On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution.
Categories
Maryland Makes Seven
Not spending millions more to hire and train swarms of Internal Revenue Service agents to poke, audit, investigate and squeeze more tax dollars from wealthier Americans would be — you knew this was coming — racist.
That’s the new argument for siccing the IRS on wealthier Americans; they’re more likely to be white than black.
“The federal government is losing billions in unpaid taxes,” informs a Washington Post headline, “in part due to racial disparities in the tax code.”
What racially based inequalities, precisely?
“The inequity rests on long-established tax breaks that favor White Americans over Black Americans in three areas — marriage, homeownership and retirement, according to Dorothy A. Brown, an Emory University law professor,” writes Post columnist Joe Davidson. Because, for instance, “White people . . . are much more likely to be homeowners,” and more likely than blacks “to work for companies that offer tax favored retirement plans.”
Davidson offered no further discussion of marriage.
One can argue for or against hiring more IRS agents. (I’m against.) But to calculate the merits based on the skin color of the people most likely to be investigated is . . . racist.
Where does such skewed logic lead?
“The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade,” Fox News reports, “effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.”
This statewide policy designed to hurt so many individual students — and to help none — is predicated on closing a racial gap in math performance. By knee-capping the higher performing students of all races.*
So which is worse? That it’s a human rights violation . . . or that it is so incredibly stupid?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* As a candidate in this year’s Virginia House elections explained to The Federalist, the proposed statewide policy “is incredibly belittling, arrogant, and racist in assuming that children of color cannot reach advanced classes in math.”
Screenshot from Harrison Bergeron
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Marcus Aurelius
If mind is common to us, then also the reason, whereby we are reasoning beings, is common. If this be so, then also the reason which enjoins what is to be done or left undone is common. If this be so, law also is common; if this be so, we are citizens; if this be so, we are partakers in one constitution; if this be so, the Universe is a kind of Commonwealth.
Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (c. 121-180 A.D.), Book IV, 4 (A.S.L. Farquharson, translator).
Categories
Wollstonecraft & Spencer
On April 27, 1759, English philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft was born. Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher William Godwin and the couple begat one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Wollstonecraft herself wrote several important political treatises, including her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and her valiant effort in the emancipation of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
English philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820. Among Spencer’s most famous books are First Principles, Principles of Ethics (chiefly its first part, The Data of Ethics), The Study of Sociology, The Man versus the State, and two editions of Social Statics. Spencer was an evolutionary theorist as well as a religious and political philosopher, and coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He called the basic principle of a free political order “The Law of Equal Freedom.”
Police body-cam video cannot bring back the dead. Nor end racism or prevent tragedy.
What point-of-policing video can capture is solid and critical evidence. After a deadly police encounter, body-cam footage gives the public confidence that the truth will soon come out.
But only if police consistently and promptly release relevant video to the public.
Consider last week’s tragedy in Columbus, Ohio, where a policeman shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant as she was preparing to stab another young women. Many politicians and those in the media were ready to herald it as “the latest in a string of deadly videos documenting the final moments of a person of color killed by law enforcement.”
The cop-cam video, however, clearly showed a policeman firing his gun to prevent one person of color from stabbing another. Just what we want police of any color to do.
NBC Nightly News still managed to mangle its reporting, editing out the image of the knife. In the aftermath of George Zimmerman’s shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin, you may remember, NBC News broadcast Zimmerman’s 911 call but dishonestly edited part of the conversation to inject a racial element where none had been.*
And, sure, even staring at incontrovertible videotape evidence of good police behavior, some took to defending knife-fighting as a youthful rite of passage.
But everyone can see the footage for themselves.
In another fatal shooting last week, police attempted to serve an arrest warrant in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. But under state law police are not required, short of a court order, to release police body-cam video.
Citizens are going to court.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* The local Jacksonville, Florida, NBC affiliate fired three employees over the incident.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Categories
Herbert Spencer
When men hire themselves to shoot other men to order, asking nothing of the justice of their cause, I don’t care whether they are shot themselves.
Herbert Spencer, “Patriotism,” Facts and Comments (1902) — commenting on Britain’s “second war in Afghanistan” (1878-1880).
Categories
Sybil’s Ride
On April 26, 1777, Sibyl Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s more famous effort.
On the same day in 1805, United States Marines captured Derne under the command of First Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, an important event in the First Barbary War.
In April 26, 1865, Union cavalry troopers cornered John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Lincoln, in Virginia, shooting him to death. There was no interrogation.
Categories
Watch: The More Laws…
Tacitus was right. Paul Jacob explains.
Categories
James Monroe
Our country may be likened to a new house. We lack many things, but we possess the most precious of all — liberty!
Paul Jacob applies ancient principles to the news: