Arthur Conan Doyle

From The Paris Review of Books:

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859–1930), wasn’t knighted in 1902 for creating its protagonist, Sherlock Holmes, though many readers feel he should have been. The literary journalist Christopher Morley, founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, declared that he actually should have been sainted. In fact, Arthur Conan Doyle only reluctantly added Sir to his name—for his services and writings during the Boer Wars—because his beloved mother talked him into it. On his books he austerely remained A. Conan Doyle “without,” as he said, “any trimmings.” Such modesty is characteristic of this altogether remarkable man, one who gave his own stolid John Bull appearance, down to the military mustache, not to his Great Detective, but to the loyal Dr. Watson.

Appropriately, Conan Doyle once named “unaffectedness” as his own favorite virtue, then listed “manliness” as his favorite virtue in another man; “work” as his favorite occupation; “time well filled” as his ideal of happiness; “men who do their duty” as his favorite heroes in real life; and “affectation and conceit” as his pet aversions. It should thus come as no surprise that Conan Doyle’s books are all fairly transparent endorsements of chivalric ideals of honor, duty, courage, and greatness of heart.

In an English country garden

From The Making of the English Gardener:

Creating a garden could enhance your political future no matter the cost. Lord Dudley (Earl of Leicester) spent the modern equivalent of £1 million on his new garden at Kenilworth Castle in an attempt to gain favour with Elizabeth l, while Lord Cecil was spending an equivalent £250,000 a year on improving Theobalds in Hertfordshire. In her new book Margaret Willes provides a welcome insight into an often-neglected period of garden history by investigating what was being read between 1560 and 1660 when gardens such as Dudley’s and Cecil’s were receiving lavish attention.

This is a delightful read for anyone interested in the history of gardening.

Sign of the times

Herman Cain for president

Bruce at Gay Patriot endorses Herman Cain:

This is a personal decision by me and does not reflect the views of my co-bloggers nor should be construed as an official endorsement by GOPROUD of which I am a board member.
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I had the pleasure to meet him at CPAC and I have been closely following his campaign long before most people knew his name.

Daniel:

I expect to offer a rebuttal to Bruce’s argument in short order. Let this occasion remind y’all that while Bruce, Eric, Nick and I all blog on the same site, we don’t always agree with one another.

A poll on Ace shows that a majority of "morons" are also for Cain. I'm game. Cain may not be the most polished candidate but at least he's real, honest and sincere - and a successful businessman.

Why the corporate tax is wrong

A brief history of the income tax:

After the Civil War, nearly all the wartime taxes—including the nation's first income tax—were repealed and the federal government relied mostly on the tariff for revenues. It provided the government with more than ample peacetime income. In 1882, the government had revenues of $403 million, but expenses were only $257 million, a staggering budget surplus of nearly 36%. The reason the tariff was so high was, ostensibly, to protect America's burgeoning industries from foreign competition.
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But the tariff is a consumption tax, which is simply added to the price of the goods sold. And consumption taxes are inherently regressive. The poor, by definition, must spend all of their income on necessities and thus pay consumption taxes on all of their income. The rich, while living in luxury, bank most of their income and largely escape these types of taxes.

As the vast surpluses piled up in the Treasury, the political pressure to institute an income tax on the rich grew steadily. In 1894, with Democrat Grover Cleveland in the White House and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, a federal income tax became law. The new tax, however, was very different from the Civil War income tax, which had exempted only the poor. The new one hit only the rich, imposing a 2% tax on incomes above $4,000. Less than 1% of American households in 1894 met that income threshold.

Needless to say, the tax was attacked in court, in a 1895 test case called Pollack v. Farmers' Loan & Trust. The case turned on the definition of a "direct tax," which the Constitution requires to be apportioned equally among the states according to population, something obviously impossible with an income tax.

The court split 4-4 as to whether the new income tax was constitutional. One member of the court, Justice Howell Jackson of Tennessee, was absent because of illness (and died less than three months later). But with the case drawing enormous public attention, the court agreed to reargue it and Justice Jackson rose from his deathbed to hear it.

Jackson was known to favor the income tax and it was assumed that it would now be upheld 5-4. But one of the other justices switched his vote (the opinion is unsigned and we don't know by whom or why) and it was voted down 5-4.

The income tax was dead. But the pressure to tax the incomes of the largely untaxed rich only increased, especially as the Progressive wing of the Republican Party grew in strength under Theodore Roosevelt. By the time of the administration of President William Howard Taft (1909-13) the pressure was becoming overwhelming. One representative suggested simply repassing the 1894 tax bill and daring the Supreme Court to overturn it a second time.

That idea horrified Taft, who revered the court. He feared that it would weaken its position as the final arbiter of the Constitution. He came up with a brilliant, very lawyerly, alternative: He proposed a constitutional amendment to legalize a personal income tax, while meanwhile imposing a tax on corporate profits. In the early 20th century such a tax was, in effect, a tax on the rich. As the corporate income tax is technically an excise tax, there was no constitutional problem. Taft's solution was implemented and in 1913 the 16th Amendment was declared ratified, just as Taft was leaving office.

The new president, Woodrow Wilson, and the strongly Democratic Congress promptly passed a personal income tax. It kicked in at 1% on incomes above $3,000 (a comfortable upper middle-class income at the time) and reached 7% on incomes over $500,000. But there were many deductions, bringing the effective tax rates down sharply from the marginal ones—a feature of the tax system ever since.

