he abrogate that contract and threatening to revoke his rental license if he fails to do so. One police officer even threatened to arrest Campbell, although it's not clear what the charge would be.

If Barron and Wylie are evicted, they will lose their property interest in the home and will have to find somewhere else where they and their children can live, which may be difficult in light of the eviction. "They do not own or rent any other property," the complaint says. "If they are kicked out of their home, they are not sure where they would go. They do not have the resources to immediately rent another property. They would likely need to rely on charity from family to avoid rendering themselves and their children homeless."

Campbell, meanwhile, considers Barron and Wylie good tenants, is happy with their arrangement, and would like it to continue. If the city forces him to evict them, that process will cost money, as will the effort to find new tenants, and he will lose rental income in the meantime.

Given these costs, the Institute for Justice argues, Granite City is depriving Barron, Wylie, and Campbell of their property without due process or just compensation. The lawsuit also describes three equal protection violations: The city is arbitrarily treating residents who have rent-to-own contracts differently from residents who have mortgages or own their homes outright; arbitrarily treating Campbell differently from all the other landlords in Granite City, who unlike him are free to accept Barron and Wylie as tenants; and arbitrarily treating Barron and Wylie differently from "everyone else in the world (except for Jason Lynch)," who, like the couple, "have no responsibility for Jason Lynch's crime." These distinctions cannot survive "any level of scrutiny," the complaint says.

The attempted eviction also implicates freedom of association, I.J. argues. "The only reason that Granite City is trying to force Jessica and Kenny out of their home is that they allowed Jason Lynch to stay there," the complaint says. "Allowing a teenager to stay in your home to shelter him from the cold is a form of association. Punishing Jessica and Kenny for crimes committed by Jason Lynch is punishing them for their decision to associate with Jason Lynch."

In 2002 the Supreme Court upheld a "one strike" public housing policy under which  tenants were evicted based on drug-related activity involving a household member, even if the lessees were not involved in it and did not know about it. But that was a situation where the government was "acting as a landlord of property that it owns, invoking a clause in a lease to which respondents have agreed and which Congress has expressly required." Here the government is trying to force eviction over the objections of a private landlord.

"No one should be punished for a crime someone else committed," says I.J. senior attorney Robert McNamara. "That simple notion is at the heart of our criminal justice system—that we are all innocent until proven guilty. And yet Granite City is punishing an innocent family for a crime committed by someone they barely knew."

SINGLE PAYER, SINGLE DECIDER: Canadian Health Care Refused to Pay for Disabled Father’s Care, but Happily Paid for His Assisted Suicide.

I am perfectly willing to believe that some school districts somewhere have spending too low to ever provide the education we expect in 2019.  But after sending my kids to a private school that did a fabulous job with kids and whose tuition was lower per student than the spending in most public schools, I have become suspicious of pleas for more and more money.  It seems that lack of money is ALWAYS the claimed problem at public schools.

In fact, I am increasingly convinced the problem is not lack of money but how the money is spent.  As the percentage of staff in most public schools who are administrators rather than teachers climbs over 50%, many public schools are doing exactly what every other government bureaucracy does -- starve spending for actual public services in favor of feeding a growing, increasingly well-paid administrative staff.

Here is this week's example.  Via Zero Hedge:

The Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) has set up a donation page on their website to raise money and supply classrooms with fans this school year because of 60 Baltimore City School (BCS) buildings don't have air conditioning.

"It's no secret that Baltimore's students have had to weather the spectrum of extreme temperatures in their classrooms. We've all seen the photos of kindergarteners sitting in their coats and mittens at their morning circle. The reverse is true when school is back in session at the end of summer, when schools' internal temperatures have been measured at over 100 degrees. The Baltimore Teachers Union knows that educators' working conditions are students' learning conditions," BTU said on the donation page under the title "Donate to the BTU Fan Drive."

You see this all the time -- teachers begging the public for donations to help them through shortages of basic school supplies.  The blame is always put on public funding -- obviously Baltimore public schools are starved for cash and forced to beg for simple infrastructure items like fans.  But wait:

Of the 100 largest school systems based on enrollment in the United States, the five school systems with the highest spending per pupil in 2017 were New York City School District in New York ($25,199), Boston City Schools in Massachusetts ($22,292), Baltimore City Schools in Maryland ($16,184), Montgomery County School District in Maryland ($16,109), and Howard County School District in Maryland ($15,921). Maryland had one additional school system in the top 10, making it four of the top 10 school systems in the United States.

In the public recreation field, I call this borrowing from the infrastructure.  Infrastructure maintenance and spending is starved in favor of richer deals for growing administrative staffs.  That is why most major parks agencies have billions of dollars in deferred maintenance.  Transit agencies apparently do the same thing.

