David McElroy

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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I’d like you to think about becoming a runaway slave. I’m planning to escape. I don’t have my plan finished, but I’m working on it. I’d like you to come with me.

If you believe that taxation is a legitimate thing and that you have a responsibility to others to hand over your money and obey the will of the majority, please don’t waste your time reading any further. As I wrote Sunday, I realize that taxation is theft and is a moral issue, but I’m not trying to convince you to change your mind. I can’t change the mind of someone who’s been brainwashed into believing that he belongs to someone else — just as a plantation slave who’d been convinced that someone else owned him had no chance of freeing his own mind.

What’s it going to take to be a runaway slave? We don’t know everything about how to do it yet. I mean, there’s not a blueprint. We’re pioneers here. We don’t even know the destination for certain. But we know the beginning, because the beginning is in our own thoughts. It begins with a decision to quit being a slave — in our own minds.

When slaves started talking about trying to escape, I imagine that a few of them gathered furtively at night to talk about this crazy idea that one man had. Most of the others were afraid to even listen. Even the rest were fearful of the consequences. But a few overcame their fear of change and made an attempt. Some failed. Others made it to a place where they could live freely. They didn’t know where they were going, but they were going to work together to try.

Right now, I’ll be the crazy man talking to scared people around a campfire. Let’s talk a bit about how we might escape when the time is right.

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Thomas wasn’t supposed to come live with me. He was supposed to go live on a farm. If a woman had done what she had said she was going to do, he never would have come home with me. He would have spent time chasing bugs and mice on a farm. Who knows? All I know is I’m glad it worked out as it did.

I first saw a little kitten hanging around outside a hair salon a few blocks from my house. I assumed he belonged to someone, but I didn’t see anyone to ask. The place where he stayed was right next to a busy road and it was a block away from a busy highway. So it wasn’t a safe place for a kitten.

I finally got the chance to ask someone after a few days. The salon was closed, but one of the haircutters was there and happened to step outside as I was passing by. She said he had been there for a couple of weeks, but nobody knew anything about him other than that he was skinny and reasonably friendly. We talked about it for a little while and she decided she was going to take him to live at someone’s farm. She seemed sincere, so I assumed he was going to have a home. She said she was going to take him the next day.

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