Linked World

Inextricably Intertwined

Traditionally, business and politics have been separable in LinkedIn, but their overlap since November is far too substantive and immediate for that fiction to be further entertained.

And yet there are people on LinkedIn who still loudly complain that they come there to discuss business and are offended to see political discussion, as if it were mere distraction.

I don't know whether such remarks are born of obliviousness or privilege, but in my view these pleas lack grounding in practical reality. If there were a way to speak of business without reference to politics, I would do it out of mere simplicity. Why involve irrelevancies? But the two are just far too intertwined. US politics is no longer some minor detail, distinct from business. It is central to US business right now.

Some will see this shift as positive. Others will see it as negative. I'm one of those seeing consistent negatives. But whatever your leaning, it seems inescapable that politics is suddenly visibly intertwined with markets and products in new ways. Not every discussion must factor it in, but when it happens, it's not mere rudeness that has broken the traditional wall of separation. It's just no longer practical to maintain the polite fiction that there's no overlap.

Practical Examples

I find it impossible to see how a seismic shift like the US is undergoing could fail to affect funding sources and trends, individual business success, entire markets, and indeed whether the US is a good place for people to invest in, go to school in, or vacation in.

Nor are the sweeping effects of DOGE, Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, an issue of pure politics. Its actions have clear business impact. As Musk wields this mysterious and unaccountable force to slash through the heart of government agencies with reckless abandon, there are many clear effects that will profoundly affect business.

• Scientists at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and elsewhere have warned about the possibility of a bird flu or other pandemic. The CDC tracks and seeks ways to prevent pandemics, but that work is now under threat by an anti-science administration. As the Covid experience tells us, there is a business impact to pandemics if we allow them to just happen. A report in the National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s National Library of Medicine places that cost at about $16 trillion dollars.

• The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is important to keeping planes in the air and having them not crash into one another. Business people do a lot of flying, so their needless deaths in the aftermath of FAA layoffs can presumably affect business. And it won't help people if the public develops a fear of flying.

• The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is in charge of making sure the food we eat does not poison us or that the drugs we take have at least a bounded degree of risk. It's the kind of thing you don't think might be business related until we enter a world where employees might go home any old day and just die because we are edging toward a society where you can't take food and drug safety for granted as a stable quantity any more.

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is responsible for tracking storms so that damage, injury, or death can be minimized. And then and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) helps the recovery afterward. It is hard to see how a major storm could affect people, cities, or geographic regions without affecting the employees, customers, and products of businesses. Do I really have to say that? If people think there is a separation between business and politics, I guess I do.

  And then of course NOAA does work to study Climate Change, too. Not only has such study suggested that Climate Change is an existential threat to civilized society, perhaps to all humankind, but it turns out that if human society falls or humans go extinct, that will affect business, too. And maybe soon enough that people still alive now, even if they have no care about future humans, still need to care because it could affect them or those they love.

It used to be that business did not have to worry about such things as much exactly because government used to see it as its job to invisibly take care of these many things. But this change in politics is not just a change in spending, but a shift of responsibility from the government to businesses and individuals. They'll have to look out for themselves now. That is a big deal thing that will affect businesses—their products, employees, and customers in profound ways. All the more so because the present administration changes its mind daily in ways that seem to have no plan, so uncertainty abounds. Business hates uncertainty.

Unemployment

Additionally, the many layoffs in government mean additional unemployment, which itself has business effect. Perhaps some will rejoice at a plentiful supply of potential workers or the fact that they may accept lower wages. But, meanwhile, those unemployed were also the customer base of other businesses who will be less happy. Those people aren't in a position to buy as many things—not just luxuries but essentials like food and rent and healthcare. Perhaps others in their families will pitch in to help them survive, but then those people won't be in a position to buy as many things either.

Mass layoffs do not happen in a vacuum. Those political choices will show up on the bottom lines of businesses. Some businesses may not survive that loss of business, creating a cascade effect.

Racism and Xenophobia

Racism and xenophobia are on the rise. Recent ICE actions seem designed to send the message that we purposefully treat some humans like vermin. “Stay away,” it screams to a large swath of the global population, some of whom we might like to sell to or have invest in us.

It began by going after the undocumented, surely because they are easy targets. That circle is expanding, and it seems unlikely to stop any time soon. The goal seems to be to end any sense that anyone has rights at all. That creates a lot of uncertainty about what is allowed in the way of both speech and action. Such uncertainty makes it hard to plan and manage anything from the selection of an appropriate employee base to how products will be positioned and marketed.

