George Rebane
Mr Douglas Keachie is a loud voice in the community and on local blogs. A man of progressive persuasion, he is also a sometime commenter on these pages. In his latest effort he attempts to reveal “three fatal flaws” in my 11jun11 Union column ‘Entrepreneurship 2011’. His revelation was published as an Other Voices submission in the 21jun11 Union (here).
Mr Keachie launches his piece with the devastating deduction that I claimed the tax rate to be 100% (confiscatory) for all earnings above $250,000 – “The tax on net income above $250,000 is not 100 percent.” It is easy to verify that nowhere in my column do I make such claim or anything that remotely resembles it. From that point of departure Mr Keachie proceeds swiftly downward in his displayed comprehension of what I wrote, and in his understanding of the entrepreneurial enterprise in general.
There are two possible explanations for such errors. The first is that Mr Keachie is among the many who have been short-changed by our public educational system. And that would explain why his remarkable conclusions fall into the lower categories as documented in the longitudinal National Adult Literacy Survey that is conducted every ten years by the National Center for Educational Statistics. As the record shows, this is not the first time that Mr Keachie has had trouble understanding what I write. (I have reported extensively on adult numeracy and literacy on these pages – RR keywords ‘numeracy’, ‘adult literacy’.)
The other explanation is that Mr Keachie is taking a page from Saul Alinsky’s manual of political discourse, and simply fabricating a set of ‘facts’, attributes, or other characteristics that can be ascribed to a person to be denigrated. Such characteristics, derived from whole cloth, go on to serve as the ridiculed targets for the remainder of the presentation. The reader, unfamiliar with the original, is then at the author’s mercy.
As to why The Union so prominently published Mr Keachie’s article, one can only guess. Perhaps, through their over-worked editorial filter, my column represented an ideological bias that had to be ‘balanced’, and the Keachie piece was the only one at hand – any port in a storm.
rebanesruminations.com 
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