Archives for September 2011

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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I sometimes have mixed feelings about people in positions of authority who make serious mistakes and then apologize later. I admire them having the guts to admit they did the wrong things in the past, but I’m frequently still irritated by the arrogance of their original mistakes — and the consequences of those mistakes.

So I have mixed feelings about the news that a Connecticut Supreme Court justice has apologized to Susette Kelo for his role in taking her home away from her in the infamous case of Kelo v. City of New London. (I’m not going to outline the facts of the case since they’re so familiar to most people, but click the link for a summary if you need it.)

The case was the one that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and established the precedent that governments can basically take away private property from owners with pretty much any excuse they want to make up.

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