David McElroy

What does it mean to make an investment? It’s pretty straightforward. It’s money that you put into something in hopes of getting a return on it in the future. If I choose to invest $10,000 in XYZ Co., that’s an investment. If someone takes my money by threat of force and spends in on XYZ Co., that’s theft. Some politicians don’t know the difference.

As I expected, the City Council in my suburb raised our sales tax to 10 percent earlier this week. I talked about it when it was first proposed and then when the City Council held a public hearing about it, so I don’t have a lot new to say about it. But something the City Council president said at the vote in favor of the tax irritated me:

Council President Wayne Taylor said the increase is “about reinvesting in the community we all love.”

This is pure arrogance and stupidity. It’s using words that have a clear and definite meaning to cover up what’s really going on. The politician is using force to take money from people in order to spend it the way he wants to spend it. It’s no different than the Mob taking money from people through coercion and then buying businesses with the cash. It’s theft, regardless what the thief does with the money.

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Hillary Clinton’s 1996 book, “It Takes a Village,” is based on the idea that children need to be cared for by an entire community, not just by their own families. She said it was based on an African proverb — “It takes a village to raise a child” — but there are questions about whether it even originated there.

Now it turns out that the maxim isn’t even true. A University of Michigan researcher says that African kids raised in nuclear families do just as well as those raised by extended families or “villages.”

“In the African villages that I study in Mali, children fare as well in nuclear families as they do in extended families,” said Beverly Strassmann, professor of anthropology and faculty associate at the UM Institute for Social Research. “There’s a naïve belief that villages raise children communally, when in reality children are raised by their own families and their survival depends critically on the survival of their mothers.”

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U.S. military forces have spent a decade fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but most Americans still don’t have a clear idea why those wars happened. What’s worse, it’s considered unacceptable in some circles to tell the truth about why terrorists from the Middle East attacked the United States 10 years ago. People honestly prefer to remain in the dark about it.

When the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 happened, it was understandable that many people were emotional and frightened. I can even understand — if not condone — the fact that many Americans were willing to support irrational foreign and military policies under such stress. But I have no sympathy for people who refuse to face the truth after this long.

Republican presidential contender Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who’s been trying to have an honest, adult conversation about why the terrorist attacks happened and why the two wars happened. Shamefully, voters are showing clearly that they don’t want to hear him. In the CNN Tea Party debate Monday, Paul was booed when he outlined why certain groups are upset with the United States. It’s not that they have facts to indicate that he’s wrong. They merely don’t like the truth that he has the temerity to speak.

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