I’m more afraid of sanctimonious smart people than of stupid people

By David McElroy · August 1, 2012

For a long time, I’ve found myself wishing I could live on an island somewhere — or maybe even in a cave — to escape the stupid people who seem to be all around.

But when I think about it more seriously, I realize it’s not just stupid people who I want to escape. I want to escape from very bright people who insist that it’s their moral right to force me to obey their will.

There are some quite brilliant people — at least as measured by IQ — who have fallen for the civic religion that tells them it’s their moral right to make my decisions and take my money to use as they please. Most galling, perhaps, is their sanctimonious belief that I’m being “greedy” if I don’t want to obey them.

I watched an online discussion play out of Facebook Monday between siblings over the issue. One woman posted this graphic from the Bastiat Institute, which I had also posted Monday. It points out something that I’ve talked about before. If someone else claims a right to what you produce, you are a slave to that person or group to that extent.

After the woman posted the graphic, her two sisters disagreed with her, each for a different reason. It ended up mostly as a dialogue between the original poster and one of her sisters, who is a progressive left Democrat. They’re all three exceptionally intelligent women. But the leftist misses the moral point about the theft of property entirely. I think this part of the exchange was when I most wanted to bang my head against a wall:

You also miss the fact that many people don’t believe taxes are theft in the first place. It’s only “theft” if you happen to feel very strongly about wanting all your money for yourself, rather than viewing money as a necessary evil for keeping things running. The former viewpoint is also known as “greed,” the latter viewpoint means I’m less attached to having “my” green stuff and willing to let some of it float out there in the service of the greater good. You might be surprised how many people would pay taxes without a gun to their head.

This paragraph encapsulates so much of what the progressive left mindset is all about, so let’s look at it piece by piece.

She says that many people don’t believe taxes are theft. She’s right. Many people have been brainwashed into believing they have a moral obligation to obey people who give them orders. If those people would like to voluntarily pay the people who call themselves “government,” I have no objection. But how will they react when I opt out? And if this woman doesn’t believe it’s theft to take what belongs to someone else, would she mind if I come to her home and take what I please from her?

She next says that the only people who call taxation theft are those who don’t want to hand over their money. Well, duh. I feel the same way whenever my money is transferred to someone else. If I want the transaction to occur, it’s not theft. If I don’t want the transfer to occur, it is theft. That’s the very definition of theft. It’s the coercion involved that makes it theft.

Next, she pulls out the biggest weapon in the progressive arsenal. She says that anyone who wants to make his own decisions about his money — who doesn’t want it stolen — is greedy. So if a mugger holds a gun to you and demands your money, you’re greedy if you don’t happily hand it over. Right?

These people don’t understand what money is. They believe that money is some zero-sum game with a static supply of value. Instead, money is merely an abstract representation of little bits and pieces of your life that you’ve given to someone else in exchange for agreed-upon value. If someone pays me $500 for something, I’ve given something of value to someone else, either in the form of my time or my ideas or effort. (Usually a combination.) So when someone takes your money against your will, he’s taking bits and pieces of your life. He’s enslaving you.

This person argued that a moral person wants to give up his money in order to help others. I happen to know that the woman who posted the graphic is insanely generous with her money and effort, pouring untold dollars and untold hours into ministry efforts to improve other people’s lives. So it’s not that she objected to giving her money. She wasn’t trying to keep her money for herself. She wants it to be acknowledged that she has the right to decide for herself whether to give money and who to give the money to.

I ran across a quote from libertarian and comedian Penn Jillette Tuesday that makes this point very well:

It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.

People need to be fed, medicated, educated, clothed and sheltered, and if we’re compassionate we’ll help them, but you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right. There is great joy in helping people, but no joy in doing it at gunpoint.

If you want to be compassionate, give your money to help people. Get involved with ministries or non-profits that are in keeping with your beliefs. Do whatever you want to with your own money. You can even try to sell other people on the idea of voluntarily giving to the causes you believe in.

What you can’t morally do is demand that others make the same choices with their money that you do — and then use the power of a gun to take it from them if they decline to obey you.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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