Kill the Tax Monster

It’s all very well for Paul Greeberg to call for the end of the current federal income tax system.  No doubt he’s right that

For the average American family, filling out a tax form has become like attacking a puzzle to which, often enough, there is no right answer. But we’re all supposed to swear, on penalty of perjury, that we’ve done our best to find it.

But are people really as upset as he thinks?  First of all, only about half the American people actually pay income tax.  Rush Limbaugh has a permanent feature, Truth About Taxes, on his web site that trumpets the fact that 50 percent of the taxpayers pay 96.7 percent of the federal income tax. 

Then people like “beating the system” with the home mortgage deduction and the various tax credits.  It’s like weekly supermarket specials.  Supermarkets could just keep their prices low.  But instead they advertise loss leaders every week—and that means that other prices must go up to balance the loss leaders.  Why do they do it?  Women like the fun and excitement of hunting for bargains and clipping coupons.

Still, the federal income tax is enormously wasteful and complicated.  For the sake of national hygiene we should replace it.

Greenberg wants to replace the current income tax with a flat tax.  He’s right.  The president’s budget for 2008 anticipates income tax collections of $1.246 trillion.  That’s about 9 percent of GDP.  For that we need a complicated schedile of tax rates going up to nearly 40 percent and a forest of deductions, credits and allowances?

Come on.  America can do better. 

Just Who Has the Conflict of Interest?

It was noble of Newsweek to allow a climate change denier, climate scientist Richard Lindzen, to write a column in their global-warming scare issue.  But they wanted you to know that Lindzen “receives no funding from any energy companies.”

Oh really.  So we are to believe, writes Jeff Jacoby, that

Apparently Lindzen’s scientific and professional credentials aren’t sufficient to lend authority to his views; readers must be explicitly reassured that "energy companies" haven’t paid him off.

The cluelessness of Newsweek’s clarification is this.  Don’t they realize, and don’t Newsweek’s readers realize, that the “conflicts of interest” are all on the scare side of the global warming debate?

To begin with, staggering sums of money are channeled to researchers who emphasize the human role in global warming.

You know: grants.  Research money.  Not to mention promotion and advancement.

And then there are the prizes.  Big ones.

ASA’s James Hansen, a prominent global-warming Cassandra, won a $250,000 Heinz Award in 2001. Last month he was a co-winner of the Dan David Prize and its $1 million purse. Other awards and other purses have frequently gone to other prophets of doom. And the potential rewards don’t stop there. For those who toe the politically correct line on global warming, there have been big book contracts, hefty speaking fees, worshipful magazine profiles, softball TV interviews — even an Academy award.

Yeah.  Let’s talk about conflicts of interest.

The Passing of Unsung Conservatives

Liberals we know all about.  They are celebrated from a thousand MSM mouthpieces.  But when conservatives pass on we find, from the reminiscences of friends and acquaintances, that we hardly knew ’em.

Here is Milton Friedman remembered by Charles H. Brunie.

Once when Milton was in New York visiting some of Oppenheimer’s clients, we had a cocktail party after a long day. A young man asked him a question in an exceedingly rude manner—again and again. Milton’s response was very gracious. The next morning Milton was debating James Tobin, another Nobel laureate, at the Institutional Investor conference, with perhaps 1,000 attendees. Tobin asked almost the exact same question as had the young man the prior evening, but he did it very politely. Milton went at him hammer and tongs. Later, I asked Milton why he was so polite to the young man and so aggressive with Tobin. He replied, “The young chap didn’t know what he was talking about. Conversely, James did—it was an ambush question, and I wasn’t going to let him get away with it.”

Now we have the reminiscences of Pat Buckley, Mrs. William F. Buckley, Jr. from NRO.  Writes William Rusher: 

The news of Pat Buckley’s death prompted two quite diverse reflections. The first was the memory of her many quiet kindnesses. Indeed, “quiet” is hardly an adequate word; “secret” might be better. In any case, they were wonderful. By pure chance, I learned that she had visited one friend every day for the last two weeks of his life, as it ebbed away owing to a mortal illness. To be there when you really needed her: That was Pat.

Well, who knew?  A rude young man graciously tolerated?  A New York socialite making the time for daily visits to a friend in the last two weeks of life?

Maybe that’s how it should be.  For if our good works are “known only to God,” what’s the problem?  You need to have your charity and your generosity celebrated in the newspaper Life section?

Virtue, it is said, is doing good when nobody can see you.

Hypocrisy Week

If shock jock Don Imus went to his reward, what about Malik Shabazz?  If it’s an outrage to make a racial joke about some basketball players then what about calling an Asian American woman a prostitute to her face on cable TV?  That’s what happened to Michelle Malkin.

Next, one Malik Shabazz, leader of the "New Black Panther Party," refuses to apologize for lynching the innocent Duke lacrosse players—and then proceeds to call me a "political prostitute" and mouthpiece for whites. Like I haven’t heard that a half-million times before.

Yeah.  Malkin’s heard it all before.

Comes with the territory when you’re an uppity brown woman who strays from the liberal plantation, you know.

And I gotta say, if they are insulting Michelle Malkin, then for me it’s personal.

