Gold Dome Abuse

If you are an auto dealer in Georgia, you can have anything you want, if you give Georgia legislators enough money.  First you have to make your case that your automobile dealership is a home grown Georgia business, a family business, funded by Georgia Banks and serving Georgia customers.  Are you ready to get out the fried chicken, grits, pecan pie, watermelon and Georgia Bulldogs flag yet ?

In 2013, we all went through the tyranny of the auto cartel when they convinced the Georgia Legislature to stop allowing Georgia citizens to buy used cars from each other without paying a sales tax. Furthermore, they wanted buyers to pay their own taxes directly to the county tax collector’s office when they went in to get a license plate. In the old days when you bought a car from a dealer, he would put your sales taxes on the bill, so you could pay it off with your car payment. 

Now our Georgia auto dealers are complaining that Tesla, the electric car company sells their car direct to customers. Of course there is a Georgia law that forbids that and these dealers want their legislature to keep the law in their favor.

Remember, our laws are built to ensure that elected officials have full campaign war chests, in case any principled challengers run against them and this case is just the tip of the iceberg.

Lets look at what makes a free market.  It is a market where you can make things and sell them or offer services to anybody. That principle would allow you to buy from anybody, right ?

Our transformation from a free market to a regulated market came about a long time ago when a farmer wanted to grow his own feed for his animals. The feed store complained and filed suit and that was the end of that. Nobody believed the court decision that the farmer could not grow his own feed because it too sales away from the feed store. But nobody complained with enough money to reverse it.  Now our contorted world of middle-men with campaign contributions has all but ended what was once our free market system.

Instead of reversing that court decision as a violation of free market principles, legislators and special interest groups started thinking up laws that would give them monopoly power and protect themselves from any would-be competitors.

It was a campaign money machine where politicians could refuse to answer voters’ questions in meetings and not really meet the voters to campaign.  They just raised a lot of money to pay for signs, TV commercials, attack ads, glossy 4 color brochures, robo-calls, mailings, dirty tricks, lawsuits, indictments, accusations, rumors, lies and silence and they would win.  I can understand why politicians and special interests would fight to keep this kind of efficient corruption, wouldn’t you ?

As for the auto dealers, these are the kind of guys who would support Georgia initiating a tax on anything you buy over the internet, the last free bastion of our free market.

If Georgia upholds the monopoly power our auto dealers want, they will vote for an internet tax as well. Brick and mortar retailers would be the ones to push for an internet sales tax for the same reasons using the same campaign contribution scam.

Norb Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader