Evening Must-Read: Michael Strain: Conservatives, Wake Up: The Tax Code Is Not Your Biggest Problem

Two things that came across the transom this weekend:

First, Elizabeth Stoker Buenig writing on Civility [and] Outrage after being attacked for writing that it is morally questionable to seek fame and fortune by kicking down against those unfortunate enough not to have been born to the right parents or who have been unlucky in other ways.

I have always thought that there are three major sins of the intellect:

1. Cruelty–that is, kicking down in the hope that it will make the lives of the unlucky worse for, relative to the unlucky, contra John Donne the writer is indeed an island.

2. Laziness–that is, failing to inform oneself about the issues, and failing to think through the problems: failing to use your intelligence to any purpose.

3. Stubbornness–that is, failing to properly update one’s beliefs when new evidence comes in, and turning instead to elaborating reasons for why the new evidence doesn’t mean what it means: using one’s intelligence for a malign purpose to keep yourself from properly marking one’s beliefs to market.

I’ve always thought that when you cannot say that someone is being cruel, or lazy, or stubborn, but only “uncivil”–well, then you got nothing. And if people are being cruel, or lazy, or stubborn? Then it is a misdirection of effort to point out that they are uncivil. And that it is never uncivil to point out that people are being cruel, or lazy, or stubborn. Or perhaps it is better put as Adam Smith put it: that often “mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent”.

And just as I read this the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain crosses my desk:

Michael Strain: Conservatives, wake up: The tax code is not your biggest problem: “Our health-care system is in need of serious reforms…

…The Affordable Care Act is an ugly package filled with unintended consequences. One of those consequences is a significantly smaller labor force. It should be repealed and replaced with a conservative alternative. And health-care costs are projected to put Medicare and Medicaid spending on an unsustainable and destructive path, and are putting downward pressure on wages and salaries. I would make progress with conservative health-care reforms before worrying about tax reform. It’s a bigger economic problem today–and it’s a problem that will only grow in importance over the coming years…