Professor and Green Party presidential candidate Cornel West owes more than half a million dollars in taxes to the federal government, dating back to 2005.

Onlookers should not laugh this off as another socialist hypocrite but instead have righteous anger at his privilege.

West appeared to confirm the Daily Beast reporting on his tax avoidance as true, even as he laughed it off and blamed it on his “gangster proclivities.” He’s actually not a gangster; he’s a high-earning college professor. If he were a gangster, he would go to jail for not paying his taxes, like Al Capone did.

“Any time you shine a flashlight under somebody’s clothes, you’re going to find a mess,” West said before going off on a tangent about how he would fight people for insulting his mother. He then said he doesn’t like “lying,” in apparent reference to a claim, which he disputed, that he owes $49,500 in child support.

It is not a laughing matter that West gets away with not paying his taxes.

I know he likes to paint himself as someone down with the struggle of ordinary people, telling the media they should focus on poor people suffering instead of his taxes, but most do not make as much as West does. They were not professors at Harvard University, and they don’t get to hobnob with political leaders.

West wants to soak other people with taxes while he says he got behind on his own obligations because he was being so generous. “It’s partly because I do like to give to loved ones,” West said.

So? I would much rather send my taxes to my local church or a pro-life pregnancy center, but this is the system under which we live.

West said he does not tolerate “lying,” but for years, he has implicitly lied to the IRS, affirming he was paying all the taxes due. I can be sympathetic to someone who made a mistake dealing with our complicated tax code. West is free to hire a tax attorney and object to the IRS calculations or make a case for interpreting a clause in the law in a particular way.

He does not appear to have done that. The IRS, meanwhile, has abetted West in evading taxes while innocent people get harassed and have their lives ruined.

Look at what the IRS did to economist Peter Schiff, who set up a legal bank in Puerto Rico. The IRS conspired with foreign tax officials to ruin his livelihood. This came just a few years after IRS officials harassed Tea Party groups and asked them for the content of their prayers.

West probably does have genuine concern for the little guy and the issues of people in poverty. But I cannot identify with someone who refuses to go through the same effort I and others do in carefully tracking income and expenses and paying an accountant to ensure proper compliance with the law. I am just a simple man with degrees from colleges that rank, to put it politely, in the top 300 of colleges. West went to Princeton and Harvard.

When he announced his run for president, he said he was running for “ truth and justice .”

He should act with truth and justice and pay all his taxes, and he should stop acting like he is above the law because he gives money away to other people. Most other people have to deal with the IRS rigmarole. West is surely capable of doing so as well.

Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.