I am so done with the Confederate flag. As you all should know, I’ve been complaining about it for years. It is not just because it was retrieved from the dustbin of history for specifically racist reasons. It was the flag of treason. Yet we did not punish the south for this horrible act of treason. We looked forward, but there are certain people in the south who have done nothing but look back. So I’m glad that there is a more concerted effort to get rid of it. But I hadn’t figured that I would be writing about it again — at least not so soon.

But this is just too amazing a story not to pass along. David Edwards over at Raw Story wrote, Man Calls Cops After Mostly Black Town “Hurts” His Feelings by Disrespecting Confederate Flag Parade. The man in question is Chris Oliver. He, his wife Angela, and about 100 other people in Virginia took part in a Confederate flag “parade.” Basically, they outfitted their cars with big Confederate flags and drove around. The problem is that they drove through Petersburg, a majority African American town. And not surprisingly, the people of Petersburg did not appreciate this display of “southern pride.”

According to Oliver, “There was people protesting, throwing bottles, hit my truck, hit numerous other vehicles, people yelling, yelling racial slurs.” His wife noted that they had brought their Confederate flags to Petersburg as a “peaceful ride.” And the result? “People throwing bottles at our vehicles, our property that we worked for.” Apparently, the local police weren’t too keen to help when Oliver went to the police. After all, a few plastic bottles thrown and some unkind words? The Olivers come off as pathetic. But I suspect in their minds, this is just what “those people” are always doing. So it makes sense.

But that’s not the worst of it. Oliver said, “The racial slurs are really what hurt me. You know, it’s uncalled for. There’s no need for that in today’s society.” Yes, can’t we all just get along? I mean, there these people were just minding their own business. Just taking a flag with a long history of racial oppression, and parading it through a town that is overwhelmingly populated with African Americans. What’s the big deal? Haven’t the people of Petersburg heard of a little thing called southern hospitality?

I can only assume that the Olivers are in earnest — that they really don’t see that they’ve done anything offensive. If that’s the case, this is an amazing example of white privilege. If the situation were reversed, certainly they could see it. It really doesn’t matter what the Confederate flag represents to fans of The Dukes of Hazard, to the people of Petersburg, it represents a long history of slavery, lynching, and oppression. But okay, maybe the Olivers didn’t know that when they started their parade. But they certainly should have known it afterward. And they should be ashamed.

Hillary Clinton has announced some of her economic policies, and I have to admit that I find them compelling. I’m sure I will write more about it later. But for now, I want to focus on some of her family friendly policies. Yes, of course, we should make it easier for workers to have families. I’ve always found this very interesting that social conservatives don’t get on the liberal economic bandwagon. Instead, they seem to think that family values are something that only the rich should be able to afford. Similarly, they want to outlaw abortion, while both making access to birth control difficult and then not providing for mothers after the children are born. So great: let’s make work better for young mothers.

But Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has an even better idea, Liberate Women From Full-Time Work. She noted that it would be good if new mothers were not pushed out of the work place. So Clinton’s ideas are certainly welcome. But maybe we should also create a system where new mothers don’t feel that they have to work. Bruenig pointed out that in the very happy Netherlands, 76% of women work only part-time. In the US, it it is more or less reversed: 80% of prime age women work full-time. And that is not what they would prefer.

I find it constantly amazing that the liberty caucus is not the least bit interested in actual liberty. To them, liberty is something that the government takes away from rich people. If a poor woman works 70 hours a week and has to have her children raised by institutions, well that’s not a lack of liberty. That’s just the laws of economics and there is nothing that can be done about that! Of course, that is nonsense. We are at a curious point in social evolution, where we actually have a lot of choices, but we are denied them because the rich are afraid they might lose a couple of pennies.

The great American lie is that things are pretty much the way they must be. And the only way forward is to take more rights away from workers — to make the whole of civilization more like the law of the jungle. Even if that made sense — and it makes absolutely none — in the jungle, everyone is born more or less equal. No chimpanzee is born owner of a whole section of jungle with a police force and judicial system dedicated to protecting those property rights.

We really need to start thinking differently than we have been in the past. We live in a society in which liberty is not a right of all humans. Liberty is a right inherited from one’s parents. The children of the rich have happy childhoods filled with exposure to all the greatest things that humans have accomplished. The children of the poor have unhappy childhoods filled with standardized testing and inconsistent nutrition. When the children of the rich grow up, they do whatever they want. When the children of the poor grow up, they will be lucky to get a soul crushing job and become technologically unemployable by the time they reach 50.

I’m for doing anything that will help. Clinton’s proposals are mostly great. But Bruenig is right: we can do a lot more. The least we can ethically do is make sure that all children have happy childhoods filled with exposure to all the greatest things that humans have accomplished. Doing quite a lot less than that would be to allow mothers to actually raise their children. And the least we could possible do is what we are doing: nothing. Because: liberty!