Also, it's an ugly truth that the US relies on already-terrified undocumented employees to accept very low wages, sometimes perhaps skirting wage regulation. Many US businesses will lose access to such cheap labor. The ethics of having relied on this population in this way are certainly tangled and I don't want to defend this practice. But for purposes of this discussion I simply observe that this change will have business effects that may affect both prices and product availability.

It is as if the administration's answer to immigration concerns is to make the US seem as utterly hostile to anyone who is not a native-born, white, Christian male. These trends already affect who feels safe coming to the US to trade, to study, to do research, and to found companies. It's going to be hard to unring that bell.

Rule of Law

In addition, this process seems to be having the side-effect of diminishing rule of law generally. By asserting that due process is not required, when plainly it is, a test of wills is set up between the executive and the rest of the government as to whether the President can, by mere force of will, ignore the Constitution entirely.

The clear intent is to establish us as a bully power, to say that worrying about whether foreigners like the people of the US showed weakness, and that we must make the world fear us. That shift cannot help but affect who will do business with us and how.

We cannot expect our global peers, already horrified by the recent shift in our choice of which foreign entities to fund or ally ourselves with, to shrug these matters off in business with a casual "oh, that's just politics."

Education

Also, higher education is under assault. There is a complex ecology here because people from around the world have revered our universities as places they could send people to acquire a world class education. But with research funds being cut, that may no longer be so.

That the US Government seems intent on snatching foreign students off the street does not make this picture any better. It becomes a reason for international investment dollars to go to other countries where it is safe to walk the streets.

International Investment

The education system is not cleanly separated from the business community. There is a complex ecology in which many businesses locate themselves near universities to have access to the best human talent and research the world has to offer. As US educational institutions are undercut, and the administrations anti-science agenda is pursued, foreign businesses that take education and science more seriously may look elsewhere for leadership.

These capricious changes—the sense that nothing is promised or certain—may affect the reputation of the United States and trust in the US dollar. The present administration wants more control of the Federal Reserve, which has traditionally operated independently. If that happens, it could worsen faith in the US dollar.

The US has also weakened enforcement of anti-bribery laws for dealing with foreign governments. Perhaps some will regard this relaxation of ethics good for business, but whether you do or not, it is most certainly a major change.

And the US is demonstrating on-its-face incompetence at every level of government because everyone with a brain is deferring to someone who plainly lacks either understanding or caring about the damage he is doing. Foreign businesses and governments used to look to the US as a place that had something to teach, but as this incompetence continues unchecked, it cannot help but hurt our reputation internationally.

Philosophy of Government

There is a definite push to “run government like a business.” I think that's a terrible plan, as my recent essay Government is not a Business explains.

But whether you think running government that way is good or bad, it marks a profound shift. More privatization and, with that, probably more corruption. These are things that will profoundly affect not just the US political landscape, but also its business landscape.

Not Separable

Hopefully these examples make it clear that politics and business are no longer separable. It is simply impossible to discuss business in a way that neglects politics. All business in the US is now conducted in the shadow of a certain GOP Elephant that manages to insinuate itself into every room.

 

---

Author's Notes:

If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Some parts of this post originated as a comment by me on LinkedIn. Other parts were written separately with the intent of being yet another comment, but I finally went back and unified the two and pulled this out to a separate post where I was not space-limited.

The vague approximation to the LinkedIn logo was created by me from scratch in Gimp by looking at the LinkedIn logo and doing something suggestive of the same look. A globe image was obtained from publicdomainpictures.net under cc0 license, and post-processed by me in Gimp to work in this space. I just made guesses about sizes, proportions, fonts, and colors. At no time were any of actual logos used for any part of the creation.

Gratitude and Life's Poetry

Once born, people push on the world and it pushes back. We are not born expecting a specific number of arms or fingers. If born with an extra, we use it and see what it does. We touch, feel, smile, recoil. But it's a dialog of sorts with the world. What we are and become is a product of this give and take that predates speech, which itself is also arranged in dialog of speaking and hearing, and tying meaning to how our interactions proceed.

Gratitude is part of a more abstract dialog that follows once we have the mechanics down. People, and later society or its pieces, do things for us, and we do things in return. Sometimes the thing we do in return is an act, sometimes a promise, sometimes an acknowledgment of gratitude. But gratitude seems one of the words in the abstract vocabulary of social participation. We encourage it because it helps us learn and sustain our place in society. When there is no specific act to return, its use preserves the meter of the verse that ebb and flow that is polite society's ever-being-written poem. Omitted, the rhythm is off.

