A friend who sits far to the right of me on the political spectrum (as so many of our fellow Americans seem to) sent me an adorable short animation yesterday she thought I’d enjoy, even though it blames the poor for being lazy and greedy and shows how the hard-working wealthy are persecuted and exploited by the progressive tax system. You can watch that delightful proof of the case here.
Although I have many things I need to get myself do today, every day, and am languishing at the moment, on many levels barely functioning, even though Sekhnet correctly growled when I mentioned it, I had to send this response to my friend. Part of my effort to preserve our friendship and to ward off future emails like the one she thought I’d like, the oversimplified and therefore irrefutable cartoon about the unfairness of a progressive tax system (or a progressive anything else, I suppose) in a magical world where everyone is born with the identical chance to prosper, if only they’ll stop being born in toxic slums and get a decent home to grow up in so they can embrace hard work and smart investment.
I wrote to my friend:
The problem with this kind of hypothetical is that it sets up an artificial, conveniently over-simplified example that can rarely be seen in real life to “prove” a proposition about the complicated real world. If the set-up in this cartoon was the case in even one out of 100 cases it would be a lot.
It sets up a straw man (the demanding lazy brother happy not to work, spending every penny and feeling righteously entitled to his rich brother’s forced charity) on an absolutely even playing field, excluding all inconvenient, complicating facts, to stand in for all the parasites, you know the ones– they are out screaming every time a policeman enforces the law and one of their illegitimate kids die, and those with guilty consciences who don’t believe the police always act with justification, even when the person they kill isn’t shown to have posed a lethal threat — and the wealthy, every one of whom, as we all know, got their money from their hard work and smart investing. The wealthy who are persecuted and exploited by parasites and hated and envied for their every hard-earned advantage.
It always surprises me when, because you agree with the conclusion of some political piece, you send it thinking I will find it convincing. I try to remain mild, and Sekhnet curses me for spending any time at all responding to these things whenever I mention it to her, but I really do find it amazing that you can’t see these things for the preaching to the choir they are. And that they are also provocative (the kid in Missouri bashed the cop/racing car driver’s face in before the cop shot him to death, Obama lost the war in Iraq after Bush won it, etc.) especially when they turn out to not be true.
And, not to belabor the point, but you agreed not to send me these political things.
Love,
[name withheld by request]
gratuitousblahg 