Tax Lawyer's Blog

“Stop being taller than me.”

- From the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night -

Even at the age of five I appreciated the absurdity of that line.

The character who speaks it is the shorter of a pair of not-so-bright thugs who spend half the movie chasing the Fab Four through the streets of London. Clearly, the short thug thinks it immoral that his partner continues to be taller than him. Every time he sees him he gets annoyed that he hasn’t done something to eliminate the inequity. Just what it is his taller friend should do is not made clear.

The line of course is a joke, but it has resonance today because it provides us with a perfect example of the attitude of some in this country whose master plan seems to be to remove from existence all unfair advantage.¹

Liberals are like short thugs.² But what is it that makes them so unable or unwilling to accept that life is inherently unfair? And what is it that makes them think that a select group of intellectuals (i.e. themselves) is sufficiently wise to decide for all of us what must be done to change nature so that it ceases to be unfair?³

These are the questions that keep me awake at night.

It is a fact of life that nature’s gifts are distributed unevenly. Some people are prettier than others, some people are stronger than others, some people are smarter than others and, yes, some people are taller than others. But the arbitrariness of nature in no way obligates me to allow a few self-annointed central planners to concoct taxpayer-funded schemes to “level the playing field.”

I’ll take my chances with the invisible hand before I do that.

Footnotes:

¹ Most of these are the same people who prop up Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution as the gold standard of cosmology. Darwin’s entire thesis is based on the inherent unfairness of nature; that some organisms are, in fact, superior to other organisms.

² If you don’t believe me, just make a visit to any Ivy League’s School of Cultural Studies. You will find there courses of study that teach students about the inherent unfairness of white skin and male genitalia and what those having those advantages should do about it. Is “stop being whiter than me” or “stop being manlier than me” any less absurd than “stop being taller than me?”

³ Economist Thomas Sowell dedicates his book “Intellectuals and Society” to a discussion of the way the liberal intelligentsia arrogantly assumes that its finite knowledge is greater both in quantity and quality than the cumulative knowledge of the masses acquired and refined after many thousands of years of experience.  

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