BRIAN CATES: “If you’ve followed SpyGate from the beginning – and I have – then you know that it came out months ago via anonymous sources in news reports that all of Hillary Clinton’s St. Dept. emails were being automatically copied & sent to a Chinese-related email account. So what changed today? Documentation was released that verifies these anonymously sourced prior news accounts.”

I TRY TO BE OPTIMISTIC BUT THEN I READ THIS: Lawrence M. Ludlow returned to teaching high school after a 35 year absence and found … well, the title of his piece in The American Thinker says it all – “Worse Than Ever: Government Schools After 35 Years.”

PETER THIEL: ‘Globalist’ Google Is In Bed With Chinese Military; Must Be Investigated By FBI and CIA.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: I used to think gun control was the answer. My research told me otherwise.

Leah Libresco is a statistician and former newswriter at FiveThirtyEight, a data journalism site. She is the author of “Arriving at Amen.”

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.

When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gunowner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, arocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.

As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.

The thing to understand is that gun control isn’t about saving lives. It’s about humiliating the deplorables and keeping them in their place. It’s culture war of the crassest kind.

So I just got a 24 hour ban from Facebook for Violating Community Standards, because I insulted the imaginary people of an imaginary country.  Which is kinda hilarious.

Long version. About a year ago an author friend of mine was putting up snippets of his alternative history story, in which the fictional country (Neu Saxony) experienced a terrorist attack.  One guy thought it was real, and a whole bunch of us ended up having fun arguing on behalf of our made up countries about who was really responsible.  It was pretty funny.

I ,of course, came to the aid of noble Krasnovia, a nation of peaceful sandwich makers, who were being falsely accused of these heinous crimes.  (We were obviously framed)

So a year later the memory reminder thing on FB is bringing this back up. Another friend of mine created this post:

Remember your brothers killed by Krasnovians. #OnlyGoodKrasnovianIsADeadKrasnovian

Now let me share with you the silliness which ensued, which resulted in my terrible violation of community standards.

• Eudyptes Diabolicus: the media never warns people about the krasnovian menace. I think they’ve been corrupted
• Jarrad E Truog: Eudyptes Diabolicus collusion
• Larry Correia: I am disgusted by your Krasnoviphobia.
• Jarrad E Truog: Larry Correia look man you weren’t there when the Horde cut down my men
• Eudyptes Diabolicus:  It’s not a phobia. It’s rational caution
• Larry Correia: Krasnovians are a proud people, known for their fine sandwiches, and genocide, but mostly the sandwiches.
• Cathe Smith:  If only they could approach the genocide with the same careful attention to detail that they approach sandwich making.
• Jarrade E Truog:  Larry Correia I didn’t think we had a Krasnovian Apologist here.
• Larry Correia:  I’m a member KAIR. Krasnovian American I something Relations.
• Jarrad E Truog:  I knew it.
• Cathe Smith: Krasnovian American Interfellowship Relations
• Jarrad E Truog:  The Neu Saxony princess was murdered by Krasnovian Separatists #NeuSaxonyStrong
• Larry Correia: That’s a conspiracy theory! There were Krasnovian immigrant members of the brave Uhlans lost that terrible day.
• Eudyptes Diabolicus: suicide assassins don’t get to be counted as “lost”
• CJ Hyatt: As a card carrying Mojavian, Krasnovia can ETADIK.
• Jarrad E Truog: LOL
• Harman Meyerhoff: Free Nogovia!
• Larry Correia: It’s sad, just because you invade a country and genocide a bunch of Pinelandians one time, everybody forgets about all the wonderful things Krasnovians have given to the world… like the waffle maker, or… uh… well, several different AK-47 variants.
• Jarrad E Truog:  I mean they are Communists so are they really people?
• Cathe Smith: Admittedly, the use of a waffle maker in perpetuating a genocide was a new spin on things.
• Larry Correia: Indeed, those Pinelandian dogs never saw that coming! HA HA! Oh, wait… err… I mean, that was a tragic misunderstanding over a border incident, in which the peaceful Krasnovians were unjustly attacked.

• Eudyptes Diabolicus: Just because those pinelandian scum are scum doesn’t excuse krasnovian aggression
• Cathe Smith: The Pinelandians aggressively planted Pinelandian pine trees on Krasnovian soil.
• Larry Correia: It wasn’t aggression. It was self defense! Our column of T-80s were just minding their own business when set upon by savage Pinelandian villagers.
• Jarrad E Truog: Were they minding their own business in Pinelandia?

And my comment which got deleted for violating community standards…

• Larry Correia: It was a “disputed” area, originally settled by peaceful Krasnovian sandwich makers, and then invaded and occupied by filthy Pinelandian goat rapists.

##

So there you go. I’m banned from Facebook for 24 hours. Rest easy everyone, Mark Zuckerberg is on the case! Facebook will not tolerate satirical posts about a bunch of genocidal sandwich makers saying cruel things about people from an imaginary country.

