David McElroy

Black cats are said to be a source of bad luck, but this black cat seems to be incensed at being blamed for the stupidity and ignorance of politicians. You can’t blame her, can you?

Campaigning in Iowa — although he pretended it wasn’t campaigning — Barack Obama lamented the state of the economy. He claimed that his administration had things turned around until … well … you read it:

“We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again,” Obama told a crowd in Decorah, Iowa. “But over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.” Obama listed three events overseas — the Arab Spring uprisings, the tsunami in Japan and the European debt crises — which set the economy back.

I covered this just a few days ago. The late, great sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein famously wrote that those who did everything in their power to stop creative people from advancing civilization would blame the problems on something besides themselves:

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I have a certain old friend who’s very bright and thoughtful. He’s a respected attorney with a responsible government legal job. I have a lot of respect for his intelligence and his intellectual honesty, but our ideas about politics and society are strongly opposed.

When I wrote Sunday about the idea that taxation is theft, he strongly disagreed, arguing that the idea was impractical and “naively idealistic.” He referred to what I said as an “untennable radical position.” I don’t want to re-argue that debate here. Instead, I want to look at other radical positions that seemed pretty untenable when they were first proposed.

Hundreds of years ago, it was taken for granted that kings had special rights that ordinary people didn’t have. He was seen as having his power from God and any opposition to the king was opposition to God. It was called the “divine right of kings.” The king had rights that made him little short of being a god in his kingdom. No one was allowed to judge or oppose the king except for God Himself.

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If you’re not wealthy, I have good news for you. Warren Buffet wants to give you money. Well, sort of. He want to force other people to give money to the state, but isn’t that the same thing?

In a smugly self-righteous column in Sunday’s New York Times, Buffet lectures other wealthy people about what they should do with their money. (Actually, it’s about what should be done to those people, but we’ll set that aside for now.) He says that people such as himself should be paying more taxes, because the percentage he pays isn’t as much as the percentages that other people pay. What insane person ever decided that percentages should be used to calculate the price of services?

Buffet says he paid $6,938,744 in federal taxes last year, but he says that’s too little because it amounts to only 17.4 percent of his income, which he says is a lower percentage than was paid by anyone else in his office. Would he care to compare the actual dollar amounts paid?

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