I wasn’t quite sure about the idea that Donald Trump is a “genius” for avoiding paying taxes, or about the further claim that this expertise makes him uniquely qualified to be in charge of taxation and spending. Even after reading Mark Sumner’s excellent diary. Until I thought about the drug epidemic in this country, and realized that the problem is that instead of upstanding but law-abiding doctors with experience like Vivek Murthy, we would do better to appoint meth dealers to the office of Surgeon General. Because who better to make people well than someone who has successfully worked to enrich themselves by doing the exact opposite all their adult life?
Sure, we’ve had Surgeons General who have been well-meaning, and they all know all sorts of things about “the body” and about “medicine.” Has that stopped our children from buying methamphetamines? No.
Now imagine Mags Bennett (played by character actress Margo Martindale on “Justified,”) or Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston in “Breaking Bad,”) in that office. Sure, their only experience is gaming the system, and contributing to the very epidemic that the system was created to control. But isn’t gaming the system the same as making the system work except upside down and backwards? After all, anyone who has wrecked a car basically has learned how to manufacture one. So if Donald Trump’s systematic tax avoidance would make him close tax loopholes, so too finding a market and exploiting it at the expense of vulnerable children is surely the best qualification for the job of making sure children grow up strong and healthy.
You might object that the notion of a country is built on an implied social contract, and that those people who avoid contributing or operate outside that contract for their own gain are basically pathological. That is true, but as the Trump campaign points out, he is pathological like a fox! And only a fox could be entrusted to guard the hen-house, because only a fox knows how a fox thinks. And I’m sure that if we put the fox in charge, he would use that knowledge even while he stops thinking like a fox, and works to protect the hens simply because that is what we hope he will do. So, obviously, by that reasoning we’d want a meth dealer in charge of our country’s public health.