While OpEdge is on a two-week hiatus, we are running some of the more evergreen columns from past years. This blog entry originally appeared on March 19, 2010.

Most of the first round of hand-ringing about the Texas Board of Education’s decision to infuse inaccuracies in social science textbooks is over.  I’ve noticed a very interesting fact about the comments in the main stream news media.  Here is a sampling of what four mainstream and four regional media said about the Texas school board.  Most but not all are against the school board’s reckless pushing of one point-of-view, but for or against, they all make one assumption.

First the sample stories:

• Washington Post reports historians hate the changes.
• Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Thomas Frank that looks on the school board’s actions as a much needed anodyne to liberalism.
• The New York Times bemoans the decision of the Texas School Board to introduce so many distortions into the study of history.
• The Economist cheerfully reviews what happened in a half-satirical tone, ending with a note that even Texas Republicans are “growing weary of the board’s antics.”
• Kansas City Star columnist also bemoans the decision.
• Washington Monthly reporter gives a good history of what happened in Texas
• Columnist for the Toledo Blade likes the move to reconsider standards but is concerned that the Texas curriculum was “deliberately dumbed down by hard-core ideologues tweaking textbooks to indoctrinate instead of inform.”

The assumption all these opinion-makers take for granted is that the textbook industry will bend over and say “yes sir” to Texas.  The underlying ideological subtext is unregulated free marketplace in which it is natural and appropriate for there always to be a seller for the buyer.

Let’s take a look at that assumption: When a corporation or individual wants an attorney to help in creating a fraudulent business structure or covering up a crime, don’t we assume that virtually all lawyers will turn down the work?  What about when a client asks a PR agency to knowingly lie?  My agency would turn the work down and so would most agencies I know, which is the expectation stated in the industry’s ethical standards.  Accountants asked to fudge the numbers? An architect asked to cut costs by substituting unsafe materials?  A food store asked to sell unsafe food?  All against ethical standards of the industry, and mostly against the law.

Now I know that corrupt people and organizations can always find corrupt professionals to do their bidding, unethical and/or illegal as it might be.

But the textbook industry is much smaller.  There are perhaps a handful of publishers, whereas there are millions of lawyers, so many that you could even find one or two who would write that torture is legal.

Additionally, textbooks are typically written by experts in the field: historians, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists.  These professionals all have standards of ethics.  If the small number of textbook publishers hewed to these standards of expertise in the writing and revision of textbooks, then a body of elected no-nothings like the Texas Board of Education would not be able to dictate changes that introduce inaccuracies and lies into textbooks.

Companies and industries walk away from “bad business” all the time.  Certainly, if the textbook industry walked away from Texas, someone would fill the void.  But that would take time and a greater outlay of resources by Texas, as new books would need to be written.  The resulting impact on the rest of the country would be smaller, because the new or rogue publisher wouldn’t have the contacts and database required to sell to the thousands of school districts across our 50 states.  I understand that the voters of Texas hate new taxes more than they like right-wing myths and homilies, so facing the need to recreate the industry in its own image, there might suddenly be a lot of pressure on the Texas Board of Education to reconsider its lunacy.

But did one of these columnists chide the textbook publishers for rolling over and playing dead?  Did one of these columnists advocate that publishers close ranks against Texas?  Or did any of them suggest publishers’ create a voluntary set of standards that prevent any from publishing what are known to be historical inaccuracies in textbooks for public schools?  Did any of them call for associations of historians take action?  Did any even recommend that school districts outside Texas refuse to buy Texas-poisoned texts? No, no, no, no and no.

No, because to do so would be to question, even if it’s only in a small way, the total dominance of the free market ideology in all thinking about all social issues.  The assumption that everything is for sale and that the market dictates all decisions by economic entities is so engrained in the ideologies of those who write for the mainstream media that the idea of exercising a little ethical self-control would never occur to any of them.

While OpEdge is on a two-week hiatus, we are running some of the more evergreen columns from past years. This blog entry originally appeared November 10, 2009.

Whenever Congress talks of raising taxes on the wealthy, as in the current House bill on healthcare reform, people complain that it isn’t fair for the government to take a greater percentage of wealth from people who are successful.  Inherent in these statements is the belief that at least in the U.S., if you earned it, it’s because you deserved it: you worked harder or came up with a smarter idea.

In any free market society, all values over time reduce to the lowest common denominator of free exchange, and that’s money.  And that goes for success as well.  In the U.S., we learn that to seek money is one of the greatest goods and that those who have more money or earn more money deserve to be praised and do not deserve to be punished through higher taxes.

I would assert that for virtually all people who have or have earned large sums of money, factors other than personal virtues, including the infrastructure of the society in which you live, are more responsible for your success than anything you do yourself.  My argument of course is that if you didn’t contribute that much to your own wealth, then to take more of it away from you to help people who weren’t so lucky is a proper role of government.  Maybe my own brand of weirdness deforms my perceptions, but I think that to most people, redistribution of wealth from the lucky to the unlucky sounds a whole lot better than redistribution from the wealthy to the poor.

But first I have to prove that most of success is luck and therefore deserving of no great praise or reward.  In doing so, I’m going to simplify (but hopefully not distort) the ideas that Daniel N. Robinson, a philosopher who teaches at Georgetown, expressed in Praise and Blame: Moral Realism and Its Application.