Unfortunately the corporate income tax, originally intended as only a stopgap measure, was left in place unchanged. As a result, for the last 98 years we have had two completely separate and uncoordinated income taxes. It's a bit as if corporations were owned by Martians, otherwise untaxed, instead of by their very earthly—and taxed—stockholders.

This has had two deeply pernicious effects. One, it allowed the very rich to avoid taxes by playing the two systems against each other. When the top personal income tax rate soared to 75% in World War I, for instance, thousands of the rich simply incorporated their holdings in order to pay the much lower corporate tax rate.

There has since been a sort of evolutionary arms race, as tax lawyers and accountants came up with ever new ways to game the system, and Congress endlessly added to the tax code to forbid or regulate the new strategies. The income tax act of 1913 had been 14 pages long. The Revenue Act of 1942 was 208 pages long, 78% of them devoted to closing or defining loopholes. It has only gotten worse.

The other pernicious consequence of the separate corporate and personal income taxes has been a field day for demagogues and the misguided to claim that the rich are not paying their "fair share." Warren Buffett recently claimed that he had paid only $6.9 million in taxes last year. But Berkshire Hathaway, of which Mr. Buffett owns 30%, paid $5.6 billion in corporate income taxes. Were Berkshire Hathaway a Subchapter S corporation and exempt from corporate income taxes, Mr. Buffett's personal tax bill would have been 231 times higher, at $1.6 billion.

Just as in the late 19th century, the tax code is now hopelessly arbitrary and unfair. It requires a complete overhaul.

The contradictions of Karl Marx

All socialists are insane and Marx was no exception:

As Mary Gabriel's new biography of the Marx family, Love and Capital, makes clear, though, Marx was indeed human: a philosopher and revolutionary thinker, yes, but also a husband and father who loved his family and who experienced a tremendous anxiety over his failure to provide for them.

Marx's more human aspects have been played down by both his detractors and his supporters. Some Marxists, Gabriel notes, went so far as to try to suppress knowledge not only of certain scandalous aspects of their idol's history and conduct (the fact, for instance, that he fathered an illegitimate son with the family's housekeeper while his wife was in Europe pleading with her relatives for financial assistance) but also of such innocuous facts as that Karl had a nickname (his close friends and relatives called him "Mohr").
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"Freedom," he wrote in 1875, "consists in converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it" -- a statement that clearly indicates the distance between his own views and many of the programs that were eventually implemented in his name.

More broadly, it surely helps us understand the overall meaning and intent of Marx's economic critiques to know that he and Jenny, his wife, spent the majority of their life together in considerable and frequently miserable poverty, relying on contributions from supportive friends (most reliably Friedrich Engels, Marx's lifelong intellectual companion and coauthor of The Communist Manifesto). "The man who wrote Capital," writes Gabriel, "was an extraordinary philosopher, economist, classicist, social scientist, and writer, but he was also someone intimately acquainted with the slow death of the spirit suffered by those condemned to poverty while surrounded by a world of wealth."

If this was hard on Marx, it was surely harder still on Jenny. Born in Prussia in 1814, four years before her future husband, Jenny von Westphalen was raised in an aristocratic family but inherited her father's relatively radical political views. Though she knew that in uniting with the young Karl she was turning her back on a life of comfortable privilege, she could not possibly have predicted just how uncomfortable and impoverished her life with Marx would prove to be. Karl Marx's journalistic writings earned him little, his philosophical writings nothing at all. Both he and Jenny lived in the expectation that his masterwork, Capital, would earn enough capital to relieve their debts and render them financially secure.
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He spent much of his life in poor health and constant pain as a result of various ailments. (One particularly humanizing moment has him writing to Engels that he had had to give up going to the British Museum Reading Room on account of his hemorrhoids, which "afflicted me more grievously than the French Revolution." ) And there were other, profounder sufferings: four of the couple's seven children -- including all three sons -- died before reaching adolescence.
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A good deal of Love and Capital is devoted to the three surviving Marx daughters. Like their father, they tended to be intellectually adventurous and possessed a zeal for social reform. And like their father, they lived lives plagued by personal difficulties -- indeed, two of the three ended up dying by their own hand.

Cliff Richard

Cliff Richard:

The veteran star, who turns 71 next month, has told how he believes modern society could benefit from a more 'spiritual approach to life' with less violent crimes and less wars taking place if people were more religious.

Sir Cliff, who became an active Christian in 1964, revealed he still prays regularly - for both friends and foes.
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He said: 'The last couple of months have really shocked me. The riots! Yes times are tough, but smashing up the high street isn't the answer.'

The star also gave his verdict on gay relationships from a religious perspective.

He said: 'I talked about same-sex relationships and I knew that would ruffle a few Christian feathers.

'But what does it say in the Bible? Judge not, lest ye be judged.'

He went on: 'If people can't understand me and my life, it's up to them. I can't live my life for other people.'

Three years ago, in his autobiography, Sir Cliff spoke of his friendship with former Catholic priest John McElynn he calls his 'companion'.

The practising Christian told how McElynn - an ex-American missionary - shared his home and was a 'blessing'.

Cliff and John shopping in Malibu: