A new OXFAM report finds that the richest 1% of the world’s population is responsible for as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of humanity.
This is the Pareto Distribution in action and it is a natural law. You can try many things to eliminate it, but you will never be successful. Its just part of life.
I agree that there are good charities funded and run by good people with good intentions that do good work.
What I would like to convince you of is the idea that charities and corporations are not good substitutes for well funded government. I also would like to convince you that we all should be lining up to pay our taxes and that the wealthy should be at the front of the line with the biggest cheque and doing the least grumbling. Let me try to lay out my case (in part-complex problems cannot be solved in a few paragraphs).
You mention the constant refrain from government officials about not having enough money to properly fund programs. I don't think that this should surprise us at all. Over and over again we elect, candidates who tells us most loudly and proudly that they will be the one to cut our taxes, to put more money in the hands of hard working families, to drain the swamp by cutting down government to the bare bones. We fall for this snake oil pitch every time and the result is the same every time, we get less for more. When tax reform does come it directed to primarily the benefit of corporations and those who already have the most. We get sold on ridiculous and repeatedly debunked trickle down economics or related BS as the rationalization for this approach and then claim to be shocked when it just continues to make things worse. Shame on them for sucking us in the first time but shame on us for falling for it over and over again. Its like we have absolutely zero long term memory. To make it worse, when we do on occasion elect someone with ideas that might really make a difference we run quickly back to the purveyors of the "taxes are bad" mantra as soon as we are reminded that the important stuff costs real money.
I don't want to harp on charities too much but I do want to point out that because of the nature of the tax structures that support them they have the effect of diverting significant amounts of money away from our government's available resources. I am not a heartless s.o.b. trying to demonize the charitable instincts of good people. I am simply arguing that they shouldn't be supported on the public's dime and at the expense of properly funding government.
More important than charities are corporations. Corporations are a legal fiction created to remove/limit the personal risk of individuals taking on business ventures. They are tools of private interest. They are by their design and law required to prioritize the bottom line of themselves over all other interests. They are sociopathic. Their interests are not the interests of the community at large. Their interests are only those of their owners despite any marketing propaganda they may spout to the contrary. They externalize all costs that they are not legally obliged to incur. That means: pay as little as possible, preferably nothing, for exploiting public resources (forests, minerals, water or any other resource of the broader community that we are now, agonizingly slowly, realizing are not infinite), pollute if it costs less than not polluting, pay workers as little as possible, download infrastructure costs to the broader community, AVOID PAYING TAXES,... ad infinitum. We have, through poor legal governance of their activities and through the tax system, allowed them the means to hold government (who's purpose is to protect the public interests) hostage to their personal interests and by doing so made them our de facto governors. (more accurately, the unelected people that own and run them).
Now, I can sense that you might want to counter me by pointing out that corporations create jobs, corporations do pay taxes, corporations can provide services more efficiently than government can, etc. There is some validity in these counterpoints to my position, in theory, but I argue that the current system is so badly tilted in favour of maximizing the much more narrow interests of a few that it needs deep structural reform (starting with the tax system, or perhaps better with the government lobbying system so that we might have some hope of actually getting somewhere with tax reform).
I had the opportunity during my working career to see close up how flawed our tax system is. It is a byzantine labyrinth designed to obfuscate. It attracts very smart people to the tax business because navigating it is a challenging intellectual exercise and very smart people tend to know where to find money. There is lot of money to be found in the tax code. Corporations employ armies of lawyers and accountants and lobbyists to, first, influence how the tax rules are structured to ensure that they start tilted in their favour, while at the same time engaging a huge marketing machine to convince us that they the world will end if they have to actually pay taxes, and, second, to exploit the weaknesses in those same systems to further tilt the playing field and divert truckload upon truckload of money away from our government and into the private hands of a very small minority. If you want to get a small, and frightening, glimpse into just how profoundly corporations manipulate government for their interests, spend some time following the career paths of the lawyers/accountants/lobbyists that work day and night for corporations to exploit tax law loopholes. The smart ones, the best of the best at their jobs are very same ones that wrote the rules while working for the government. They then go on to the private sector to make real money exploiting the "legal" loopholes they created. I challenge you to track down detailed descriptions of some of the tax shelters used by corporations and high net worth people to avoid paying tax and, in effect, download their costs to the community (charities play a role here by the way). These schemes employ a complex maze of deliberate deceptions hiding their true role and undermining the purpose and spirit of the tax system. And, because the system was rigged from the start, these schemes are arguably legal. Standing behind a thin veneer of legality they exploit the rules to their very limits and beyond which in turn requires the government to try to stop the bleeding by hiring their own army which in turn diverts tax revenue away from what it was designed to fund in the first instance.
None of what I have said denies that government sometimes goes off the rails and sticks its nose into places it shouldn't or that it sometimes funds boondoggles of dubious merit that wastes tax revenues. That reality does not imho support an argument for gutting government. Instead it supports an argument for all of us to stop abdicating our personal responsibility for the quality of government we elect. We need to stop sucking up the populist drivel and demanding more of our political leaders.
Make no mistake, populist leaders on either side of the political spectrum are dictators at heart. Anyone who cannot see the parallels between the language of populist leaders being elected around the world today and the horrors the world witnessed only a lifetime ago is in a very deep state of denial. I recommend reading a short book written by Benjamin Ferencz called Make it Count as a reminder of what ordinary people are capable of under the influence of populist leaders claiming to have the solution to all our problems and as a guide on how not to continue to fall victim to their siren call.
Getting back on track, health care, education, support for the young and elderly, and a host of other important social functions are simply too important to be left to the whim of the private sector and or charity. They may both have a supporting role to play in some limited cases but making them the main suppliers of important services to the public will simply widen the divide between the haves and have nots while accelerating the destruction of the planet that supports us all.
We need, during every election cycle, to work together as a community to ignore the partisan nonsense and dog whistle distractions that dominate and divide political discourse and the community and displace discussion of the really important issues. We need to stop letting ourselves be manipulated and divided into us and them warring factions operating in a constant state of blind rage from where we cannot make rational decisions in the best interests of the broader community. Then we can start to create a government and community that serves us, each and all, well, fairly, justly.
I think we are capable, as a community working together, of creating government that we can point to proudly. I think that we can create government that we support, even when it does something that we may not fully agree with at an individual level, because we know it has the interests of the entire community at heart and not just a select few. I have no expectation or delusion that we will find a place where we all agree on everything and live in idyllic harmony but I do think we are capable of much more and being much better humans and that we as individuals together with the governments we choose have an important role to play in getting there. We need to accept that we get the government we deserve and start, together, demanding better from those that stand up to serve and then to support strongly those that answer that call faithfully. We need to stop falling for the distractions that those who benefit most from weak government deliberately fuel. We need to stop screaming at each other and realize that we are all from the same tribe and sit down and work together to be better humans. It will be hard, multi-generational work but what better thing to we have to do with our time here.
We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I confess that my writing can come off as a bit preachy at times but I spend a lot of time thinking about how we (humans) can learn to come to a consensus on what is just and moral before we kill ourselves all off arguing over it and have I come to some conclusions that I think stand up well to criticism and are worthy of being shared. I am working on how to do that in a productive way and, clearly by how you have responded to my comments, I have some work still to do in that regard. So, I will change tack and keep trying.
I have concluded that a just and moral society is not possible without some government and the rule of law. I suspect, though I admit of the possibility that I may be wrong, that you would agree with me on this point even if we disagree strongly on where the lines are drawn.
I think the evidence is fairly clear that a free for all Wild West where everyone gets to do whatever they want whenever they want is not a good recipe for creating or maintaining a civilized society. I also think that dictatorships that impose the will of one or a small minority on others are problematic to say the least. So where then is the happy place in between and how do we get there? I have some ideas to put forth for consideration.
