David McElroy

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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For years, doctors have been looking for one gene to blame for problems such as depression and schizophrenia. A couple of new studies have dashed those hopes, because it seems that dozens or even hundreds of genes are involved. The doctors involved in the study were disappointed. I was relieved.

If you could take a pill — or get a shot or have an operation — to “fix” some way in which you’re different from other people, would you do it? With some things, the answer is clearly, “Yes.” If you were blind or deaf or had damaged vocal chords, most people would gladly make the change.

With other things, the answer is pretty clearly, “No.” If you’re left-handed, you don’t want to be made right-handed. If your eyes are blue or green, you don’t want to change your eyes to brown just because it’s the most common thing in the world. For other things, the answer is more gray? Do you remove a mole that you’ve been worried about all your life? Do you straighten your nose? For most of us, we conclude that we’d rather be what we were born with in most areas, simply because it’s who we are.

If the questions and answers are that complicated for your physical body, how much more complicated are they for the mind? We can sometimes see our bodies as physical shells we ride around in on Earth, but our thoughts and feelings are what make us entirely different from the other people around us, at least as far as our own internal thoughts are concerned. (I’m ignoring the issue of a soul, because this is about psychology and ethics, not about theology.)

If the doctors in one of the studies in the news Monday had come up with one gene to blame for depression or schizophrenia, would you want whatever “cure” they came up with? As long as my life were fairly functional, I know I wouldn’t want it. Whatever goes on inside my brain — and my heart and something on the inside — is what makes me “me,” and I don’t want someone else monkeying around what what I am.

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