How You 'Earned' It

As some of you are aware, it has long been my hobby to dally in Right-Wing Extremist Land, trying to wrap my head around how the other 23% thinks. For years I read extensive diatribes on Those Evil Feminist Baby-Killers, Those Satanist Socialists and Those F*'n Libtards, setting aside the odd surge of incredulous rage and regarding their venomous screeds with scholarly detachment. I came out of it with only a mild case of Stockholm Syndrome, thinking, "Gosh, they're so CUTE. Good thing they're not running the world any longer, though."

But all honeymoons must come to an end, and around the time Obama sealed the nomination, the State of Grace in which I had been dwelling abruptly evaporated. It's not just that I like Obama, and believe that it is High Time that an empath with a balanced global perspective was running things; it's that when a person calls Obama a moron and takes Sarah Palin seriously--well, words and empathy both fail me.

So it is with the full understanding that I am preaching to an empty hall that I take on the issue of Taxes.

There are those of you out there who object to Paying Taxes on What You Earned. You state that Progressive Tax Rates Are Patently Unfair. The horror. The cruelty. The Economic Stupidity. You declare, righteously, that rather than pay those Taxes you will take your marbles and go elsewhere. After all, you EARNED it.

Yes, darling, you did. But if you earned more than a quarter million dollars last year, you didn't do it working freelance. That is, you didn't do a physical job in a measurable amount of time and get paid market rate for it. You didn't dredge up clients one by one, and convince them to pay you for a single object or a single service, one by one.

No, if you earned more than a quarter of a million dollars, you did it by positioning yourself--or being positioned--at a strategically superior position in a very large system. I.e., you were a high-ranking officer in a large corporation, a lawyer, an investor, or an entrepreneur on a large scale. You received a percentage of the profit from the labor of thousands of people. Your 'earnings,' then, are inseparable from both the existence and the smooth functioning of this system, and thus dependent upon the system in a far more pervasive way than the labors of a freelancer at the bottom of the pyramid. To put it mathematically--a freelancer's earnings are linear. Yours, by virtue of your advantageous connections within the system, are exponential.

So you may complain to me about paying Higher Taxes--if, and only if:

• You, and all of your employees, and all the employees of every corporation you invest in, never use roads.

• You, and all of the above, have never attended a public school, including a state university.

• Your business does not utilize any standardized weights or measures.

• You, and all of the above, do not require a working environment free of cholera, malaria, polio, war and pestilence of all kinds.

• You, AAOTA, do not use the Internet.

• You, AAOTA, do not require clean drinking water, sewers, or garbage removal.

• You, AAOTA, and none of your progenitors ever staked a physical claim--say, to a piece of land or a sum of capital--that was upheld in perpetuity by the rule of law.

You may tell me until the cows come home that you don't care about Those Other People, that lazy people don't deserve healthcare, that your right to prove to God that you are a Good Person by Giving Voluntarily is inalienable, and that Government is Evil. Fine. So why don't you go where there is no government--say, the moon--and keep 100% of everything you find there.