Next week, I’m going to travel across a bunch of imaginary lines drawn on the ground by politicians.

Those lines are called “borders,” and in the case of my upcoming trip they separate areas known to most as Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

There are also a bunch of other borders, too numerous to mention, within THOSE borders, separating places called “counties,” “cities,” etc.

I don’t expect to have any problem crossing all those borders. You probably don’t have any problem crossing them either. You may cross two or three borders on your way to work, or when you pop out to grab dinner and watch a movie. Chances are you won’t be pulled over at any checkpoints to have your “papers” checked when you cross from Utah into Idaho, or from Cook County into Chicago, to make sure you have permission to cross the imaginary lines.

On my own trip, I could decide to stop traveling, rent an apartment, hit the “help wanted” ads for a job, etc. and nobody would so much as raise an eyebrow (well, nobody but my wife, anyway).

If I suddenly decide to put down roots  in Burlington or Lancaster, I won’t be put into shackles and deported to Gainesville. I’ll  just be treated as subject to the laws in Vermont or New Hampshire instead of Florida. No biggie.

But if I want to travel less than 50 miles between Burlington and Saint-Armand, or less than 60 miles between Lancaster and Dixville, or fly  to Acapulco or Reykjavik and back for a vacation, a bunch of cultists on both sides of some of the imaginary lines separating those places will start insisting that where I go and what I do is very much their business.

Why? Because they fervently believe that those imaginary lines imbue them with a special magical right to require that I get their permission to move, to stop, to live, to work, etc. And, unfortunately, these particular cultists employ large numbers of thugs to enforce their superstitions at gunpoint.

The next time you hear about a “border crisis,” I hope you’ll keep in mind that if there really is such a “crisis,” it is caused by those cultists and their obsession with controlling others, not by the ordinary, peaceful practice of free people traveling wherever they damn well please.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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It’s a tantalizing headline from investigative journalism group ProPublica:  “The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax.”

The source material for the report is an alleged “vast cache of IRS information” which may have been illegally leaked. A spokesperson for the US Treasury says that angle has been referred to the FBI, federal prosecutors, and other investigative bodies. And the title was clearly crafted to get our outrage gears turning.

But digging into the details, the promised revelation is … well, kind of boring. How do the wealthiest Americans “avoid” income tax? By not having “income.”

Yes, really. Words mean things, and the IRS spills a lot of ink defining those things.

How much ink? As of 2017, according to PolitiFact, the Internal Revenue Code was 6,550 pages long —  not including (Politifact cites the Tax Foundation)  6.6 million words of additional IRS regulations and 60,000 pages of case law.

And, as it turns out, most of the most wealthy’s wealth isn’t “income” according to the IRS’s definitions.

I’ll use Jeff Bezos as the example, because everybody does, right?

You’ve probably seen the headlines after a big stock move: “Bezos’s wealth increases by $4 billion” and so forth.

The obvious way of visualizing this headline is that a truck full of $100 bills pulled up to Bezos’s house and a crew carted those bills to the room where Bezos likes to roll around in money a la Scrooge McDuck.

What really happened is that the prospective sale value of stock that Bezos owns went up. Until and unless he actually sells that stock, he hasn’t made a dime. If he does sell that stock for more than it was worth when he got it, he’ll get hit for capital gains taxes of up to 20% on the price difference. Which is nowhere near the top income tax rate of 37% … but Jeff Bezos didn’t write the tax code, did he?

As a libertarian, I’d prefer to do away with taxes altogether. If the Navy wants a new aircraft carrier, let it hold a bake sale, or maybe send the Marines out to knock on doors and sell subscriptions to Rolling Stone to raise the money.

But if we’re going to have taxes, it’s kind of silly to blame people who pay what the tax code says they have to pay, rather than more, just because the amount paid doesn’t seem like “enough.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Was SARS-COV-2 — the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic — created (or at least weaponized by being made transmissible to and between humans) in a Chinese research lab? Was it then leaked, accidentally or intentionally, from that lab into the human population? It’s impossible to overstate the explosive potential of a provable “yes” answer to those two questions.

Seventeen months into the news cycle surrounding those questions (they were first publicly hinted at in a tweet on January 5, 2020), they’re still putting off lots of heat and very little light. And that’s likely to remain the case, because the “Wuhan Lab Leak theory” is not a theory.

A theory has to be objectively testable such that if it’s false it can be PROVEN false. Otherwise, it’s just a hypothesis.

If my car keys go missing, I can hypothesize that little green faeries (who have the power to fool security cameras) took them in the middle of the night, then forgot to put them back after taking my car out for a joyride, filling the gas tank back up, parking it back where they found it, and rolling back the odometer.

My hypothesis “explains” the missing car keys. But it can’t be falsified. If I find the keys in my jacket pocket, well, the faeries obviously put them there, dummy!

Many “conspiracy theories” are just hypotheses which continuously change to accommodate any evidence that might disprove them.

No, I’m not saying the “Wuhan Lab Leak” hypothesis is a wild-eyed “conspiracy theory.” But it’s also not likely testable or falsifiable.

For one thing, the Chinese regime, while notable for many things, is not notable for its likely willingness to let western investigators poke around Wuhan at will, actively assisting those investigators in determining whether it accidentally or intentionally killed  millions of human beings and cratered the global economy.

For another, the regimes urging such an investigation have a long record of lying about pretty much everything (does “Saddam has WMD” ring any bells? How about “the NSA doesn’t spy on Americans?”), and have already spent a good deal of time setting  China up as their latest  “adversary.” It’s hard to imagine any situation in which those who WANT to believe in — or stand to gain political power from selling — the “Wuhan Lab Leak” hypothesis would concede that they were mistaken.

It’s a hypothesis, not a theory, and it’s likely to stay that way. When dealing with hypotheses, our best analytical tool is Occam’s Razor. Simple version: The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the likeliest.

Which explanation requires fewer assumptions?

That, like most human infectious diseases (60% according to the US Centers for Disease Control), SARS-COV-2 jumped from animals to humans via random mutation?

Or that, unlike (almost — the 2001 anthrax attacks may be an exception) any other past disease, SARS-COV-2 was weaponized in a lab and released into the human population?

Occam tells us to choose Door Number One. And good sense tells us to stop obsessing over questions we cannot hope to provably answer.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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