Today, as I was driving home and leaning right (I always lean right when I listen to NPR), I heard another explanation of why taxes should be raised for the rich—i.e., those having an income above $200,000.

As the fellow laid out his case, it hit me why conservatives and liberals have trouble agreeing on these things. The reason that this liberal fellow gave for taking more money from these people were almost completely unstated. In logic, we call an unstated part of an argument an enthymeme. Usually people don’t state enthymemes because they are so obvious that they need not be stated. Here is the most famous example with the enthymeme in parentheses:

All men are mortal.

(Socrates is a man.)

Therefore, Socrates must die.

In this tax arguments the man went through two scenarios—the $200,000 and above tax hike and the $1,000,000 and above tax hike. He made no real argument. He simply said that the people making $200,000 and above were 3% of the population and that those making more than million are 0.3% of the population. He also mentioned that we really need the money and that if we extend this tax cut to all people it will cost $700 billion dollars. We will then, he said, have to make hard cuts in social services. This might be true, but it was hard to tie everything together without extensive use of enthymemes. So, I rolled the marbles around in my head for a few minutes. Here is what I came up with (again the enthymemes are in parentheses):

(These people have money.)

There are not a lot of them—i.e., the “rich”.

(They cannot keep us from taking their money.)

We really need the money.

Therefore, we should take money from the rich and use it for “us.”

The horror of this logic, of course, could work at every level—i.e., if we just keep defining the “rich” as people who have more money than we do, we should be able to take their money whenever we need it.

For liberals this seems to make sense, so much sense that it needs not be stated. For political conservatives it is blasphemy that should never be uttered.

This does not tell all of the story. Believers with money must use it to bless the poor. They must tithe so that the church can meet the needs of the needy. They must, however, choose to do this. Consent is a big deal for me because without it no real lesson is being learned by the giver (who has, often, hard earned wealth that he gives away so that it will not be an idol) or by the receiver (whose heart should be full of gratitude because God through the generosity of the giver has met his need). No, this does not tell the whole story. It just tells the part of the story that we are not mentioning—the enthymeme.

This is why a classical and Christian education is so important. Through it we give students tools and teaching to sniff out the logical conundrums built into unbiblical thinking.