Lately in the presidential campaign the issue of taxation has been taking up a lot of the oxygen in the room, and we have been consistently treated to what I like to call ideological intellectualism , which boils down to high-sounding talk buttressed by statistics and truisms designed to convince everyone that a particular ideological point of view is supported by history, common sense, general morality, and economic theory. The reality is that 99.9% of the people talking (and this includes an even higher percentage in Delaware)would find to their dismay that their arguments wouldn't pass the most cursory of smell tests among actual academics in the disciplines they purport to represent. Why? Because they generally fail on one or more of the three following aspects of sound scholarship (or just good undergraduate writing): 1) The confusion of unsubstantiated assertions with facts. 2) The cherry-picking of examples rather than the examination of evidence (which includes the respon...