I'm finding it difficult to think about anything other than the American election these days, and I guess my leaning toward Hillary Clinton is obvious. I don't think she is free of flaws, but they seem minor to me compared to Donald Trump's flaws. 

However, a cataloguing of the candidates' alleged flaws, both the allegations that can be shown to be based on evidence and those that no one seems to have any evidence of, is not my intent today. I wanted to look at a deeper issue that I don't see being analyzed adequately right now. 

When Trump remarks during a debate that his not paying income taxes for nearly two decades makes him smart ("That makes me smart.") and a number of his supporters (Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie) call it "genius", I have to wonder whose side they are on. Whatever one it is, it does not seem to me to be the side of their country. 

One of the most basic measures of whether an action is moral or not is to ask: What if everyone acted that way? So what answer do we arrive at if we ask about Trump's not paying taxes and his followers defending that action so creatively? 

If everyone in the US believed that it was admirable to avoid paying taxes, the country would fall into misery in one generation. I mean third world-style ruin. We have plenty of examples in the world today of where such a general way of thinking leads, and History supplies plenty more. 

The truth is that the big majority of Americans pay their taxes and accept that this is a price that citizens must pay in order to live in a democracy that functions. The military, the roads, the border guards, the legal system, prisons, the police, and so on ...these all run on tax monies in every land or they don't run at all.   

The deeper insight is the one that tells us the tax system in the US clearly needs to be reformed. This is true periodically in every country. But the deepest insight tells us what the Donald and his supporters are missing here. If your country is populated, mostly, by people who obey not just the letter of the law but the spirit of the law, it can survive and flourish. If not ...not. 

No system of laws - tax laws or any others - is ever going to be so cleverly written that rascals can't find loopholes to exploit in it. As Mark Twain put it: "Figures don't lie, but liars can sure figure." We just do our best to catch and incarcerate the rascals. But functioning democracies must contain, as a basic, a lot of ordinary folk who, with an attitude of responsible patriotism, try to make the country work, even by the small actions of their daily lives. 

When the rascal percentage of the population reaches a critical mass, then the country begins to decline at an ever-increasing rate. You can't hire enough police or judges or watchdogs to make that country efficient anymore. The rot advances faster than it can be stopped. 

So I will even go so far as to say the politically incorrect thing here. A strong sense of honesty deeply embedded in the majority of a country's citizens is indispensable in order for that country to thrive. 

I don't believe that Donald Trump, as the saying goes, "gets it". No person who thinks it is smart to rip off his country should ever become its leader. He is supposed to be an example for the rest of the citizens of the country. Exploiting the tax system is not setting a good example. Choosing such a leader would just be bad business over the long haul.