We’ve heard of so-called white privilege. Now there’s supposedly “male privilege” as well. And some Americans are apparently willing to tax all men because of it.
So discovered author and interviewer Mark Dice (shown) when he took to the streets and asked people: Would you be willing to support a 10 percent “male privilege tax”? The idea is that since men earn more than women, men should have to pay that additional levy on top of normal taxation. A number of people are then shown in Dice’s video enthusiastically signing a petition to this effect, even though the notion that the intersex wage gap is due to unjust discrimination is an already-debunked myth. Writes Infowars Paul Joseph Watson:
Asked to support an additional 10% tax on men’s income, one woman responded, “I’ll definitely sign for that,” before adding, “Yeah I’ve never heard of that before but whatever they’re trying to do right now is clearly not working so I’m all for giving it a shot.”
Dice then talks to a couple, telling the woman the petition is to “fight sexism in this new world order.” She signs right in front of her boyfriend, who doesn’t dare raise a whimper of dissent.
Two more women sign the petition, with one saying it helps her “feel better,” before adding, “When that actually happens, that would be great though.”
Interestingly, a number of men without women by their sides also signed Dice’s petition.
Of course, Dice’s tax is not a serious proposal but simply a device meant to illustrate the ignorance and leftist bent of many citizens. It’s also true that Dice no doubt cherry-picks his respondents, which is generally the case with “man on the street” interviews. (One woman not featured can be heard in the background saying to Dice, “That’s their [the women’s] problem; let them go out and find a good job. I make more money than my husband.”) Nonetheless, the video does get at some interesting issues.
First, the petitioners are supporting an overtly “sexist” proposal in the name of fighting “sexism” (one of the buzzwords Dice used when persuading them to sign). So as with the leftist notion that only whites can be “racist,” “sexism” apparently means whatever suits the social engineers’ agenda at the moment.
Also, since most men will marry and have families, a tax on them is actually a tax on everyone, on the women and children they’ll be helping to support. It clearly didn’t occur to the female respondents, however, that they were advocating a proposal that would ultimately rob money from their future offspring.
But most interesting is the intersex wage-gap myth. It has been debunked for many years, such as by writer Carrie Lukas in her 2007 piece “A Bargain At 77 Cents To a Dollar.” Despite this, dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers could still lament in 2014 that it was one of “5 feminist myths that will not die.” She then refuted it herself:
The bottom line: the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.
Wage gap activists say women with identical backgrounds and jobs as men still earn less. But they always fail to take into account critical variables [such as that full-time men work more hours than “full-time” women, women are more likely to choose “self-fulfillment” over promotions and higher income, and women often interrupt their careers to nurture children]. Activist groups like the National Organization for Women have a fallback position: that women’s education and career choices are not truly free — they are driven by powerful sexist stereotypes. In this view, women’s tendency to retreat from the workplace to raise children or to enter fields like early childhood education and psychology, rather than better paying professions like petroleum engineering, is evidence of continued social coercion. Here is the problem: American women are among the best informed and most self-determining human beings in the world. To say that they are manipulated into their life choices by forces beyond their control is divorced from reality and demeaning, to boot.
More importantly, it’s belied by the facts. Consider: Women are actually more likely to enter stereotypical fields in highly “egalitarian” nations, such as Norway, than in far more patriarchal India. Why? Because as the excellent Norwegian documentary The Gender Equality Paradox relates, the sexes have different natural inclinations and interests. Yet this must take a back seat to survival in relatively poor India, where women will enter “male-oriented” technical fields because that’s where the money is. In rich countries, however, women can afford to follow their hearts.
(The wage-gap issue is treated more exhaustively in my article “Equal Pay for Equal Work Means Paying Men More.”)
As for Dice’s fictional tax on men, you needn’t worry about giving leftists ideas — because they already had them. In 2007, a Harvard economist proposed taxing men at a higher rate than women to encourage female labor participation. And in 2004, Sweden’s Left Party (yes, its real name) left sanity and proposed what it called a “Man Tax,” designed to compensate society for the cost of “male violence.” As the party’s leader said at the time, “We have to have a discussion so that men understand that they have a collective financial responsibility.” Of course, not only do men already pay the majority of income tax, but what of collective financial benefit? As I quipped last year, I’m on board with the Man Tax — with one stipulation: “That men also receive royalties for all the inventions, innovations, and scholarship they birthed throughout the ages.”
And perhaps in a way they already do. After all, could it be that higher male incomes somewhat reflect male innovation? Or, as Barack Obama has suggested, is it all just a matter of winning “society’s lottery”?
Image: screenshot from YouTube video showing Mark Dice petitioning people about the “male privilege tax”