Here’s my short version of Robinson: There is more luck than individual effort in all success.  For example (and I’m sure I’m deviating from Robinson is some of what I list), here are some types of luck that contribute more to success than hard work:

• Mental or physical talent with which one is born that some would call god-given. If you have it, you will be able to do something naturally that most others have to struggle to learn.  No matter how hard others work, they will have trouble keeping up with the talented person.  But keep in mind that there is less real talent, or genius, around than most people think.  My point is if it’s god-given, you did nothing to obtain it.  Even if you work hard to hone that talent, someone with less talent could work just as hard.  Wouldn’t he or she be just as deserving of praise, and reward?
• Social-economic standing of your family: Over the 200+ year history of the United States there has been very little social mobility—which means people moving up or down from the class in which they were born—and recent studies show that there is less mobility today than ever before.  Rich families can pay for lessons, send kids to specialty camps, pay for private tutors and educational consultants, contribute sums to prestigious schools, call friends of friends of friends to introduce children to influential people in their chosen careers and finance business or artistic ventures.   Middle class families can do some of these things and poor families very few, if any.
• Family’s Emotional Situation: The individual has no say in whether he ends up in a loving, stable family or in a family of drug addicts.
• Secular conditions, referring to the social and economic conditions of the era: Imagine turning 20 in 1950 when the economy started booming and there was a dearth of qualified engineers? Or in 1970 when you could draw a low draft number and end up in Viet Nam? Or living in L.A. in the 30s when it was rapidly growing into the entertainment capital of the world? Would you rather be an African-American today or in 1850?  Would you rather be an astigmatic math genius during the days of hunting big game or today?
• The value society puts on your talent: Bankers, attorneys, neurosurgeons, professional athletes, business owners—all these people get paid more than high school teachers, players in classical symphony orchestras and plumbers, who may work as hard and be just as talented in their field. That’s called the luck of the draw.  A plumber could work just as hard as an investment banker does and make far less money.  Does that make you less praiseworthy than the banker?
• Just plain old “luck” luck, such as the luck to be in an intersection 10 seconds before or after an accident or for your professor to bring you onto his long-term research team.

Robinson also spends pages demonstrating that those whom we blame—the bad guys—aren’t all that bad.  I recommend getting a copy of Praise and Blame, but be forewarned, Robinson writes in a precise, but tortuous prose that considers every aspect and condition of the topic of the sentence, engages in complicated thought experiments and references the thoughts of other philosophers on the topic.  It’s a hard read, but worth it.

If you want real-world proof that luck has as much to do with success as personal attributes such as hard work, select any profession and spend a week collecting the names of those under 30 who have been quoted in mainstream news media.  Then check their backgrounds and see how many are children of prominent people in that or another profession, or went to a prestigious college or come from an upper middle class or wealthy background.

I don’t want to demean successful people.  For one thing, it would be hypocritical of me, since I strive for success and enjoy the measure that I have achieved.  Yes, successful people often work hard.  Yes, they deserve to be singled out.  It’s okay to have winners and losers.

But we shouldn’t forget that so much of success is a matter of multiple kinds of luck, and in a real sense, society bestows success on successful people.  So when the government wants to tax rich (successful) people to make sure that nobody dies or suffers because of a lack of access to proper health care, then people with money should embrace the idea of giving back a small part of what society and that irrational chaotic force called luck have given us.

Let’s face it, when we remove the complex financial structuring, the obfuscating economic theory and the strident political posturing and just look at the flow of money, the Greek debt crisis reduces to one kettle of rich folk owing money to another kettle of rich folk.  Kettle, by the way, is the name for a group of vultures.

Here’s the simplified version: The debt Greece owes is primarily in the form of loans from private (not state) banks and bonds. For the most part, rich folk own bonds and the stock of banks. So when Germany and the rest of Europe refuse to let Greece off the hook for this debt, they are doing nothing more than protecting the interests of the wealthy.

Let’s look at why the Greeks owe so much money. The primary reason is that the country has never done a good job of collecting taxes from the wealthy.  Tax evasion by the wealthy in Greece is notorious and has been covered in recent years by virtually every mainstream news media, Reuters, Bloomberg News, New York Times, The Economist, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Der Spiegel, all of them.

If these wealthy and upper middle class Greeks had paid their fair share of taxes, Greece would have the revenues to pay off the interest and pay down the principal on the loan and to make bond interest payments. Thus, it’s really the debt of the rich that we’re talking about.

My modest proposal is to have European governments and regulators get out of the way, and let the one kettle of rich pay the other directly. I’m fairly confident, that some part of this debt will cancel itself out, as some of those wealthy Greeks who avoided paying taxes invested their scofflawed income in Greek bonds and European banks.

Here’s how my plan would work:

1. Freeze debt at remaining principal.
2. Assess a special income and wealth tax on the top 1%-2% of Greek earners that is earmarked to paying off the principal on the debt and bonds over a 20-year period.
3. To make the assessment work, Europe will have to agree that any wealthy Greek citizen living or working in another Euro country must pay it, as must any wealthy Greek who changes nationalities for 10 years after becoming a citizen of his or her new country. The Eurozone countries would also have to insist that the nations with which they trade agree to the same policy for wealthy Greek nationals as a condition of all treaties.
4. Europe will also have to help the Greek government learn how to collect taxes more efficiently, with grants that pay for training, new technology and pumped-up enforcement.