While we are unlikely to ever come to a place where we agree on everything, it is essential, if we are to have any hope of ending the cycle of war and violence that plagues the entire planet, that we start by acknowledging that we are all of the same “tribe”. We are human. The sooner we phase the term race out from our vocabulary the faster we will move forward to a better place. It is a term without scientific basis or merit and it is so hopelessly misused that it serves only to widen the divide between us.
I go further and argue that as humans we all share some basic rights and that part of the role of government is to enact and enforce laws that protect those rights for all equally. It is not a just and moral society that says some humans are more equal than others.
It has been my experience that the more I get to know other members of my human tribe the more I find that we share the same basic needs and desires and that our differences pale in comparison to what we share. I notice this most when I get to know people who come from very different places, physically/culturally/ intellectually, than I have come from. I also notice that what most often divides us and keeps us killing each other are three things: 1) Religion; 2) Nationalism (tribalism) 3) Economic circumstances. We kill when we feel our God is threatened, when our country/tribe is threatened, when our livelihood is threatened. These are not original ideas of mine but I have come to them on my own through long hard thought. The articulation of them above is a fairly blatant borrowing from a book by a gentleman by the name of Benjamin Ferencz called Make it Count. It is a short book but imho a very worthwhile one and I encourage you to give it a read.
Given this background the trick, I think, then becomes to work towards a place where the fact that someone sees the world somewhat differently than you (believes in different God, comes from a different nation) is not a threat to your God or your nation or your economic well being. I have no delusions that this is an easy task or that it can be accomplished in a short time or all at once. It is a goal that needs to be worked on for generations but I have concluded that there is nothing better we can as a species do with our time here and that a good place to start is to get to know better, and ideally befriend, someone who is different than you. It is much harder to kill/oppress someone who you have not branded as the “other”. That was the point I was trying to make.
Don’t get me started on charities. There are certainly exceptions but by and large they are tax dodges and vanity projects for the one percent. They, in effect, get everyone else to pay for whatever pet project they decide to take on without any reference to true community need and then expect to be patted on the back incessantly for their false magnanimity. Show me a one percenter who makes their charitable donation anonymously, without taking a tax write off, and directs it toward a cause that reflects a true need of the most in need and that isn’t run by a crowd of their peers who blow the majority of what is given on self aggrandizing marketing (carried out by companies run by their peers) and charity balls (attended mostly by their peers) and I will happily pay them some well deserved respect. In the meantime, I call BS on the idea that charity, even at its best, is an appropriate substitute for well run publicly funded social programs.
This all appears to be based on us continuing with the current shareholder capitalism model which prioritizes return on shareholders investment rather than a model in which benefits are shared more evenly among shareholders, management, workers, and consumers. It is a sad reality that those even in the 10% are not using that wealth to reduce their environmental impact. Just to begin, if I had that wealth I’d be off the grid and using renewable energy.
Have the 1% ever in the course of human history demonstrated that they are prepared to give up anything?
Our evolutionary history haunts us deeply in this technological world. The concept of enough is largely meaningless in the human mind, not just in the minds of the 1%. The simple reality is that some are just luckier to have been born with the capacity to be better at the game than others and some just get luckier than others and are born or stumble into a place of better opportunity. You can reshuffle the deck periodically through revolution and war but the world sorts itself into the haves and have nots very quickly because, unfortunately, even small differences in capacity and or opportunity can make differences in outcome that compound very rapidly and become self sustaining. Combine that with the primitive, overpowering evolutionary baggage that compels us relentlessly to “get while the getting is good” and we appear doomed to repeat a cycle that will eventually, sooner than later given the way we are heading, doom us all. While being better at the game or being lucky in no way denotes moral superiority it is most certainly predictive of outcome at scale. Our only hope, imho, is that enough of those fortunate enough to have the capacity to be better at the game and or to be born or stumble into opportunity find the moral decency to begin to view everyone as part of the same tribe and to accept the moral responsibility placed upon them by their good fortune before technology advances to the point where their indifference to the plight of the masses becomes irrelevant to their own survival. At the moment the 1% still depend on the 99% to keep the party going but that may not be the case for very much longer.
This is the Pareto Distribution in action and it is a natural law. You can try many things to eliminate it, but you will never be successful. Its just part of life.
