The Dispatch’s Ann Fisher had a piece last week detailing spending out of public coffers by Attorney General Marc Dann and his predecessors, Republican and Democrat, for a booth, sponsorship and a parade slot in Columbus’s Fourth of July festivities.

Good stuff, but what puts Fisher in the running for our Pistol of the Week award was her call on the dodge by Dann’s office suggesting that the spending was ok as it wasn’t using tax dollars:

I say the court settlements generated by the good lawyers in the office of the Ohio attorney general and then channeled into a special fund don’t qualify as tax revenue per se.

But it is the people’s money, even if it didn’t arrive freshly minted from the hip pockets of the taxpayers.

The people pay the taxes that are spent to run the office. The lawyers in that office work on behalf of the people. Their wages are paid by the people.

Any jack they nail in the process belongs to the people.

Fisher restates one of our findings from the 2006 Ohio Piglet Report: for the individual there is no difference between the dollars taken from you by government through direct taxation and the dollars taken from you through the civil justice system or any other of the several coercive means available to government. Either way it is a loss of your economic freedom and government’s gain at your expense.

And it is still wasteful spending regardless if the money came from taxes or from fees, charges, settlements, fines or all other means. After all, government has nothing to spend it hasn’t first taken from someone else.

Government revenue that doesn’t qualify as “tax revenue per se” was 45 percent of state spending in 2006, or almost $19 billion. Politicians need to be held as accountable for non-tax spending as they are tax dollar spending.

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