With the debt spun off—in a sense privatized to the appropriate private parties—European leaders will be free to put together a package of loans to the Greek government to jumpstart growth and create jobs—technology investments, infrastructure improvements, product commercialization, foreign investment. It will represent a kind of reboot for Europe and Greece after the disaster that austerity induced.  Another way to look at my solution is to think not of Greece but of the Greek debt as the sick patient that needs to be isolated. My plan isolates this debt by giving it back to the people whose problem it would be if governments followed policies to help all the people, and not just the wealthy.

The big objection to my plan is that after having to settle for the return of principle over an extended time frame, the rich folk who are creditors won’t have enough money to invest in new jobs. We hear that excuse for lowering taxes in the United States all the time, despite the growing evidence that in most cases, raising taxes on the wealthy produces more jobs, because the government spends the money, which boosts the economy.  While not the enormous gap we have in the United States, Europe has nevertheless seen a large increase in wealth and income inequality over the past 30 years. Like everywhere else, the ultra-rich and the merely wealthy have so much new money that they have been piling it away in cash and bloated assets. They haven’t been investing it because of market conditions. If and when market opportunities exist, the rich folk hurt by having to absorb the entire brunt of the Greek fiasco will still have plenty of cash on hand to take advantage, and thereby create jobs.

Of course, given the fact that most elected officials in Europe, as in the United States, vow their fealty to the interests of the wealthy, my modest proposal has less chance of being enacted than Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal of 1729 to ease the economic troubles of the Irish by having the poor sell their children to the wealthy for food. After all, we are used to sacrificing children and young people to war. But it’s a rare occurrence in history for rich folk to sacrifice to solve any problem, even those of their own creation.

I have been scratching my head as to why the mainstream news media has seemed to lionize George Mason professor Tyler Cowen over the past few years. It seems that everywhere you turn—Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsweek, New Republic—you can see an article by Cowen.

Stupid me, I just wasn’t digging deep enough into Cowen’s professional background. I want to thank Twitter follower Alan Parker for his tweet to me that states flatly that the Koch Brothers “bought and paid for” the university at which Cowen teaches, the ostensibly public George Mason University.

As it turns out, “bought and paid for” is not entirely hyperbolic: Koch gave $30 million to George Mason in the mid-80’s (roughly $66 million today) and in return, George Mason took over a right-wing think tank now called the Mercatus Center. The Kochs, and other ultra-rich ultra-rights, continue to fund Mercatus, which means “market” in Latin.

The Center comprises more than 70 professors and an additional staff of more than 50, all dedicated to churning out research and reports that “advances knowledge about how markets work to improve people’s lives,” as the Mercatus mission statement puts it. In other words, all Mercatus work begins with the false premise that free markets can solve every social and economic problem.

Here are some examples of untrue assertions by Mercatus scholars:

• Three years ago, Charles Blahous infamously predicted that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) would worsen federal deficits. In reality, ACA has saved more money than was originally anticipated.
• As I have reported on OpEdge, Tyler Cowen continually argues for a deregulated free market by focusing on individuals and ignoring large groups, as when he claims that workers have nothing to worry about in the shared economy since a few of them will flourish economically or when he states that because individual families gain and lose wealth over generations inequality of wealth has not increased.
• Richard Williams ridiculously compares trans fats to water in an opinion article that appeared in The Orange County Times. Both are bad for you in large amounts, so why ban trans fats from foods until we know for a fact that they are bad for you in small amounts. What a completely scurrilous analogy, especially considering that 50-75% of the body is water. Unlike trans fats, we have no reason to test to determine whether water is inherently safe before we allow it to be consumed, although we do demand tests that it be safe water! Just as we demand our food be safe.
• Four Mercatus scholars combined on a white paper that asserts that consumer rating systems provide enough protections that Internet, smart-phone and shared economy markets do not need consumer protections. The paper calls for an end of consumer regulations, ignoring the fact that consumers may not be aware of what safety or quality entails in a good or service.

Let’s take a look at a small excerpt of this last example of Mercatus twisted reasoning to support a one hundred percent free market:

“Regulations…are not as effective as market solutions, and may harm consumers instead of helping them. Regulators can be influenced by regulated industries, erecting barriers to keep out new competition, stifling innovation, and imposing higher prices and reduced quality on consumers. By making it more difficult to do business, regulations can have the unintended consequence of entrenching already-established businesses while closing the market to entrepreneurs with innovative ideas.”   

Pure rhetoric that we’ve heard from conservatives since Congress passed the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906. This standard rightwing cant ignores the cost to individuals and societies when vendors sell substandard goods. The public is willing to pay more for safety.

I’ve given just a few examples of bogus “analysis” and “research” I found on the Mercatus website. There are literally hundreds of published opinion and analysis pieces, white papers and books spewing out of Mercatus “scholars” every year.

And who is the chair and general director of Mercatus?

Yes, you guessed it. It’s Tyler Cowen.

We have to wonder, then, whether there is a connection between Cowen’s consistently weak arguments and the fact that he’s on the payroll of Koch Industries?

Nothing would delight me more than making a case against George Mason’s involvement with Mercatus, but they can’t censor these guys, and plenty of scholars spin fantasies and garbage in the social sciences and humanities; it even happens from time to time in the natural sciences. There is nothing wrong with rich folk giving money for university research, as long as the money is earmarked for answering questions and not asserting conclusions. But what we have with Mercatus is rich folk paying for an elaborate academic cover for a bunch of policies that hurt everyone but them.