An Odd Example

I sometimes ponder the peculiar ritual where I am going through a door and I see you behind me. You're too far back to take it, yet I hold the door. You must run to grab it. It's a pain for me to hold it, and a hassle for you to run ahead. It serves no one in an obvious way, yet we all do it with some regularity, and mostly we all tolerate it as if it were a favor. Why should that be?

Maybe empathy for having lived the reverse.

But also I think it's because the ritual of it in a society of strangers reinforces to someone you don't know that you are not alone in chaos, but among friendly people who agree on--if nothing else--some social conventions. You knew nothing of me, I nothing of you, yet now you know that I'm no beast but someone who would, if called upon, behave by shared rules of social behavior. And I know of you and your gratitude for this pointless act that you likewise subscribe to these unwritten rules, that you will go out of your way for strangers. So we part friends, a little less alone in the chaos of the day. It seems like nothing exchanged, but really the payload is subtle and abstract, that people and society matter, that we acknowledge each other's dignity.

---

Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

The power is out today at my house after a big storm last night. That leaves me little to do, but I am taking an online class at FutureLearn entitled What Is Character? Virtue Ethics in Education, and this essay is something I wrote in response to a discussion about the nature and purpose of Gratitude. I was happy with what I wrote and thought it worth sharing here. I would also recommend the course to anyone interested in ethics, and especially ethics in education. As I write this postscript, here in the dim light of the aforementioned power outage, the course has just started a couple days ago, so you could quickly catch up.

Maybe You Have Two Cows

There are some descriptions of various political systems running around the net that are expressed in terms of you having two cows and how each political system affects you.

Here’s one about Democratic Socialism that a friend quoted on Facebook:

Democratic Socialism
You have 2 cows.
You pay your taxes.
You now have free healthcare and free college
 and a government that isn’t owned by billionaires.

I don’t find this to be as useful as it could be. Its tone hints that Democratic Socialism isn’t carefully thought through. Or, at least, that’s how the opposition spins it, unquestioned by media.

I would prefer something more plain and to-the-point. Then again, I don’t know if this describes Democratic Socialism. It just describes what I want. Yet somehow I doubt that Bernie would disagree with a lot of this:

Common Sense Politics
 (as interpreted by Kent Pitman)

Maybe you have 2 cows, maybe not.

Many have far less. Can we stop pretending everyone has it good? People are getting left behind.

People making enough to have a surplus
 pay tax on surplus.

Why are we taxing people who have less than they need to get by? So we can give it back to them later and call ourselves heroes? Leave them alone and get the money we need from the people who can afford it.

Forget this “skin in the game” crap
 about why everyone should pay tax.

Being poor IS having skin in the game. No additional reminder is necessary. The poor are not parasites, they are people society has failed.
And anyway, if you want fewer people, fund birth control.

Rich people pay their fair share
 and stop calling it pain.

Less luxury is not pain. Of course the money for a society is going to come from those who have a surplus. To do otherwise is irresponsible or inhumane.

Corporations pay tax on surplus, too.

Profitable corporations don’t need or ask for subsidies.
And it should go without saying, but...
Corporations are not People.

Corporations pay a living wage.

So employees don’t have to ask for government subsidy. Duh.

The military doesn’t get to waste money either.

No more buying stuff we don’t need just to supply pork to someone’s district.

A healthy and educated society benefits us all.

We pay for these collectively out of society’s surpluses, not by making people choose between these things and basic needs. And we stop calling the money that society pays for these things “expenses.” They are “investments.” It’s not “should we spend on healthcare or education?” but “should we invest in healthcare or education?”

To decide our future, we count citizens, not dollars.

Everyone should participate. Yet another reason education matters: We need well-informed voters. But it’s citizens, not dollars, that need a voice. Money always speaks loudly. Government is supposed to counterbalance that. Any suggestion that money needs a voice in politics misses the point of the Constitution, which assigns no special privilege to wealth, but rather takes it as given that we are all equal.
End Citizens United.
End gerrymandering.
Make voter registration easy and fair.

Fix Climate.
 Now.

Or none of the rest of this will matter.

But, either way... Go Bernie!

