Don't better your own lot unless you are willing to share your wealth with others

From Not Very Giving by Rob Reich. A great opinion piece for dissecting to unpack the logical fallacies, the unintended consequences, the factual errors and in general the structure of a poor argument.

Wanting to support your own children’s education is understandable, but it also has unintended, pernicious effects. The school foundations are legally registered as public charities. When donors give to their own child’s school or district, they are making a charitable contribution that the federal government treats in the same way as a donation to a food bank or disaster relief.

But charity like this is not relief for the poor. It is, in fact, the opposite. Private giving to public schools widens the gap between rich and poor. It exacerbates inequalities in financing. It is philanthropy in the service of conferring advantage on the already well-off.

The unexamined assumptions, the willful aversion to contemplating unintended outcomes, and the instances of blindness to the implications of his unstated assumptions are numerous and consequential.

Robert Reich was the Secretary of Labor under Clinton and is currently a Chancellor at University of California, Berkley. He writes op-ed pieces for the New York Times with some frequency. I enjoy reading him occasionally. In general I find that I can agree with some but not all of his goals, I often disagree with his prioritization of issues, and very frequently regard his proposed solutions to be as problematic if not more so than the problem he is trying to solve. That said, I read him because his positions are usually well argued.

So I was somewhat surprised to read this opinion piece which is of such inferior caliber. Step two was the realization that I had read a couple of other similarly anemic pieces by him in the past few months. Step three was the realization that Rob Reich of Stanford University is not the Robert Reich of Berkley. Both on the left in terms of political orientation and both energized by real societal issues but chalk and cheese in terms of being able to present a credible argument for their respective positions.