I can make a good case against the mainstream media for publishing the claptrap of Mercatus employees while pretty much ignoring the solid research of legitimate scholars who either self-identify as progressives or demonstrate progressive ideas. It just demonstrates that 1) the mainstream media seek out research that will confirm their existing prejudices, even if the research is suspect or ultimately financed by special interests; and 2) far from being liberal as politicians often aver, the mainstream media are at best centrist looking right.

If there’s a false argument to be made in support of corporate interests, Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University is sure to make it. Cowen specializes in spinning dispassionate sounding short articles that sell economic nonsense in the better mainstream media, such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs.

A year ago, Professor Cowen was embarrassing himself with a series of articles that purported to disprove the findings of Thomas Piketty in his Capital in the 21st Century. Cowen’s argument tended to follow the pattern of staring at the trees so you won’t see the forest, which in this case means believing that the fact that individual families gain and lose wealth through generations proves that over time more wealth does not tend to accumulate into fewer hands. By focusing on the trees—individual wealthy people, Cowen ignores the forest—the class of the wealthy—who have accumulated more and more of the wealth of the world and the United States over the past 35 years.

Cowen now uses the same trick of ignoring the group to perform another feat of corporate justification in a New York Times article titled “In an Uber World, Fortune Favors the Freelancer.” Cowen asserts that some workers—those who hustle, i.e., “are willing and able to turn their spare time to productive uses,”—will do very well in the freelance economy created by sharing services such as Uber and Airbnb.

The good professor creates hypothetical situations to assert that workers who are more educated will be more likely to take advantage of the opportunities to freelance as a driver, dog-watcher, private tutor or whatever, and therefore make a lot of money. He never proves this point, but he does make a clear implication that some individuals will thrive in the sharing economy.

Of course, Cowen never defines what thriving means—will these successful freelancers make $150,000 a year, or will they just do a little better than average for the driving, delivery, baby-sitting and other semi-skilled, low-wage labor that constitutes a large part of the sharing economy. Surely Cowen isn’t talking about freelance attorneys or accountants, who tend to make less than their peers with real jobs.

The hidden premise behind Cowen’s argument—one that right-wing economists and social thinkers never tire of making—is that those who thrive will deserve to do so, while those who don’t will deserve their fate.  This argument is an important foundation stone of our free market system, because it justifies the obscene wealth that a few possess—they earned it and they deserve it, just as much as that young go-getter who is delivering your package to the airport for $5.00 an hour.

Now maybe some of the trees in the forest of the shared economy will grow to the clouds, but what about the rest of the forest, which in this case comprises most people trying to scrape a living together on freelance and part-time jobs.  Cowen neglects to tell us what’s going to happen to the group of workers who don’t thrive in an entrepreneurial environment. They will make less money and will always be in competition with fellow workers for every little job.  Their work world, always brutal, becomes more so in an apps-driven world.

That the Times accepted Cowen’s article should disappoint anyone who believes in high journalistic standards. In making his case, Cowen cites two studies, one sponsored by Uber and partially written by an Uber executive and the other paid for by Airbnb. When I was a journalist, we tried not to depend on research paid by parties who had a vested interest in the research results. For a scholar to accept such non peer reviewed research is surprising, unless Cowen is feeding at the same corporate trough as those who took Uber and Airbnb’s money. For the New York Times not to ask Cowen to remove the research from his article is equally as disconcerting. Don’t the editors remember all the bogus research that the tobacco industry generated for decades?

As with all labor and wage challenges, Cowen finds the answer to the dilemma of some workers not thriving is to give them greater education and training.  He avers that the educated shared economy worker will provide better service and get higher ratings, and thereby get more jobs and make more money. As usual, Cowen never considers the conundrum of what happens when every worker is better educated. Interestingly enough, Cowen manages to get a tiny plug into the article for for-profit education when he proposes that in the future going through an Uber training program might serve as a legitimate educational credential on par with “those of some lower-tier colleges and universities.”

Cowen hides the brutal fact that the sharing economy hurts workers in several ways. It either replaces the stable income and benefits of full-time work with a precarious freelance existence or it floods labor markets with people who may or may not be qualified, thus driving down rates. It creates dangerous situations, such as the apartment that’s really a sub-standard hotel or the unsafe driver. It takes profit out of the hands of those who do the actual work. It makes it much harder for workers to organize into unions.

But none of that matters to Cowen, who prefers to force a smile and focus on those who will succeed in the sharing economy. If he looked at the whole forest, he would see that the wage-suppressing nature of the sharing economy creates a major economic challenge for the country, as more and more workers fall into permanent economic insecurity.

Conservative Republicans must privately be rejoicing that the U.S. Supreme Court 1) affirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry and 2) declared it constitutional for the federal government to subsidize poor individuals and families who buy health insurance on the federal exchange because the state in which they live doesn’t have an exchange.

Let’s take these decisions one at a time:

By upholding the centerpiece of the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Supremes, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, have given the conservatives a punching bag for several elections to come. They can continue to tell lies about it and to demonize it. They can hit the Democrats over the head with false assertions that it costs too much, takes away freedom, leads to death panels and is rife with inefficiencies. These lies began almost immediately, as every one of the Republican candidates for president tweeted his objection to the Supreme Court decision within hours of the announcement, many calling for repeal of the law and the development of a better alternative. Of course, the Republicans have no alternative, save some pious homilies about letting the free market work and giving consumers more choice, which ends up meaning very little in the realm of health care.

The Republicans understand that they can keep the issue alive through lies and invectives, and thereby keep their Tea Party base engaged and writing checks.

But if the Supreme Court had invalidated the ACA, it would have presented Republicans with major problems. For one thing, it would have thrown tens of millions of Americans off the health insurance rolls, because they wouldn’t be able to get government subsidies. These people would no longer have any protection against high medical costs.

Those who could keep their coverage would have also gotten screwed if the Supremes had voted thumbs down on Obamacare, because the health insurance system would have suffered the loss of enormous sums of money when those who lost coverage left the system. Insurance companies would have had to raise rates precipitously to pay for the medical expenses of those remaining in the system.

The Republicans would have suffered the wrath of the American people if the Supreme Court had ruled against the ACA. They would have been blamed when millions lost their health insurance and everyone else saw their costs zoom.  In truth, Obamacare has been a success. Many more people are covered than before and healthcare inflation has moderated. People may say they don’t like the ACA, but they seem to like how it helps them. And they sure wouldn’t like it if they lost all the benefits that the ACA gave them.

The set-up is now perfect for the Republicans. They continue to hammer at Obamacare with no fear that anything will come of it. Kind of like the old Abbot & Costello bit in which Abbot is about to get into a fist fight and he shouts, “Hold me back, hold me back.” When Costello doesn’t make a move, Abbot pleads, “Please hold me back, you don’t want this guy to hit me, do you,” or some similar chicken-hawk statement.

Gay marriage is the same song, verse two. Besides ending discrimination against a large number of Americans, it’s a great victory for personal freedom in the United States, plus an affirmation that we live in a secular, not a Christian society.

A majority of Americans now support gay marriage and each new poll shows those numbers growing larger all the time. The Supreme Court is neither pulling nor pushing society, but reacting to it.

For years, Republicans have used social issues such as gay marriage and abortion to entice the religious right to vote for them. For decades, the Republicans have asked these “values” voters to vote against their own economic best interest to make certain that their religious views prevailed. But if gay marriage had remained a state-by-state issue, the GOP would have been playing a losing hand, as more and more people became offended by anti-gay rights rhetoric.

Just like after the Obamacare decision, the Republican candidates for president are lining up against the gay marriage decision in statements and tweets. They will continue to bemoan the decision well into the future, but there’s one thing they won’t have to do—support or oppose legislation, court decisions and ballot initiatives related to gay marriage. Supporting laws that attempt to protect the right of businesses to decline to provide goods and services for gay weddings is a much more comfortable position for Republicans who don’t want to alienate the mainstream of American voters, who now favor gay marriage. Instead of opposing gay marriage, Republicans can now support religious rights, something in which every American believes, even if we define it in a variety of ways. Jeb Bush and Lindsay Graham have already made deft pivots to supporting religious rights in their comments about the 5-4 Supreme Court decision.

In short, these two Supreme Court decisions, both so important for the well-being of the United States, also take Republicans off the hook as far as real action is concerned. Instead, they can wallow in their imaginary world of rhetoric, mixing lies with glorious statements about freedom, tradition and free markets.

Just keep in mind that it’s not merely posturing, but a smoke screen of phony issues that the GOP continues to use to distract Americans from real issues such as global warming, income and wealth inequality and institutional racism.

Don’t get me wrong. I have been opposed to the flying of the Confederate flag for decades. I immediately become disgusted, make that physically revulsed, when I see the blue X with white stars across a field of red—the central motif of the flag of the American slave republic—branding belt buckles, tee-shirts, banners, jackets, bandstands, caps or state flags.

Despite protestations to the contrary through the years, the Confederate flag is an inherently racist symbol.  I can’t possibly imagine anyone displaying Confederate iconography except for racists, those who want to get the votes of racists or those who want to do business with racists using racism as a common affinity between seller and buyer.

There is no doubt that flying the Confederate flag on government or public property is and has always been an act of treason, since the establishment of the Confederacy was an act of treason. And there is no doubt that the United States is a better place when the flag of the American slave state is marginalized: when candidates don’t wrap themselves with it pretending it’s a symbol of states’ rights; when it is not readily available for purchase in large national chains; when the consensus opinion is that people who display the Confederate flag are as anti-social as those who revel in Nazi iconography. While I think brandishing the Confederate flag is protected speech under the First Amendment, I am glad to see that we as a nation are finally saying that it is an anti-social and explicitly racist act.

But the swiftly spreading collective movement to end the flying of the Confederate flag in South Carolina and elsewhere in the country is a bit disconcerting, because it’s another example of the United States addressing the wrong problem in a crisis. Just as we attached Iraq instead of going after Al Qaida in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, so are we trying to curtail flying of the Confederate flag as a means to stop single-shooter mass murders. It’s an example of an entire society exhibiting what psychiatrists sometimes call displacement, which occurs when the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object for goals felt to be dangerous or unacceptable. We have displaced what should be a concern for gun control with a concern for one of many symbols of the force that motivated this particular mass murderer. 

