"They're Playing a Different Game"

This morning, eating a bowl of cereal and waiting for eggs to come to a boil, I happened to tune in to Dennis Prager's program and caught a snippet of his discussion on leftism and taxes.

More important to leftists than liberty, Dennis argues, is equality. Bringing the wealthy down is more important than bringing the poor up. That's why the left believes in taxing the wealthy. Obama's tiresome and disingenuous mantra (my words), that millionaires and billionaires aren't paying their "fair share," is the latest riff on this idea.

If a conservative were to challenge that notion by explaining that raising taxes on the wealthy actually suppresses prosperity for everyone in society and not just the wealthy, the left wouldn't care. Dennis suggests an analogy. It would be like telling a baseball player, "If you do [thus and such], you won't be able to score a touchdown." But the baseball player doesn't care about touchdowns. He cares about home runs. It's a different game. 

That's the way it is with the Left, says Dennis. The Left doesn't care about prosperity. It cares about equality. The Left is interested in a different goal. They're playing a different game. 

I find this analogy pretty intriguing. I wonder how others view it. 

The question about whether raising taxes on the wealthy helps or hurts the economy was addressed in an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by Stephen Moore. Moore argues that raising taxes hurts the economy and cites several times throughout American history when this was demonstrated, including during and after JFK's administration. 

Moore writes:

JFK cut rates by about 30% for every income group. He argued that the lower tax rates would "boost the economy, produce revenues, and achieve a future budget surplus." He even called lower rates an "investment in the future." His prediction that the economy would surge was validated by rapid growth every year from 1965 through 1968. Tax collections grew by 8.6% per year and unemployment fell to 3.4%. "The unusual budget spectacle of sharply rising revenues following the biggest tax cut in history," announced a 1966 U.S. News and World Report article, "is beginning to astonish even those who pushed hardest for tax cuts in the first place."

This is the kind of common-sense fiscal policy we might have seen instituted under a Romney administration. Unfortunately, common sense fiscal policy is lost on the class warfare policies of hard-leftists like Obama and his fellow Democrats who, believing they were given a mandate in the 2012 election, are trotting onto the football field carrying gloves and bats, intent less on lowering the deficit and stimulating job creation than they are on leveling the playing field. They're playing a different game.

"Why Lower Tax Rates are Good for Everyone," by Stephen Moore (Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2012).

Mini Book Review: Dennis Prager's "Still the Best Hope"

Finally finished Dennis Prager's Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph. I've heard Dennis say on his radio program that the book is really three books in one, and I'd almost agree with this assessment but for the fact that the third section, arguably its most important given the title of the book, is disproportionate, in terms of substance and depth, to the other two. The first section (Leftism) is comprised of four chapters (What is Leftism; Why the Left Believes What it Believes; Why the Left Succeeds; The Left's Moral Record) and is over 200 pages long. The second section (Islam) is also four chapters (On Evaluating Religions; The Moral Record of Islam; Islam, America, and the West; Responses to Arguments on Behalf of Islam), though it is half the length of the previous section (about 80 pages). The third section (America and its Unique Values) is not delineated by chapter titles and runs about 80 pages in length. If Dennis ever writes a second edition of the book, I hope he is able to flesh out the third section especially. I got the sense that he was rushing towards deadline. The discussion felt compressed and condensed and is not as well-documented compared to the documentation in Parts I and II.

The strongest and most insightful discussion, in my view, is on Leftism. Writing about the left must be like trying to hold a giant squid in your hands while describing it to an audience. Prager says as much in his opening pages. He argues that leftism is a kind of religion, albeit one without Scripture and verse, making it difficult to document its core beliefs and tenets the way you might be able to define (say) Judaism or Buddhism. In addition, Dennis points out that people on the left don't even refer to themselves as "leftists," nor do they consider their beliefs as an alternate worldview in comparison to other worldviews. Instead, they seem to consider their beliefs de facto, incontrovertible, unarguable, while all other viewpoints are not only dubious but evil. For Dennis to attempt to identify the tenets of Leftism must have required an arduous amount of research, and indeed, he provides endnotes for most (not all) of the points he makes.

His discussion on Islam (Part II) took a lot of guts. He admirably and consistently makes a distinction between practicing, peace-loving Muslims around the world and those who advocate Sharia law and forced conversion. He is not afraid to expose the ugly side of Islam with its history of violence, oppression, and especially the anti-Semitism which fuels its hatred toward Israel and America. He is hopeful and optimistic that Islam can and will be reclaimed by thoughtful, honorable, good Muslims who believe in the American trinity (see third section). Me, I'm not so confident. I hope he's right.

My only real criticism of the book has to do with his third section.