I will admit, when I saw the ban window pop up for my cruel attack on Pinelandians, it was the best laugh I’ve had in a while.

REMEMBER, THIS IS HOW SINCERE DEMOCRATS ARE ABOUT LIMITING “GUN VIOLENCE:” Democrats reject push to alert ICE when illegal immigrants fail firearm background checks.

BRITISH LAW ENFORCEMENT PRIORITIES: Police warn people mocking convicted drug dealer’s hairstyle they could be prosecuted.

THIS REALLY DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE. Capitalism is Saving the Planet: Minnesota Forests Are Flourishing.

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… is from page 281 of David Friedman’s excellent 1996 book, Hidden Order:

The U.S. government does not exist; there is no benevolent elderly gentleman watching over us. What we call “government action” is not the act of a person but the outcome of a political marketplace. In that market as in others, rational individuals act to pursue their own ends – under a set of rules rather different from the rules governing the private market.

DBx: Quite so.

Those who wish to turn ever-more decision-making power over to government – and, hence, to take such power from individuals operating in their private spheres (including, but not limited to, private markets) – believe this bizarre notion: when Jones has the power to spend Smith’s money and to order Smith about, Smith’s welfare is improved compared to when the power to spend Smith’s money and to determine how Smith will act is reserved to Smith, with Jones’s authority confined to his – Jones’s – own business.

In private-property markets each individual has the power to say “no,” and when each individual says “yes,” that individual spends only his or her own money. Also, in private-property markets each individual’s choices are significant: if Smith chooses to buy a new car, Smith gets the new car that he chooses; if Smith chooses not to buy a new car, Smith gets no new car.

These basic features of private-property markets, along with a handful of other features that are embodied in the common law, ensure not that markets operate “perfectly,” but that the market process is always in action to generally improve the operation and outcomes of markets.

The political marketplace is nearly the exact opposite. In the political marketplace, Jones spends Smith’s money, and Smith has no real power to say no. Nor is Smith’s choices ever genuinely significant (unless, of course, Smith becomes one of the relatively small percentage of people who succeed in grabbing hold of political power).

If a malevolent all-powerful being were intent on designing a market that is destined to abuse the vast bulk of people, that devil could do no better than to impose on his victims majoritarian politics largely unconstrained by constitutional rules. This devil – being, of course, ill-mannered, and evilly-intentioned – would seek to destroy private-property markets.

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… is from page 85 of Benjamin A. Rogge’s March 16th, 1956, speech titled “When to See Your Economist,” as this speech is reprinted in A Maverick’s Defense of Freedom, the 2010 collection of Ben Rogge’s essays that is edited by Dwight Lee:

Others deny that the economic problem need exist even today on the grounds that our production potential is so great that we have the ability to satisfy all the wants of everybody. This thesis is often stated thusly: We have now solved the problem of production; all that’s left is to solve the problem of distribution. Gentlemen, this is not only arrant nonsense, but productive of great mischief as well. I submit that the gap between what people want and what they’re able to get is little narrower today than it was three thousand years before the birth of Christ, and I predict that five thousand years from now it will be but little narrower than it is today.

My argument rests on man’s virtuosity and elasticity as a wanter. How many of you have wanted a television set twenty years ago, in 1936? How many of you now look on it as more or less essential to the good life? As Gandhi said, “Today man wants to visit England; tomorrow he will want to visit the moon.” This analysis led Gandhi to reject the goal of getting more, and to recommend the goal of wanting less. It leads me only to accept the existence and permanence of the economic problem. I may have fears about the future of the economist, but of one thing I’m certain: he’s not going to be made obsolete by an early disappearance of the economic problem.

DBx: The reality identified here by Ben Rogge is the reason why good economists pay no attention to so-called “happiness studies.” Human wants being unlimited, each and every person – apart from, perhaps, the rare Gandhi – always experiences a vast array of unsatisfied wants. This lack of satisfaction is felt, by many, as a kind of unhappiness – at least as a kind of unhappiness that will strike many people to report it as such on “happiness surveys.”

The good economist understands that ever-greater prosperity does not bring ever-greater felt happiness. But the good economist also understands that people are indeed better off, in a real sense, the higher is their material standard of living. Greater material prosperity brings opportunities to experience new wants, wants that people less prosperous never experience.  Inability to satisfy all of these new wants makes many people feel “unhappy.” But were these same people less materially prosperous, they would be at least equally “unhappy” for want of ability to satisfy needs that their current higher level of material prosperity enables them to satisfy.

Another piece of reality revealed by Rogge’s point is that worries about technology or trade destroying opportunities to work are misguided. As long as human beings have unmet desires and unfilled wants, human beings will have opportunities to work.

SOCIALISM MEANS CARING: Let fat people die to save NHS money, says Michael Buerk.

MICHAEL YON: “Tonight I talked for about an hour with a ‘Google Snowden’ who will soon go public. A deep insider. Fascinating stuff. I cannot say much now other than pay attention to what is coming out starting in a week or so from now. Source said many interesting things about how Chinese are flooding into tech companies like Google, and some of the incredible techniques they can use to brainwash or at least mislead millions of people.”

I suppose we’ll wind up nationalizing Google, for national security reasons.

DANA LOESCH: Why Red Flag Laws Are Not A Good Solution To Mass Shootings.

The murderers in Parkland, Florida and Dayton, Ohio, are two recent examples. These two monsters were walking red flags with access to firearms and yet, with all of the laws available to adjudicate them ineligible to carry or purchase guns, they continued unabated until the unthinkable. They weren’t stopped.

In fact, the Parkland murderer was coddled by a school district that pretended a refusal to report crime (thereby suppressing their criminal statistics) was the same thing as reducing crime, and they received federal dollars for it. That murderer’s violent behavior (beating his adoptive mother, sending death threats to fellow students, and putting a gun to another person’s head, to list a few offenses) was so well known, teachers had a backup plan in case he decided to become threatening, and he was searched every morning after arriving at school.

We didn’t need red flag laws to get either of these individuals before they committed their crimes. According to numerous local reports, had the previous Broward County sheriff performed his duties, case number 18-1958 would not have been able to legally purchase the rifle he used to carry out his evil. From everything reported on the Dayton murderer, it seems barring him from legal purchase or possession of firearms by adjudicating him mentally unfit was entirely possible.

The point of red flag laws isn’t to protect the innocent, but to cast suspicion on anyone exercising their Second Amendment rights.

HONG KONG: It’s Now A Revolution. “In Hong Kong, revolution is in the air. What started out as an unexpectedly large demonstration in late April against a piece of legislation—an extradition bill—has become a call for democracy in the territory as well as independence from China and the end of communism on Chinese soil.”

Plus: “Some of the protest messages were impossible to miss. In Wanchai’s Golden Bauhinia Square, a magnet for tourists from other parts of China, kids spray-painted a statue with provocative statements such as ‘The Heavens will destroy the Communist Party’ and ‘Liberate Hong Kong.'”

WHO HIRES THESE REPORTERS? THIS IS REALLY INCOMPETENT: “Washington Post Glibly Dismisses Mental Illness as Cause of Mass Shootings.”

WHY IS GOOGLE SO EVIL? Google Memo Claims Discrimination, Retaliation Against Pregnant Women at Tech Giant.

CHARGING YOUR LAPTOP AT MCDONALD’S IS ONE THING: Florida Man Parks His Tesla Overnight on a Stranger’s Lawn to Steal Electricity: The owner of the Tesla Model 3 used an extension cord to plug in to a complete stranger’s outlet for 12 hours. “Driving an electric car can sometimes make a calm person slide into bouts of extreme desperation. That may be the kindest way to describe why a Florida man ditched his Tesla on another person’s lawn, stole electricity from that house, and walked off to party with friends in the middle of the night. . . . Please do not be this pathetic while driving an EV.”

I INVOKED MY CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO DRINK A FIFTH:

NOPE. I’VE BEEN SHOWN NO REASON TO TRUST THE FEDS ON THIS, AND PLENTY OF REASONS NOT TO. AG Barr Says Consumers Should Accept Security Risks of Encryption Backdoors.

HEY, WE TOLD YOU THERE WERE BARGAINS GALORE: Amazon Accidentally Sold $13,000+ Camera Gear For $100 On Prime Day.

WHEN YOU SLAG THE U.S. SPACE PROGRAM FOR INSUFFICIENT DIVERSITY — AND YOU CAN’T EVEN GET THAT RIGHT:

Give the Soviet Union credit though — one place where it excelled was in getting good propaganda value from the New York Times. And that remains true even when it’s dead and gone.

BUT OF COURSE: Compassionate Christian Votes For Government To Steal Money From His Neighbor And Give It To The Poor.

A lot of Christians are criticized for not being very compassionate to the poor. But you can’t say that about Larry DeManson, a local believer who is so committed to charity for those less fortunate than himself that he always votes for government to steal money from his neighbor and give it to the impoverished.

“The Bible calls us to take care of the poor,” he told reporters, “but that’s tough because it costs money. But then I was looking over at my neighbors and realized they have more money than I do—why not just vote for the government to confiscate their wealth and give it to the poor? Problem solved.”

DeManson no longer has a guilty conscience whenever he sees people in need.

“I don’t personally have to do anything,” he said. “The government does it for me.”

It’s the Babylon Bee, so it’s satire. Sort of.