Category Archives: law

A Thought on Income Taxes and Equal Treatment under Law

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It occurs to me that many of our States’ income tax codes violate our Constitution. Here’s the relevant clause, from the 14th Amendment’s Article I:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Any income tax law that taxes citizens differentially plainly does not afford all citizens equal protection of the (tax) law. Such laws confiscate the incomes of some people far more than it does others, and such laws that exempt some people from paying the tax favors those folks over others who must pay.

States’ income tax laws that do not tax every one equally must be found unconstitutional. That such a ruling would disrupt State budgets is no reason to continue this violation.

That principle applies, or should apply even if not strictly constitutionally, to our Federal income tax code, also. In particular, the 16th Amendment authorizes a Federal income tax, but it in no way authorizes the Federal government to tax Americans differentially from each other.

A Thought on Farmworkers and Welfare

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Pity the poor American farmworkers. That’s what Jason Yarashes, Legal Aid Justice Center‘s Director of its Worker Justice Program, wants us to do. He was responding to an earlier Letter in which that letter-writer was lamenting the troubles that farmers are having as a side effect of our government regaining control of our borders and the ensuing lack of illegal aliens coming in to do those farmers’ farm work.

Yarashes is correct that such labor is backbreaking, and most of it goes unaccompanied by Social Security benefits or health insurance, despite paying taxes. Never mind that the illegal laborers are happy to get the work and most of them succeed in sending some of their pay back to their families in their home countries.

There’s an obvious solution to this conundrum, although it’s one that Leftists like Yarashes will decry to the heavens.

The US has a bloated collection of welfare programs, each of which is itself bloated. Most of those on these programs are able-bodied, healthy, and unemployed, even with the light work requirements attached to these programs.

Put these folks to work on the farms. Let them pick the lettuce, detassel the corn, harvest the apples and oranges, and on and on as a criterion for collecting welfare payments.

Let the farmers pay these modern day CCC workers the wages they would have paid their illegal alien workers—not Yarashes’ precious minimum wage rate—and collect their welfare payments on top of that, which the illegal aliens do not get. The kicker: the farm work is heavily seasonal, but these farm CCC-ers would be eligible for their welfare collections year-round. And: boost the farm workers’ welfare payments by some amount—say 10% as an opening move—to reward them for their actual, and harder, work than skating by on volunteering, entering “work training” programs, or scattering around resumes like so many advertising fliers.

One onus on the farmers: they would have to rate these farm CCC-ers on the quality of their work, with their eligibility for continuation in the next year’s farm work contingent on getting satisfactory ratings this year.

A Thought on Physician-assisted Suicide

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The headline and subhead laid out the case in extreme terms:

Physician-Assisted Suicide Isn’t Healthcare
We all took an oath to do no harm. That includes killing our patients.

In the article the writer made the case against physician-assisted suicide in Biblical terms, and it’s a valid one:

Cain should have been put to death for what he did. But the Lord spared him, proclaiming that life and death belong to the Lord alone.

And

Medicine shouldn’t be entangled in the business of death. Killing isn’t healthcare.

Certainly. But what the Hippocratic Oath actually says is this:

I will abstain from all intentional wrong-doing and harm, especially from abusing the bodies of man or woman….

But that’s not what physician-assisted suicide does. If the patient wants to short-circuit an end-of-life period of misery, assisting his suicide isn’t “killing the patient;” it’s helping him move on. Withholding that assistance is most assuredly deeply injurious to the patient’s continuing body, and to his mind. Beyond that, it’s disastrous to the patient’s and his family’s emotional and economic well-being, consigning the latter, especially, to an extended life of impoverishment that could have been avoided. Physician-assisted suicide is palliative care in the extreme, but it is still palliative care.

The killing is the patient’s act, and that’s between him and God. Do no harm includes not getting between the patient and God. A doctor’s role assuredly does not include suggesting suicide; although, some governments do encourage it. A doctor’s role does, absolutely, include palliative care.

Along these lines, the Hippocratic Oath explicitly enjoins the physician from doing abortions:

Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.

I have to ask: how many abortions has this writer of the article at the first link performed? Plenty of his colleagues have done them, and proudly so, many even proclaiming abortions as “health care.”

A Sanction of New York over its Board of Elections

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New York’s State Board of Elections has inadequate safeguards regarding its elections and appears to be refusing to correct that.

Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), a nonpartisan organization focused on election security, alleges the New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) stonewalled a request to fix the state’s voter registration form to comply with federal voting law.

Absent those corrections, the State-dominating Progressive-Democratic Party could register loads of voters of whom Party approves, thereby cementing Party’s reign over the State for generations.

If RITE’s allegations are true, and the NYSBOE continues to refuse to correct its errors, there is a sanction that would have strong and sharp teeth. Here’s Article 2 of our 14th Amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The 19th and 26th Amendments modify this Article only to the extent of extending the right to vote to women and lowering the minimum age of eligibility to 18 years old.

Allowing ineligible persons to vote dilutes the votes of eligible, legitimate voters, and that is a functional, even if not direct, denial of those eligible voters’ right to vote. That dilution means their votes no longer count as whole votes, but only as reduced, fractional votes. In our system of elections, any reduction in the value of a vote to less than that of the entire vote is a denial of that vote.

The sanction, then, should be a reduction of New York’s representation in Congress according to the proportion of registered ineligible voters to registered eligible voters plus the proportion of eligible voters denied registration to the whole number of voters in the State.

Misreading

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In his letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, the Reverand Carmen Mele decried the deaths of more than 100 children at an Iranian school that occurred as a result of our country’s armed forces‘ bombing as a violation of just war principles.

This is a misreading of the situation. What the highly intelligent and learned man of the cloth chose to omit is that the school was adjacent to the military target, an adjacency that the Iranian regime deliberately chose in an effort to use those children as shields for its military, a common practice by terrorists.

The deaths of those children are deeply regrettable, but the responsibility for those deaths lies on the backs of those terrorists who so badly abused those children. This is well understood by any serious student of just war concepts.