Law and Anti-Law

In “It’s Destructive and Unfair to Tax ‘Unrealized Capital Gains’” (op-ed, March 31), Richard McKenzie observes that President Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders would like “a levy on unrealized capital gains.” Their thinking would be OK if the future were known and the reasoning was consistent.

Consistency demands that taxpayers could take deductions for unrealized capital losses as well. Follow the logic further and reach unrealized deductions for future dependents. Pregnant women could even deduct for the life in utero, along with unrealized child-care and educational expenses.

For that matter, if older people are likely to become dependents, a deduction for them could be made by those who anticipate their future dependent status. And why not deduct unrealized but anticipated, i.e., future, costs of doing business? Maybe, on second thought, the unrealized future is better left out of tax policy.--letter to editor

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San Francisco’s 1.7-mile Central Subway, which opened in January at a cost of $1.95 billion, three times as much as initially estimated. The subway is drawing fewer than 3,000 daily riders, no doubt because the design doesn’t make sense: Riders have to walk the equivalent of three football fields to connect to other transit lines and take three escalators to reach platforms 12 stories underground.

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Law and Anti-Law 

Earlier this month, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan was relentlessly heckled and successfully shouted down by a frothing mob of mini-Robespierre jackals who call themselves Stanford Law School students. The mob was simultaneously juvenile and outright vile, with one student unconscionably yelling to the esteemed jurist, "We hope your daughters get raped!" Even more galling, "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" Associate Dean Tirien Steinbach finally rose up upon the judge's plea to restore order...and, in pre-prepared remarks, sided with the protesters and ludicrously asked whether the "juice" (of Judge Duncan's planned remarks) was worth the "squeeze" of the alleged "harm" to the pampered brat students that Duncan's mere presence caused. (Steinbach has since been placed on administrative leave by Dean Jenny Martinez, although the culpable students have tragically escaped thus far with impunity.)--Newsweek, of all places

One can only imagine the future of these young attorneys who see the world as one-sided, as they enter a judicial system that is basically adversarial.