Let’s be clear about what has happened: The shooting of nine innocent people during a Bible study session at an old-line black church by a lunatic who was also a racist has had an earthshaking impact on the country—our people, our leaders, our news media. Most of us are horrified and crying out to do something in a way that’s reminiscent of the country’s reaction after the first Selma March or the killing of students by National Guard soldiers at anti-war demonstrations at Jackson State and Kent State universities.

But where have our politicians and the news media pushed us? To attack one of many manifestations that Dylann Roof hated African-Americans. If Roof had not fetishized the Confederate flag, he would still have displayed virulent racism: He still would have subscribed to the ideas of the white supremacist group, Council of Conservative Citizens. He still would have frequently used racial invectives when speaking with friends. He still would have written his sick manifesto.

The Confederacy wasn’t even the only racist country whose flag Roof incorporated into his self-expression. He also displayed parts of the Rhodesian and the Apartheid-era South African flags on his clothing.

To be sure, Dylann Roof reminds us what an embarrassment it is to the United States that the flag of enemies of freedom, defenders of slavery and traitors to the United States still flies on public property. But taking it down will have at the most a very minor impact on the rate of mass murders in the United States. At best, racism will become somewhat less socially acceptable, which may lead to several mentally ill people having one less reason to pick up a gun and hunt the innocent.

But far from every case of mass murder has had to do with race. Spurned love, mommy issues, peer rejection and social isolation have all compelled wackos to kill. But virtually all mass murderer in recent years (as opposed to terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh and the Al Qaida operatives) have had two things in common: 1) They’ve been mentally ill; 2) They’ve gotten hold of one or more guns.

Clearly we have to do something about the ease at which mentally ill people can legally obtain arms and the type of high-grade military arms available for purchase by the public. We have to expand gun registries, increase the waiting time for gun sales, toughen laws regarding keeping guns in households where mentally ill people live, end the sales of automatic weapons, and ban all firearms in schools, universities, government buildings, restaurants, theatres, libraries, arenas, stadiums and any place where the legal occupancy is more than 10 people.

But we’re not considering any of it, not even talking about it. Instead of going after the major tool that psychopaths use to commit mass murder, we’re going after one of the many symbols employed by one mass murderer to express the reason that motivated his horrific action.

Ending all mainstream glorification of the Confederate flag is a great thing, even though extreme racists will continue to revel in its symbolism. But it has nothing to do with preventing more tragedies like the Emanuel AME Church massacre. If we want to end mass shootings, we have to take the view of private ownership of guns shared by the rest of the world and toughen gun laws.

Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul wants to create a flat tax of 14.5% that he says will reduce government revenues by trillions of dollars, but magically lead to greater tax revenues in the future fueled by economic growth.

His plan, which he outlined in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that has been reprinted on many other news websites, is based on the old Laffer Curve myth that proposes that lowering tax rates always leads to economic growth, which then always produces greater tax revenues.  Laffer Curve theory has been around for ages but is associated with right-wing economist Arthur Laffer who supposedly drew it on a paper cocktail napkin for some government luminaries during the 1970’s.  When I interviewed Laffer in 1981 for a television news report, he denied the myth.

Now Paul does not mention the Laffer Curve by name, but he is proposing the same twisted reasoning—lowering tax rates will lead to economic growth which will lead to higher tax revenues.

Paul’s premise comes up short in the reality department. Since the birth of the industrial revolution, our economy has thrived most when tax rates have been relatively high, such as after World War II and during the Clinton years (when compared to the eras immediately before and after Clinton).

Paul’s program consists of two changes to the current tax code: 1) Establish a flat tax of 14.5% that’s the same for every tax-paying entity (personal or business) and every kind of income (earned or investment); note that included are payments for Social Security and Medicare, which fulfills the conservative dream of comingling Social Security funds with the general budget, the first step in making major benefit cuts. 2) End all deductions, except for mortgages and charities.

The first idea ignores decades of data to build its case on the disproved notion that if you cut taxes on the wealthy, they will invest more in the economy, thereby creating more jobs. In a sense, it’s an operation of the false theory of supply-side economics, which essentially says that if you make it and put it up for sale, they will buy it. But the experience since the turn of the century has been that the wealthy and corporations have been afraid to invest (create more supply) because the market isn’t there. The low tax regime has therefore led to the wealthy piling up more wealth and to a precipitous increase in the values of assets that the wealthy tend to own such as luxury goods, real estate and fine art. Supply side economics never works because the so-called job creators who should create the additional supply believe at heart in investing based on predicted demand.

Now if we had not lowered tax rates on the wealthy during the Reagan years and under Bush II, the money that rich folk gleaned from tax cuts would instead be in the government coffers. One thing the government likes to do is spend money, and that helps the economy. Government outlays create demand, whether it’s for new government employees, from companies and individuals to perform services from the government or from payments to the poor and middle class, which they then mostly spend (as opposed to the rich, who mostly save after a certain point).

So much then for Paul’s argument that the flat tax will unleash economic activity. More than likely, it will lead to a cut in government services, which will lead to a shrinking of the economy.

The mechanism of the progressive tax, by which people are taxed at higher rates for income earned above certain thresholds, is a prime tool for increasing income and wealth equality because the wealthy don’t just pay more, they pay a higher percentage of their additional income in taxes. That higher percentage also reflects the fact that the wealthy derive more protection and services from government than the poor and middle class do. They have more property under government protection. The regulation and protection of markets benefits their interests more than the interests of the poor. The roads government builds conveys the cars of both the rich and poor, but it also conveys everyone’s cars to stores and businesses, all owned by the rich either directly or through financial instruments. The rich are far more likely to enjoy the luxury boxes in ballparks built with taxpayer money. Thus the progressive income tax makes the best tax system both for public policy reasons and to finance the many things that 21st century government does, Instead of establishing a flat tax, we need to raise marginal tax rates on the wealthy.