I agree that there are good charities funded and run by good people with good intentions that do good work.
What I would like to convince you of is the idea that charities and corporations are not good substitutes for well funded government. I also would like to convince you that we all should be lining up to pay our taxes and that the wealthy should be at the front of the line with the biggest cheque and doing the least grumbling. Let me try to lay out my case (in part-complex problems cannot be solved in a few paragraphs).
You mention the constant refrain from government officials about not having enough money to properly fund programs. I don't think that this should surprise us at all. Over and over again we elect, candidates who tells us most loudly and proudly that they will be the one to cut our taxes, to put more money in the hands of hard working families, to drain the swamp by cutting down government to the bare bones. We fall for this snake oil pitch every time and the result is the same every time, we get less for more. When tax reform does come it directed to primarily the benefit of corporations and those who already have the most. We get sold on ridiculous and repeatedly debunked trickle down economics or related BS as the rationalization for this approach and then claim to be shocked when it just continues to make things worse. Shame on them for sucking us in the first time but shame on us for falling for it over and over again. Its like we have absolutely zero long term memory. To make it worse, when we do on occasion elect someone with ideas that might really make a difference we run quickly back to the purveyors of the "taxes are bad" mantra as soon as we are reminded that the important stuff costs real money.
I don't want to harp on charities too much but I do want to point out that because of the nature of the tax structures that support them they have the effect of diverting significant amounts of money away from our government's available resources. I am not a heartless s.o.b. trying to demonize the charitable instincts of good people. I am simply arguing that they shouldn't be supported on the public's dime and at the expense of properly funding government.
More important than charities are corporations. Corporations are a legal fiction created to remove/limit the personal risk of individuals taking on business ventures. They are tools of private interest. They are by their design and law required to prioritize the bottom line of themselves over all other interests. They are sociopathic. Their interests are not the interests of the community at large. Their interests are only those of their owners despite any marketing propaganda they may spout to the contrary. They externalize all costs that they are not legally obliged to incur. That means: pay as little as possible, preferably nothing, for exploiting public resources (forests, minerals, water or any other resource of the broader community that we are now, agonizingly slowly, realizing are not infinite), pollute if it costs less than not polluting, pay workers as little as possible, download infrastructure costs to the broader community, AVOID PAYING TAXES,... ad infinitum. We have, through poor legal governance of their activities and through the tax system, allowed them the means to hold government (who's purpose is to protect the public interests) hostage to their personal interests and by doing so made them our de facto governors. (more accurately, the unelected people that own and run them).
Now, I can sense that you might want to counter me by pointing out that corporations create jobs, corporations do pay taxes, corporations can provide services more efficiently than government can, etc. There is some validity in these counterpoints to my position, in theory, but I argue that the current system is so badly tilted in favour of maximizing the much more narrow interests of a few that it needs deep structural reform (starting with the tax system, or perhaps better with the government lobbying system so that we might have some hope of actually getting somewhere with tax reform).
I had the opportunity during my working career to see close up how flawed our tax system is. It is a byzantine labyrinth designed to obfuscate. It attracts very smart people to the tax business because navigating it is a challenging intellectual exercise and very smart people tend to know where to find money. There is lot of money to be found in the tax code. Corporations employ armies of lawyers and accountants and lobbyists to, first, influence how the tax rules are structured to ensure that they start tilted in their favour, while at the same time engaging a huge marketing machine to convince us that they the world will end if they have to actually pay taxes, and, second, to exploit the weaknesses in those same systems to further tilt the playing field and divert truckload upon truckload of money away from our government and into the private hands of a very small minority. If you want to get a small, and frightening, glimpse into just how profoundly corporations manipulate government for their interests, spend some time following the career paths of the lawyers/accountants/lobbyists that work day and night for corporations to exploit tax law loopholes. The smart ones, the best of the best at their jobs are very same ones that wrote the rules while working for the government. They then go on to the private sector to make real money exploiting the "legal" loopholes they created. I challenge you to track down detailed descriptions of some of the tax shelters used by corporations and high net worth people to avoid paying tax and, in effect, download their costs to the community (charities play a role here by the way). These schemes employ a complex maze of deliberate deceptions hiding their true role and undermining the purpose and spirit of the tax system. And, because the system was rigged from the start, these schemes are arguably legal. Standing behind a thin veneer of legality they exploit the rules to their very limits and beyond which in turn requires the government to try to stop the bleeding by hiring their own army which in turn diverts tax revenue away from what it was designed to fund in the first instance.
