Widely accepted fallacies that defy evidence

What a relief that as fall yielded to winter, the Mayan calendar’s expiration did not end the world. I was so worried. And a week and a half later, the financial world also kept from flying into smithereens as our political leaders veered away from the dreaded cliff of doom. I don’t know how much sleep I lost over that. They have to schedule these things farther apart: a body only has so much adrenaline.

The temptation is to blame the media for such idiocy, saying they want to sell papers. But with Phineas Taylor Barnum rightly saying that there’s one born every minute and two to take his money, we get an idea of our reputation of gullibility. H.L. Mencken, the Baltimore newspaperman who died in 1956, chided our credulity when he said that no one ever went broke underestimating the American electorate. For our ability to buy anything advertised to us, he invented the term “Boobus Americanus.”

Have you ever catalogued the number of things we, even with our incredible communications technology, take as true when evidence or experience tells us they are false? Because such widely accepted fallacies have been around so long, we say they must be right.  Take war. Essentially we decide that we are going to get our troops out on a field and annihilate the other side’s troops, perhaps with better weapons and training and preparedness. So we build robotic aircraft to carry Hellfire missiles undetected over enemy territory and fire them at unsuspecting targets, wiping out civilians nearby who are dismissed as collateral damage. Sorry, no hard feelings.

Gun possession also has been around a long while.  Perhaps it shares war’s worry about the appearance of too little testosterone that it positively shouts for the right to carry guns never foreseen by the authors of the Second Amendment. These authors specified that Americans may bear arms when assembling a well-regulated militia. Today’s police and military fill that bill, not private citizens. By extension, why can’t I claim the right to own a bazooka, or maybe one of those drones. I could say it is for self defense.

How about abortion? It has been legalized here and in many other countries. Its presupposition is that the baby is not a legal person by edict of the high court, so it may be terminated the way a cancerous tumor may be. Somehow the court decided that a woman’s right to privacy outweighs the baby’s right to birth. But then, kidnapped Africans in America’s 19th century were also told by the court that they were not recognizable as legal persons. Once again, nothing personal intended. Today we no longer have slaves picking cotton, thanks to the Thirteenth Amendment, even if there are more slaves today in the world than before as forced laborers or as sex captives. But as with the above lunacies, no one raises a cry. Or if they do, they are dismissed as fanatics forcing their faith on others. The Taliban has poisoned the well with its religious extremism, making social justice advocates look as believable.

And then there is the impossible to understand clamor from some in the middle class that the rich not be taxed. This would take money away from the private sector, where it could start factories and create jobs, and give it to government so it can make some more anti-poverty programs. Here the charge is that its motive is to buy votes from the poor and win elections. The only snag is that money for the rich goes to Cayman Islands wealth generators while money to help poor goes immediately to food and clothing stores. Any economist will tell you that money in circulation benefits us all while money just for the rich seldom creates the many mythical jobs to stimulate that circulation. Comparatively little ever trickles down. Why do you suppose that Jesus likened the attitude of the rich toward money to a camel passing through a needle’s eye?

Our country today faces arterial sclerosis because lenders fear to lend, employers fear to employ, and consumers fear to consume, each afraid that a sudden downturn will leave them high and dry. The term is money velocity, the speed with which it travels through the arteries of the national economy. It should be called money molasses in winter, so great is the fear four years after the Great Recession ended.  I’d like to see proof of this last.