---

Author’s Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

To Serve Our Citizens

There is a recent move by Republicans to try to cut back on child labor protections. In Missouri, a Republican-sponsored bill proposes to eliminate the prohibition on employing children under 14, to eliminate restrictions on numbers of hours a child may work, to eliminate requirements for a work certificate or permit, and to eliminate the presumption that the presence of a child at a workplace is evidence of employment. In Maine and other states, Republicans have mounted related attacks on child labor laws, proposing to change the minimum wage for children and to eliminate limits on the number of hours children can work during school days.

And, of course, a couple months ago, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law eliminating collective bargaining rights for government employees. (That law was recently struck down on procedural grounds, but there is still a chance they could repair the procedural problem and try again.)

Where is all this leading? The Republicans seem to say “give us control and we’ll return the jobs.” Maybe. But so far the only structural suggestion they have is to reduce taxes on those who already have a huge amount of the wealth.

They say the words, but sometimes I wonder if we’re speaking the same language. If you’ve seen the Twilight Zone episode “To Serve Man,” you’ll know what I’m talking about when I say we should make sure we’re clear on our terminology.

Increasingly, I’m thinking the Republican plan is like this: We take our orders from Big Business, which has been offshoring jobs aplenty because they regard that it’s just too damned expensive to employ US workers and to try to achieve US standards of product and environmental quality. So when the US has pay like the third world and product and environmental standards like the third world, then they’ll start hiring here again and declare success because “the jobs have returned.”

But are they even the jobs we’re talking about?

It seems like a race to the bottom.

As recently as this weekend, I endured watching a painful interview with Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) on one of the Sunday talk shows. In it he alluded to how he’d been talking to Vice President Biden about restoring jobs. Already I’m dubious that Biden was making the concessions Cantor attributed to him, but even if what he said was true, that they did talk about such things, are we all talking about the same things? Which jobs are coming back? How exactly?

Yes, I hear occasional talk of numbers of jobs returned. But it’s just not true that a job is a job is a job. Don’t get me wrong, numbers are important. But so are other things.

The quality of those jobs matters, too, so when I see the Republicans talking about the need to cut education while at the same time talking about how we’ll need to make it easier to employ the uneducated in ways that don’t conform to existing labor standards, I have to wonder just what exactly this plan of theirs to restore jobs looks like.

They seem to be short on details. apparently wanting to leave it to the market to decide. If the market were going to be offering back anything with good pay and good working conditions, why would there be this all-out assault on worker protections?

Something doesn’t smell right in what the Republicans are cooking up.

The photo used here is a cropped version of a photo that is in the public domain. It was obtained from Wikipedia. The photo is one of many by master photographer Lewis Hine (1874-1940), who wanted to document the living and working conditions of his time. One would like to believe those times are past. Seeing recent Republican plans for the future, one might not be so sure. Hopefully through the power of the photograph, we can collectively remember where we were, so that we can keep from going back. To quote Hine, “Photography can light-up darkness and expose ignorance.”

---

Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published June 3, 2011 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, jobs, labor, labor standards, education, child labor, labor protections, minimum wage, working conditions, offshoring, international, business, big business, multi-national business, multi-national, multi-nat, multinat, multinational, biden, joe biden, joseph biden, vp, vice president, vice president biden, cantor, eric cantor, rep cantor, representative cantor, representative eric cantor, employment, unemployment, service, serve, to serve man, to serve our citizens

Fresh Thoughts on Kissing ... and Beyond

I was pretty nerdy in my youth—unlike now, of course—and so my parents confronted the issue of sexuality with me by doing the obviously right thing: They handed me a four-volume encyclopedia on the subject and told me to read up.

I wish I could remember the name of the thing, but alas I don't. A lot of it was stuff that was boring to me at the time, like the details of reproduction. I skimmed it but didn't really care a lot about the details. I never really resonated to biology—it always seemed messy and imprecise.

There was a section on dating, though, and I read through that pretty thoroughly in case it had any useful tips. It did. It's funny the kinds of things that stick with you over the years, but this did because of the practical and specific nature of it. It defined the confusing term “fresh” (a sort of interjection that was supposed to get uttered just before you got slapped in some mysterious circumstances) in the only detailed, serious way I've ever seen anyone try to define it. I checked the dictionary just now and it merely says very vague things like these:

15. informal forward or presumptuous
Random House Dictionary

15. Informal Bold and saucy; impudent
The American Heritage ® Dictionary

12. improperly forward or bold; “don't be fresh with me”;
WordNet® 3.0

This encyclopedia, instead of offering just a word or two, offered a full description of how things were supposed to work and why the word was significant. It was highly specific in a way that I doubt people will readily agree with—many will quibble that the numbers are arbitrary, and I suppose they are. But I was able to read past that and to get the essence of what it was getting at.