None of what I have said denies that government sometimes goes off the rails and sticks its nose into places it shouldn't or that it sometimes funds boondoggles of dubious merit that wastes tax revenues. That reality does not imho support an argument for gutting government. Instead it supports an argument for all of us to stop abdicating our personal responsibility for the quality of government we elect. We need to stop sucking up the populist drivel and demanding more of our political leaders.
Make no mistake, populist leaders on either side of the political spectrum are dictators at heart. Anyone who cannot see the parallels between the language of populist leaders being elected around the world today and the horrors the world witnessed only a lifetime ago is in a very deep state of denial. I recommend reading a short book written by Benjamin Ferencz called Make it Count as a reminder of what ordinary people are capable of under the influence of populist leaders claiming to have the solution to all our problems and as a guide on how not to continue to fall victim to their siren call.
Getting back on track, health care, education, support for the young and elderly, and a host of other important social functions are simply too important to be left to the whim of the private sector and or charity. They may both have a supporting role to play in some limited cases but making them the main suppliers of important services to the public will simply widen the divide between the haves and have nots while accelerating the destruction of the planet that supports us all.
We need, during every election cycle, to work together as a community to ignore the partisan nonsense and dog whistle distractions that dominate and divide political discourse and the community and displace discussion of the really important issues. We need to stop letting ourselves be manipulated and divided into us and them warring factions operating in a constant state of blind rage from where we cannot make rational decisions in the best interests of the broader community. Then we can start to create a government and community that serves us, each and all, well, fairly, justly.
I think we are capable, as a community working together, of creating government that we can point to proudly. I think that we can create government that we support, even when it does something that we may not fully agree with at an individual level, because we know it has the interests of the entire community at heart and not just a select few. I have no expectation or delusion that we will find a place where we all agree on everything and live in idyllic harmony but I do think we are capable of much more and being much better humans and that we as individuals together with the governments we choose have an important role to play in getting there. We need to accept that we get the government we deserve and start, together, demanding better from those that stand up to serve and then to support strongly those that answer that call faithfully. We need to stop falling for the distractions that those who benefit most from weak government deliberately fuel. We need to stop screaming at each other and realize that we are all from the same tribe and sit down and work together to be better humans. It will be hard, multi-generational work but what better thing to we have to do with our time here.
We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot. I confess that my writing can come off as a bit preachy at times but I spend a lot of time thinking about how we (humans) can learn to come to a consensus on what is just and moral before we kill ourselves all off arguing over it and have I come to some conclusions that I think stand up well to criticism and are worthy of being shared. I am working on how to do that in a productive way and, clearly by how you have responded to my comments, I have some work still to do in that regard. So, I will change tack and keep trying.
I have concluded that a just and moral society is not possible without some government and the rule of law. I suspect, though I admit of the possibility that I may be wrong, that you would agree with me on this point even if we disagree strongly on where the lines are drawn.
I think the evidence is fairly clear that a free for all Wild West where everyone gets to do whatever they want whenever they want is not a good recipe for creating or maintaining a civilized society. I also think that dictatorships that impose the will of one or a small minority on others are problematic to say the least. So where then is the happy place in between and how do we get there? I have some ideas to put forth for consideration.
While we are unlikely to ever come to a place where we agree on everything, it is essential, if we are to have any hope of ending the cycle of war and violence that plagues the entire planet, that we start by acknowledging that we are all of the same “tribe”. We are human. The sooner we phase the term race out from our vocabulary the faster we will move forward to a better place. It is a term without scientific basis or merit and it is so hopelessly misused that it serves only to widen the divide between us.
