The Aspen Times posted an article today that totally amazes me. If someone can email me and tell me this is a hoax, I will actually be happy.

The article reports:

“If taxpayers didn’t pay for my housing, I couldn’t afford to live in Aspen. I’d have to live 20 minutes away and commute to my Aspen office.”

The person who spoke those words gets a $2 million house here in Aspen. Under the city’s “affordable housing” lottery, taxpayers pay 80 percent to 90 percent of the cost for people making as much as $186,000 a year. Some of that subsidy is paid for by people making, oh, about $34,000 a year.

The words quoted above were her defense of that scheme. In short, she says the scheme is good because it’s good for her.

It is one of the great ironies of our time that socialists no longer promote socialism as beneficial to society. Instead, they promote it as beneficial to themselves personally.

As in, “Let’s forgive student loans so that I don’t have to repay mine.” And, “Let’s raise taxes on everyone who makes more than I do.” And, “Let’s use taxpayer money to buy multimillion-dollar houses in resort towns for the upper middle class because I want one.”

Maybe it’s time to officially change the name from “socialism” to “selfish-ism.”

It gets worse:

Speaking of cronyism and conflicts of interest among the “in” crowd, what are the ethical implications of City Council members who are living in taxpayer-subsidized housing making decisions to route additional taxpayer money to those houses?

For their sake, I hope those City Council members have an ironclad legal opinion on the legality and ethics of their conflict of interest. And I hope it’s not an opinion that compounds the conflict. By that, I mean it had better be an opinion from an independent lawyer and not one written at taxpayer expense by their subordinates in the City Attorney’s Office.

Wow. I think they need a new City Council!