(urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
James Wynn
crushtv at gmail.com
Tue May 19 17:30:21 PDT 2009
>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.
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