In theory the second Paul idea—to end deductions—is a good one because it simplifies paying taxes, but it may not work in practice. Here’s why: For the most part, tax breaks serve as incentives for people to act in certain ways—buy houses, invest in new businesses, install solar equipment, send their children to college. Each of these tax breaks also helps one part of the economy. For decades, for example, the oil depletion allowance has helped the fossil fuels industry, while the mortgage deduction has artificially boosted the residential real estate industry. Tax policy can also discourage actions, such as our high taxes on cigarettes. Notice that I don’t include gas as a high-tax item because our taxes on gasoline are very low compared to other industrialized nations.

If we give up tax incentives and disincentives, we lose the possibility to implement social and economic policy through taxes, eventually leading to more extensive regulation as the only other means to manage the economy and guide private activity.  So while the idea of making the tax system less complicated sounds great in theory, in practice it wouldn’t work because we need tax policy to help manage a sophisticated economy and complex society.

Paul is right that our tax system has to change, but those changes should lead to higher rates of taxation on the wealthy and greater immediate revenues:

• We should increase the tax rates on incremental income (income above certain amounts).
• We should take the cap off the maximum salary subject to the Social Security tax.
• We should end the special treatment of capital gains taxes, or failing that, redefine capital gains to include only direct investments that benefit a business, which means no stock or bond bought or sold on a secondary market.
• We should end the carried-interest loophole that enables hedge fund manages to shield billions of dollars of income from taxes each year.
• We should take from the French and add a small annual tax on wealth above a certain level, maybe $5 million for an individual.
• Finally, we should assess a very stiff tax on all inheritances above a certain amount, again, say $5 million.

In other words, instead of lowering taxes on the wealthy, as Paul wants to do, we should raise them back to the level before the Reagan years. That’s a program that will lead to an economic growth spurt.

Politicians, primarily Democrats, and cable news commentators have tried to look beyond the individual pathology of Dylann Roof to explore root social causes for his monstrous gunning down of nine African-Americans at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Some say a lack of gun control laws is the culprit, others say racism, while still others assign equal blame to both these American plagues.

Evidence is piling up that Roof is a virulent racist. Friends said Roof would routinely spew racial invectives. He is reported to have exclaimed that he killed the nine people at the Church solely because they were black. There can be no doubt that his rabid racial anger found encouragement in the distorted view of African-Americans visible in American police dramas; the racial coding in the comments of Republican politicians; the self-justifying aspects of our system of mass incarceration; the prevalence of the Confederate flag and other symbols of slavery in his home state; and the several white power and other hate groups in operation (although the police have yet to find any connection between Roof and any of these groups).

There can be no doubt that Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel AME confident that he was morally right in the actions he was about to take, and that his moral fortitude fed not just on his own extreme racism, but also on the acceptance and promotion of racism, both explicitly and implicitly, in our society.

But let’s ask ourselves this question: Could he have faced those nine people alone and killed them without a gun? Could he have killed them if he weren’t a racist?

The answers, of course, are “no, he could not have done it alone without a gun” and “yes, there are many reasons people kill.”

No matter how much we decry Dylann Roof’s disgusting beliefs and no matter how much we do to eradicate racism in American society and institutions, we will not reduce future mass murders and other gun killings until we make it harder for people to obtain guns and carry them in public.

Look at Roof’s history, so similar in some ways to Adam Lanza, Craig Hicks and other mass murderers: Roof is an anti-social loner who repeated 9th grade.  He had previously been arrested for trespassing and drug charges. His situation had deteriorated recently and he was living out of his car at least on a part-time basis.

How did this wacko get a gun?

Some newspapers report his father gave him a .45-caliber gun for his 21st birthday, while others are saying he bought one with the money his parents gave him for his birthday. Either way, it’s a disturbing indictment of the ease at which people can purchase weapons in most of the country.

The current line from the gun lobby and their elected factotums is that when people carry guns, they scare some criminals and can defend themselves from others. Their former glib homily “When we outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns” has evolved into an assertion that owning and carrying guns reduce crime.

The facts do not support this outrageous assertion. Not many studies are done in the United States of the impact of guns because Congress passed a law forbidding government support of such research. But the research that does exist is clear: Increased gun ownership does not reduce crime. For example, the recent What Caused the Crime Decline? by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School analyzes the various factors that may have contributed to the decline in the crime rate over the past 30 years and finds that the radical loosening of guns laws over the same time frame has had zero impact on lowering crime rates.  Other research tells us that throughout the world and across the United States, the more guns are in private ownership in a country or area, the higher the total rate of injuries and deaths from guns will be.

During this period of public mourning for the slaughtered innocents at Emanuel AME it is right and proper for all clear-thinking Americans to contemplate the severe damage that racism has wrecked on individuals, communities and the very fabric of American society. We should rededicate ourselves to ending racism and that rededication should include specific acts, such as working to end the system of mass incarceration, ending Draconian voting laws meant to keep minorities from voting and the flying of the Confederate in any public or government area. We should work to end racism because it’s the moral and legal thing to do.

