ELECTION YEARS are notorious for giving rise to nonsense, and nonsense seems to have emerged early this time. One of the most respected minds in the country, Warren Buffet, is reported to have said – in open session of the House of Representatives – that he is not opposed to taxes on the rich (among whom he is, of course, conspicuous) being higher than on other people.

Once upon a time, it is said, there was a principle: “No taxation without representation.” Nowadays, the States make a fetish of equalizing representation: in State elections, members of Congress and other tax-spenders are allowed to vote. Why is there not just as much emphasis on equalizing taxation? If Buffett has only as many votes as the bag ladies and welfare mothers, and the people who can’t find their way across a butterfly ballot, why should he be more highly taxed? Ordinary citizens, in contrast to Buffett, dislike high tax rates; notice how much more income the elite have declared since the Republican administration reduced the rates they experience.

If Buffett wants to repay the great masses of consumers who have – willingly – endowed him with immense riches, he might very well remind the Congress that the Constitution is not only democratic – in the proper sense, that the many [State] officers have always the first and, in many cases, also the last words – but also politically correct: the privileges authorized, bankruptcy and patents and copyright, are all in favor of minorities (the U.S. is allowed to err neither to the Right, by oppressing minorities, nor to the Left, by favoring majorities.) Better still, he and his friends Bill Gates and Charles Munger and other notables might run for election as electors in their respective States: nowadays, candidates vying to be electors are all too often persons of little standing outside their respective parties.

I manage to have something that I deem worth saying about once a week. There are, of course, columnists who do it once a day, and one of them, Bill Bonner, has also co-authored at least two books, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets. Bonner – in common with Buffett – exemplifies the “modern” (as opposed to classical) mind that reasons from data to theories. (Once upon another time – I remember it well – there was a saying, “Every educated man is a liberal:” believe it or not! What the words meant was, that the only way to reach agreement with other people is to reason deductively, from first principles down to particular cases.)

At the moment, Bonner is telling us that the all-too-familiar phenomenon of warfare is attributable to evolution; we are descended from males who were ready to fight to prevent strangers from carrying off their females. There is no way to test this theory, because we cannot alter the past. However, we can point out that it is flatly false to suppose (as Bonner seemingly does) that war is a fact of life that we must accept. If “war” means conflict between states, then it arises only if there is not free trade and free travel across borders. (The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait was an exception; the pretext was a reservoir of “public” oil extending across their common border.)

But war is not necessarily frequent and widespread. The safeguard against it is called by the French fraternité, by the workers solidarity, by the Christians righteousness, by the States common defense, by the nations collective security: if any one is wronged, all hir equals join in hir defense. The sophisticated and cosmopolitan Bonner must have observed that, even in this republic (meaning, that every officer can be removed with ballots, rather than bullets,) there is a Confederation Of Public Servants that practices collective security and enjoys a remarkable measure of liberty.