Well, this is nice and loony. Holly Lisle quits the SFWA because taxation is evil:
SFWA moved from Massachusetts to California for the purpose of allowing SFWA to claim tax dollars to offer grants. I’m aware that there were other—good—reasons for the organization’s move, but this particular poison pill in the changes made to SFWA requires me to walk away and never look back.
[…]
“Giving” grants taken from tax dollars is nothing less than theft of taxpayer money. This action forces people who have no interest in the careers of writers receiving grants to support those writers’ work, no matter how distasteful, badly written, or objectionable they might find it.
The first thing I don’t understand about this, apart from the general libertarian looniness of thinking of taxes as theft, is why Lisle waited so long, as the SFWA members voted about this in 2011. Why wait fopur years to get indignant?
But she also seems to have misunderstood what exactly the SFWA gained from this: not direct grants from the government, but tax deductability of donations to the organisations as well as the ability to hand grants rather than loans to members in dire straights. Both are fairly standard for charities and I don’t understand why this would be a problem even for the most hardcore of libertarians. She should be glad the government misses out on money it could’ve claimed.
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