The article just came straight out and said that it was permissible for a boy to try to kiss a girl on the second date and to try “petting” on the eighth date. I have no idea where they got these numbers. They seemed arbitrary and unmotivated to me, and I knew even at the age of 11 or 12 when I read this that they were probably not universally agreed upon. But the point was that there was some such number. What was interesting was that the article was very clear on the notion that you had no entitlement to succeed in these things. It did not encourage you to be pushy. It didn't say that someone must submit. What it seemed to imply was that there was a time at which it was not out of bounds to think it might be proper.

So, as the article explained, it might be that a girl will kiss a boy on the first date, but he ought not try. The relationship is too fresh. After the first date, he may try, but she may still decline. Likewise, it might be that the girl would engage in petting on the eighth date, but maybe not. The relationship was too fresh before that to really consider the matter.

By the way, I'm recalling all of this from memory, but I don't recall it talking about discussing, only trying. It might be I was just reading selectively, but more likely they were just acknowledging the obvious truth that it's enough trouble having to be a bumbling adolescent without having to be articulate about what you're bumbling about.

And that was a lot of dates out—I don't think I ever got to that many dates. I did count, though, even knowing that my date probably didn't have access to my encyclopedia and that all my counting was probably for nothing. I wasn't going to feel emboldened after that time, more likely just like I was timidly missing out. Being a kid is rough. It's a wonder any of us survives to adulthood.

Anyway, I think my encyclopedia's definition of this obscure word highlights an important detail that is often lost in a lot of dialog between the sexes at any age. Lessons in interpersonal communication rarely distinguish between the correctness of a bid for doing something and the entitlement to do something. This leads to the magical and unrealistic notion that people will “just know” when it's right, and that if either party tries something when it isn't “just known,” that's wrong.

Great emphasis is placed in our society on how important it is for men to respect a “no” answer from a woman. And I agree. But equally great emphasis should be placed on giving respect to the fact that there will be questions that, in due course, need asking, even if the answer will ultimately be “no.” Whether by word or by wordless bumbling deed, the mere asking of those questions at the proper time and without attempt to pressure is not disrespectful, and the need to ask them must be respected in the same way that the answer must. Respect between caring individuals goes in both ways.

---

Author's Note: If you got value from this post, please “Share” it.

Originally published April 26, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): language, linguistics, vocabulary word, usage, word usage, meaning, semantics, definition, terminology, fresh, dating, kissing, petting, caress, touch, felt up, feel up, felt out, feel out, getting to first base, get to first base, getting to second base, get to second base, encyclopedia, dating, social, advice, manners, etiquette, polite, politeness, impudent, bold, saucy, sex education, sex ed, first kiss, first time, sexuality, kissing on the first date, kiss on the first date, first date, eighth date, appropriate, inappropriate

Tax Policy and the Dewey Decimal System

I’ve been thinking about the question of how to equitably distribute tax burden in society.

100’s  Philosophy
200’s  Myths & Religion
300’s  Social Science
400’s  Language
500’s  Science
600’s  Technology
700’s  Arts & Recreation
800’s  Literature
900’s  Geography & History

It may help you to know I'm a serious fan of the Dewey Decimal System not just for its ability to classify books in a library, but for the underlying philosophy that led to its categories. I don't even 100% agree with the categories that resulted—I just like the thought process Dewey went through in order to arrive at the categories.

Melvil Dewey conceived of an ordered series of questions that primitive man must have asked as he evolved socially, intellectually, and culturally from a cave dweller to a citizen of civilized society.

100’s  Who am I?
200’s  Who made me?
300’s  Who is the man in the next cave?
400’s  How can I make that man understand me?
500’s  How can I understand nature and the world about me?
600’s  How can I use what I know about nature?
700’s  How can I enjoy my leisure time?
800’s  How can I give my children a record of man’s historic deeds?
900’s  How can I leave a record for men of the future?

When trying to wrap my head around a conceptual space, particularly one that involves a series or evolution of steps, I sometimes find myself reaching for Dewey's list of questions to use as a kind of conceptual scaffolding while I try to devise something better to use. And that's what I found myself doing in this case.