I go further and argue that as humans we all share some basic rights and that part of the role of government is to enact and enforce laws that protect those rights for all equally. It is not a just and moral society that says some humans are more equal than others.
It has been my experience that the more I get to know other members of my human tribe the more I find that we share the same basic needs and desires and that our differences pale in comparison to what we share. I notice this most when I get to know people who come from very different places, physically/culturally/ intellectually, than I have come from. I also notice that what most often divides us and keeps us killing each other are three things: 1) Religion; 2) Nationalism (tribalism) 3) Economic circumstances. We kill when we feel our God is threatened, when our country/tribe is threatened, when our livelihood is threatened. These are not original ideas of mine but I have come to them on my own through long hard thought. The articulation of them above is a fairly blatant borrowing from a book by a gentleman by the name of Benjamin Ferencz called Make it Count. It is a short book but imho a very worthwhile one and I encourage you to give it a read.
Given this background the trick, I think, then becomes to work towards a place where the fact that someone sees the world somewhat differently than you (believes in different God, comes from a different nation) is not a threat to your God or your nation or your economic well being. I have no delusions that this is an easy task or that it can be accomplished in a short time or all at once. It is a goal that needs to be worked on for generations but I have concluded that there is nothing better we can as a species do with our time here and that a good place to start is to get to know better, and ideally befriend, someone who is different than you. It is much harder to kill/oppress someone who you have not branded as the “other”. That was the point I was trying to make.
Don’t get me started on charities. There are certainly exceptions but by and large they are tax dodges and vanity projects for the one percent. They, in effect, get everyone else to pay for whatever pet project they decide to take on without any reference to true community need and then expect to be patted on the back incessantly for their false magnanimity. Show me a one percenter who makes their charitable donation anonymously, without taking a tax write off, and directs it toward a cause that reflects a true need of the most in need and that isn’t run by a crowd of their peers who blow the majority of what is given on self aggrandizing marketing (carried out by companies run by their peers) and charity balls (attended mostly by their peers) and I will happily pay them some well deserved respect. In the meantime, I call BS on the idea that charity, even at its best, is an appropriate substitute for well run publicly funded social programs.
Do we know that any of the 1% actually own a jet? Or are these the company's jet? Why buy it when the company can pay for it.
I suspect that most, if not nearly all, Americans, Canadians and Europeans are in the richest 10%.
This all appears to be based on us continuing with the current shareholder capitalism model which prioritizes return on shareholders investment rather than a model in which benefits are shared more evenly among shareholders, management, workers, and consumers. It is a sad reality that those even in the 10% are not using that wealth to reduce their environmental impact. Just to begin, if I had that wealth I’d be off the grid and using renewable energy.
Warning: this post will be a depressing read.
Have the 1% ever in the course of human history demonstrated that they are prepared to give up anything?
Our evolutionary history haunts us deeply in this technological world. The concept of enough is largely meaningless in the human mind, not just in the minds of the 1%. The simple reality is that some are just luckier to have been born with the capacity to be better at the game than others and some just get luckier than others and are born or stumble into a place of better opportunity. You can reshuffle the deck periodically through revolution and war but the world sorts itself into the haves and have nots very quickly because, unfortunately, even small differences in capacity and or opportunity can make differences in outcome that compound very rapidly and become self sustaining. Combine that with the primitive, overpowering evolutionary baggage that compels us relentlessly to “get while the getting is good” and we appear doomed to repeat a cycle that will eventually, sooner than later given the way we are heading, doom us all. While being better at the game or being lucky in no way denotes moral superiority it is most certainly predictive of outcome at scale. Our only hope, imho, is that enough of those fortunate enough to have the capacity to be better at the game and or to be born or stumble into opportunity find the moral decency to begin to view everyone as part of the same tribe and to accept the moral responsibility placed upon them by their good fortune before technology advances to the point where their indifference to the plight of the masses becomes irrelevant to their own survival. At the moment the 1% still depend on the 99% to keep the party going but that may not be the case for very much longer.