But we can’t forget that the primary—perhaps only–reason that Dylann Roof killed nine people in a house of worship was not because he hated African-Americans, but because he carried and used a gun. If we want to end mass murders, we have to instill greater gun controls.

As a Jew, I come to the current controversies over what is a woman and what is an African-American or black with a special perspective. The definition of what is a Jew has haunted the Jewish religion, culture, race and/or nation for millennia. Internally, Jewish courts have long enforced the concept that religious identification comes through the mother, probably because before DNA-testing, we could never be 100% sure of the father’s identity. This basic definition through birth attempts to cut through all the arguments regarding what it means to be Jewish, that is to say, is the essence of Jewishness as a culture, religion, nation and/or race. But since the industrial revolution, this strict adherence to the matrilineal has become problematic, especially to the literally millions of Jewish men who marry outside the faith/culture/nation/race.

Externally, defining who is Jewish has been a necessary process for all organized anti-Semitism, and one of the first steps towards a final solution for the Third Reich. Defining who was black for the purposes of discrimination was also an essential part of American jurisprudence for centuries. These identification systems for both Jews and blacks have always depended on identifying ancestors.

Another external issue involves the problems of cross identification that derive from the fact that the definition of Jewishness usually involves religion or culture, and for some people (not me!) nationality and/or race as well: Are you an American Jew or a Jewish American? Are you a Jew if you don’t practice the customs and rituals? And if you do practice but as an atheist, are you a Jew?

Of course, someone can always convert to Judaism, a purposely arduous process. One can also apostate, which may not protect a former Jew from the dangers of an anti-Semitic roundup.

That the definition of Jewishness has always presented these ambiguities can be a stickler for those who need everything to be cut-and-dried, black and white with no gray area. Yet these ambiguities are central to any discussion of Jewishness, especially in an age when the intermarriage rate for American Jews is about 58%.

By contrast, the ambiguities regarding the nature of manhood and womanhood raised by the transgendered and the nature of “blackness” raised by Rachel Dolezal exist at the margins and are not central to an understanding of womanhood or blackness.

By saying that the issues of womanhood as it relates to Caitlyn Jenner or of blackness as it related to Rachel Dolezal are marginal, I do not in any way mean to demean these people or others in their situation. What I mean is that the numbers of transgendered/ transsexual individuals and of whites passing as black are so small as to be statistically insignificant in considering how we define womanhood or an African-American.

There is, of course, absolutely no implications to accepting Kaitlyn Jenner as a woman (once she has her final surgery) or Chaz Bono as a man.  Having a sex change operation and undergoing hormone treatment pretty much completes the transformation from one sex to another. In no way has the definition of womanhood undergone alteration, nor do we have to consider the issue of what constituent’s a woman’s mentality.

The problems arise in defining those who believe they are one sex trapped in the body of another sex; if those who identified by others as men but self-identify as women are considered women, then the presence of a vagina no longer defines womanhood.

The Rachel Dolezal controversy reduces to a similar dilemma: Dolezal self-identifies as African-American and has made superficial changes in her appearance to look more African-American. She passes, although in the opposite direction of most “passing” in American history. Dolezal believes she’s African-American in the same way that a transgendered individual believes she/he is really the opposite sex. We accept and respect the transgendered person’s perceptions and actions. Why then does Dolezal get fired from her job and accused of lying?

There is also the uncomfortable idea of mentality. If we accept the argument that Dolezal has an African-American mentality that makes her African-American, the next step is to define that African-American mentality as innately inferior to a European mentality.  The Charles Murrays and Richard Herrnsteins of the world must be salivating at the thought of using the concept of mentality to build another disgustingly false case for white superiority.

Genetics is not going to help us out of any definitional conundrum, since all of our ancestors came from Africa and everyone has DNA that traces back to our African origins. There are about 7 billion people in the world, all with absolutely unique genetic codes, so I’m extremely confident in saying that there are people who have black ancestors going back four generations with fewer African genetic markers than Dolezal has. But that still doesn’t make her black. Or does it?

A non-Jew can convert to Judaism after undergoing a lengthy intellectual boot camp and someone identifying with a different sex can take hormones and undergo surgery. But there is no such process or operation that turns one African-American, French, Italian or Chinese, and let’s hope there never is. For the most part, race and nationality are artificial constructs, as artificial and mutable as culture itself.

Dolezal is free to live in an African-American neighborhood, hang out only with African-American people, eat only foods traditionally associated with African-American culture and engage only in cultural events identified as African-American. In fact, she is even free to pass. She just can’t lie and say she’s black on a job application, census forms or to get a scholarship. She can live black, but she just can’t be black.

Which would also describe the situation of a man who identifies as a woman and practices a transvestite lifestyle even in public. Such a person may identify as a woman, but heshe better use the men’s room and better not try out for the girls’ basketball team.

At the end of the day, these definitional problems don’t matter once we begin to consider individuals on their own merit and make certain that all individuals get the same opportunities. It will take more than ending discrimination against all minorities. It will also take making sure that every child has the same educational and cultural opportunities and the same access to healthcare, nutrition and personal technologies. If we marginalize minorities economically, the fact that they have full civil rights doesn’t matter. Racism and discrimination against sexual minorities is only half the problem. The other half is the growing inequality of opportunity, income and wealth.