One's economic life, it seems to me, follows a structurally similar evolutionary path to the one Dewey describes. Admittedly, some go to college and some don't. Some start families and some don't. So the details will differ. And even for the shared issues, we might each confront them in a different order. But that was true for Dewey's system, too. So use your imagination and you'll quickly see where I'm going.

We start life with our parents taking care of us, asking questions like this:

Hey, Mom, where‘s my lunch money?
How can I afford an iPod on my tiny allowance?
How am I ever going to afford college?
How can I get a job that pays enough for me to live on my own?

Finally we break free and set out on our own, struggling at first to become self-sufficient:

How can I afford an apartment?
How can I make enough money to buy groceries?
How can I afford to buy new clothes?
How can I pay for transportation to and from work?
How can I afford to pay my college loans?

It's a good feeling to get these items under control, but it's not enough. Yes, paying for the basics is good, but we're still at the point of being hand to mouth, with no margin for error. We still have to plan for contingencies. If we can't handle those, we're only kidding ourselves in our belief that we're self-sufficient:

Heat costs how much? How will I ever afford that?
Hey, my car broke down. I was supposed to budget for that?
How can I afford that medical treatment?
Wait a minute. I can't afford to be unemployed. What now?
While still repaying college loans, I have to re-educate myself?
What if I'm unable to work later in life?

If we're lucky, we do eventually rise above it, but often it takes a long time. Ideally, though, once the above items are mastered, we start to have surplus income and can finally turn our attention from needs to wants:

How can I repay those who have been helping me?
How can I make enough money to afford an iPhone?
How can I make enough money to afford cable TV?
How can I afford to go on a vacation?

At this same time, we may begin nesting:

How can I afford to buy a house?
Can I afford to have a family?
How can I afford to feed, clothe, and house my family?
How can I survive the loss of a job without putting my family at risk?
Can I assure my children go to college?

Or our world may expand in other ways:

How can I help my friends?
How can I afford to contribute to charities?
Can I employ others by by starting my own business?

My point here is to portray life as a continuum from helping ourselves to helping others. And finally now with that in mind I can make some of the points I wanted to make.

First, it should be obvious that the first and most important thing each of us can do to help society is to eliminate society's need to help us. If we are not self-sufficient, we cannot help others.

I mention this because I've sneakily omitted taxation from the above lists of questions. This is because I want to make a point about where taxation is appropriate. It seems obvious to me that presently we tax people before they are able to help themselves. And I just don't see the point of that.

Taxing lower income people delays the time in their lives at which they can be self-sufficient. It also introduces inefficiency into the system: The entire process of taxation expends societal energy that is simply lost productivity. Taxing our weakest members is silly since they'll just turn around and ask for the money back—and the process of getting that money back to them will use up some of the money. Our tax revenue should come only from genuine individual surpluses.

And by surplus I don't just mean that people should have a few dollars left in their paycheck to go to taxes. I mean that everyone should try to fill a savings account with $100,000 for emergencies. If they haven't got that, and most people don't, then they aren't ready for the kinds of major expenses life is sure to dish out—unemployment, illnesses, accidents, retirement. Once they've provided for those, then they can begin generating a surplus.

They should be filling that account before they get to the point where they are allowed to pay taxes. Paying taxes should be seen as a privilege, a status symbol, something people aspire to do as part of their personal growth.

Of course, that might not leave a lot of taxpayers. What a burden that will be on those who are able to take care of themselves. Darn. That's awful. We hear all the time about how the economic system is not a zero-sum game, and how it's possible for someone to get rich and for others to do well. Fine, let's see it played out.

If the wealthy want to be taxed less, they should arrange for society to enrich as many others as possible, in order to have friends who share the “burden” of taxation. If enough people make a decent enough wage to achieve a surplus, it won't be so lonely at the top. If instead the present trend continues, concentrating the wealth in an ever-shrinking portion of the population, those few wealthy should expect to pay a steep price for membership in that elite club, because the rest of us can't afford to help pay the taxes until we can afford to take care of ourselves.

---

Click here for more information
about the Dewey Decimal System.

---

Author's Note: Originally published February 17, 2009 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): taxes open call, jobs, retraining, unemployment, illness, accident, rich, wealthy, wealth, low-income, poor, tax burden, wealth redistribution, income redistribution, medical emergencies, retirement, tuition, college, education, finances, politics