(urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

[James Wynn]

>Adam opines
> Should Moe pay for half the well?  I don't know.  What's the benefit  to 
> him of building the well at all?  What are the downsides to him if  the 
> well is not built?  Should the well's costs be recouped through a 
> per-liter charge on its usage, with the costs repaid to the financiers  of 
> the project, or is it actually going to be presented as a common  good? If 
> the latter, how much does Moe value his participation in the  society that 
> he and his neighbors constitute?  If the answer is "not  that much," does 
> he get to be sad if he then has to provide his own  fire protection if he 
> withdraws from their society?

We don't have to consider those things. Neither does Moe. We are more 
numerous than Moe. We're not negotiating with Moe. If Moe complains we'll 
denounce him as greedy and do what we want anyway. Moe can bend over and 
take the shaft.

>> It assumes that a guy making $25K a year is exactly like the guy  making 
>> $250K a year except that one happens to make less.
>
> Yes and no.  I mean, sure, there is a reason I eventually started  getting 
> paid more money: I was doing jobs that required skills that  were rarer, 
> or at least more valued by the people willing to employ  me, and I had 
> acquired those skills through experience and training.   But on the other 
> hand, I'm still in some important sense the me I was  twenty years ago.

You are not the same person at $60K that you were when you made $15K.  You 
have skills that you were motivated to develop in order to earn more. You 
have a history of steady, reliable work that you were motivated to create 
out of a desire for money (not a desire for a better "public space"). Stop 
and consider that you are currently making more than the mean salary in this 
country. That didn't just fall in your lap. What if society were engineered 
so you could depend on making  say...$25K per year from the get go, and 
start taxing you more as you progress. There's a good chance your work 
history would be vastly different.

Your claim that your 25% of $60K is less than 15% of $15K suggests you think 
you're being over-paid.
But consider that you perspective might be colored by the fact that you paid 
no income tax when you made $15K, and now that you make $60K, depending on 
your situation, you probably pay little or none as well. Someone else is 
making up that difference for you. Are you proud of that?

On the other hand, from then til now you almost certainly paid a significant 
Social Security **flat tax**. What is not readily apparent is that your 
employer pays it as well. Making the cost of just hiring you and your fellow 
employees to be the largest expense they've taken on--which is passed on you 
as a consumer.  Your welfare state is a self-justifying system, since it 
makes it more expensive just to get started in life and makes jobs harder to 
find.


J.