David McElroy

For much of my life, I’ve been stymied by the question of what I was. I could tell people how I made my living, but I wasn’t sure how to define myself. I went through a serious identity crisis when I was 29 years old.

I had been operating a publishing company for about three years, but the company failed and I had to shut it down. It was the first major failure of my life, and it threw me into a tailspin. Up until that time, I had defined myself as a businessman and as a newspaper editor, but everything felt hollow at that point. I realized that I had a serious question: “What am I?”

I spent the next year in a general state of depression and despair. I’m not sure how I made it through that period. Nothing seemed to matter. And every day, the question from the face in the mirror mocked me: “Who are you, David?”

After considering and discarding a million ways of defining myself, I finally found an answer to my existential crisis, but that answer scared me even more than the nothingness of the depression had. It felt true, but I somehow felt like a fraud to say it. I was an artist.

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When I was in college, I had a good friend who was struggling with his sexuality. He and I had gone to church together for years, and he eventually started having more conversations with me about the morality of homosexuality. He never said he was struggling with his own identity, but it was obvious.

After college, he joined the Army and became a Green Beret, which was a shock to all of us who had known him as an artistic and laid back guy. He was in the Army for a couple of enlistments and did quite well.

He also “came out” as gay while he was in the Army. A number of the other soldiers knew it and some proportion of them were gay, too. Everybody knew it, apparently. Regardless how you feel about whether sexual orientation is a matter of choice or not, I can’t figure out why it has anything to do with whether someone is capable of taking a job that requires him to kill people or fulfill other specific jobs to support people who kill people. It’s just not relevant to the job.

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Let’s talk about fairness in the tax system. The top 10 percent of income-earners pay 70 percent of all federal income taxes. Almost half of all Americans — 46 percent of them — do not pay a single nickel in federal income tax. Doesn’t that sound grossly unfair?

The productive people who earn a lot of money are paying far more than their share — seven times as much as an equal distribution would suggest. They’re subsidizing everybody else. And almost half the people are freeloading off the wealthy. Isn’t that the real unfairness in the system?

Apparently not, according to Barack Obama and progressive left Democrats. They want the people who are already shouldering a hugely disproportionate portion of the burden to pay even more. Why? Isn’t it ultimately the simple fact that they don’t like it that some people make so much more money than others? They’re not going to be happy until we’re all one big socialist family — except for themselves and their buddies of course. They don’t mind those people getting special deals.

First, our high income earners are already paying massively more than they should, because people shouldn’t have to subsidize each other. Even if you believe in a coercive state and a coercive tax system — which I don’t — people should pay only for their share of the services produced by government. For some reason, people are hung up on calculating the “price” to be paid for government services in percentages of income. But even by that measure, high-income earners are already paying plenty, according to this “fact check from the Associated Press.

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