James Bowman explains all this in Honor, A History.  Honor for men is standing in the line of battle and not running away and leaving your brothers in the lurch.  Honor for women is chastity.  You think that stuff is all old hat?  Then, writes Bowman, call a man a wimp and a woman a whore.

Our liberal friends, of course, have tried to upset this instinctive business of honor, with the anti-hero who makes a point of not standing with his brothers and the modern concept of women and “a sexual life.”

But of course, when it’s about race it’s different. In the liberal playbook race beats the all-important sexual revolution.

But watch for honor to make a comeback.  It’s probably more important than we think.

How Liberal Censorship Works

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a documentary focusing on the struggle of moderate Muslims to battle the forces of Islamofascist extremists would be a natural for PBS’s “America at a Crossroads” series.

But you would be wrong.

PBS has decided that the documentary “Islam vs. Islamists” produced by a group including conservative defense advocate Frank Gaffney, Jr. was too extreme and too one-sided to be shown on PBS.    

In other words, a documentary that compellingly portrays what happens to moderate Muslims when they dare to speak up for and participate in democracy, thus defying the Islamists and their champions, is not fit for public airwaves — even in a series specifically created to bring alternative perspectives to their audience.

Not that that ever worried PBS when they had a lefty documentary to show.

And that was the least of it.  PBS also:

• Tried to get Gaffney removed as an executive producer for the show
• Allowed “a series producer with family ties to a British Islamist to insist on sweeping changes to its "structure and context" that would have assured more favorable treatment of those portrayed vilifying and, in some cases, threatening our anti-Islamist protagonists.” 
• Hired, as an advisor to select the documentary films, an admirer of the Nation of Islam—which gets money from the Saudis to set up black Wahhabi mosques.  But this Saudi assistance is a feature of Gaffney’s documentary.  Talk about a conflict of interest.

More interesting than the he-said-she-said accusations is the bigger issue.  What exactly do these liberals think they are doing by covering for radical Islam?

Maybe it’s because that’s what liberals do for a living.  You identify a victim class worthy of support by compassionate and enlightened people.  Then you defend it from mainstream America—which all enlightened people know is racist and bigoted.

Up to now this approach to politics has worked a treat for liberals.  Over the last century they have successively identified workers, blacks, women, gays, illegal aliens as helpless victims.  Then they translated support for these victim groups into political power.  Hey, if it works...

But you wonder if that liberals haven’t gone a bridge to far by cozying up to radical Islam.

Let's Abolish Adolescence

Did you know?  They don’t have adolescence in most societies.  At some point children go through a coming-of-age ritual and they become adults.

Now Robert Epstein in The Case Against Adolescence argues that we should abolish adolescence.  Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is interested. 

Epstein’s new book argues that adolescence is an artificial and unnecessary part of life that people are better off without.

An argument against adolescence is made also by Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption. Harris asks why we are throwing teenagers together in adolescent-only institutions like high school and college if we want them to conform to our adult culture.

By herding teenagers together we allow them to achieve strategic concentration and combine against us.

There are additional links on Epstein’s book here and here.

We at Road to the Middle Class are all in favor of adultifying teenagers, for a number of reasons.

The advocates of the welfare state have insistent that their compulsory education and child labor laws were all for the children.

But underneath the mask of concern is a reality of self-interest.  Ever since government education got started the educationists always want to extend the period of compulsory education.

And labor unions have an obvious interest in making the low-wage competition of teenagers illegal.

The thing is: parents and children should have the right to control their own destinies, and not be ordered around by government experts.

Remember, adult literacy in the United States has not changed in the 150 years since the dawn of compulsory government education of children.  What does that tell you?

Freeman Dyson: Optimistic Rebel

Physicist Freeman Dyson makes a cameo appearance in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Dawkins takes him to task for accepting an award from the pro-Christian Templeton Foundation. Dawkins makes it clear that organizations like the Templeton Foundation should be named and shamed. They should not be allowed to appropriate the authority of an eminent physicist.

Now Freeman Dyson has a book out, The Scientist as Rebel, and he talks to Benny Peiser at TCSDaily.

Asked about the growing pressure on scientists to follow the “scientific consensus,” he replies:

Certainly the growing rigidity of scientific organizations is a real and serious problem. I like to remind young scientists of examples in the recent past when people without paper qualifications made great contributions.

For instance there’s the mule-driver who ended up as astronomer and second-in-command to Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory.

But don’t worry about the future, Dyson advises.

Amateurs and small companies will have a growing role in the future of science. This will compensate for the increasing bureaucratization of the big organizations. Bright young people will start their own companies and do their own science.

Then he talks about a new development in genetic science, a gene sequence called Human Accelerated Region 1.

In “the genomes of mouse, rat, chicken and chimpanzee” it is strictly preserved. But in the human genome it “appears grossly modified with eighteen mutations.” What is going on here?

And get this. He attributes the current gloom-and-doom mood to the British class system. No, not the division between the bosses and the workers. We are talking about the class war in the middle class!

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.

Yes. Margaret Thatcher, grocer’s daughter. There must be some mistake!

And the worst of it is that the British welfare state, the only child of the academic middle class, is self-destructing as we speak.

Go on. Read the whole thing!