Beware smooth half-truths and self-deceptions

The multi-billion dollar advertising industry testifies that people can be sold nearly anything. Yard sales do the same thing more locally. And addictions counselors report that people impulsively buy via cable stations dedicated to the sale of items that pile up in buyers’ homes unopened. But imagine how much more people can be sold if they have a dog in the fight, if they have a motive to believe a fallacy when they think it benefits them.

Take immigration. Political parties harangue us incessantly about the menace of illegal immigrants streaming into the country along our 2,400-mile southern border. Current estimates are about 12 million are in the U.S. Xenophobes are people who fear foreigners. They worry that scarce jobs will be taken by aliens, leading to a decline in the economy. Politicians feed these fears with the hope of getting votes, ignoring the dangers of antagonizing legal voters of the same ethnicities. Let’s look at some of the misinformation deliberately aired to stoke xenophobia.

Say we have two construction workers, one in the U.S. legally, the other not. The first makes a standard construction salary, the other makes half because a boss knows he can get away with underpaying someone who cannot very well go to the authorities. The legal worker gets Social Security coverage at the proper times, the illegal does not. In the construction trade, seasonal work is often the norm, so one gets unemployment compensation, the other does not. Injuries happen on the job, but one gets workman’s compensation, the other does not.

While both enjoy police and fire protection even though only one pays taxes for this, one lives in fear of deportation at any moment. That one sends money home to impoverished relatives in total amounts of many billions, which chagrins the legal citizen. Yet with what would Latin Americans buy American exports if this unofficial “foreign aid” did not take place? Illegal people pay sales tax, and their rent has to help cover municipal taxes paid by the landlord. They must live in poorer neighborhoods, where social ills are more common. They must pay proportionately more for food and clothing since lower-income area stores charge more.

Strangely enough, those who object the loudest to the above make nary a peep when it comes to the socialism for the wealthy: wage earners pay Social Security tax on their income, but only up to a certain ceiling. Any income a wealthy person makes over the sum of $106,800 pays nothing on what comes in above that. There, big government is just fine because it favors the rich. And we have not even begun to examine the tax loopholes for the rich, like 10 percent tax on dividends. Critics fault U.S. business taxes, saying that other countries are more lenient. But they fail to tell you that these loopholes see to it that the average business actually paid, after the loopholes, only 14.3 percent, quite below foreign rates. Big government is only a menace when it protects the poor. Let it enrich the rich, perhaps to make federal home insurance available for beachfront mansions, and it is the just due of the comfortable.

As next year’s presidential election approaches, beware of smooth half-truths already rocketing around the internet. It is to the distinct advantage of the haves to convince the many times more

middle-class independent voters that they should vote to benefit the super-haves. Who knows? Such voting may hurt that voter now, but it will make him orr her rich later — or so the common wisdom says.

Christian doctrine has long taught that concern for the poor must take preeminence over the drive for profit. This is a primary fallacy of the gospel of capitalism. Ayn Rand, high priestess of the Gordon Gecko set, has insisted that the well being of another is none of my concern. Jesus says the way I behave toward my neighbor will determine my salvation. He must have favored class warfare.

Greed needs a creed to justify itself. We have an instinctual aversion to letting elderly people fend for themselves, or single mothers struggle unaided. So a theology of merciless individualism is billed as moral strength and frontiersman independence. The fraud is easily exposed since most wealthy who did make their money honestly needed the help of legions of hard-working middle-class and poor to do the work in their factories. Wealthy Christians deserving the name compensate their employees justly, keeping the wellbeing of their workforce uppermost when their shareholders pummel them for even greater dividends.