TWO TIER TAXATION
This line of thinking is partly prompted by the recovery of “Embodiment” and through that source the recovery of the humanities and the huge wealth of thought. But also through thinking about wealth and trying to understand the difference between taxation of work and taxation of capital, esp. in mammoth amounts. This essay will need a lot more work, but I didn’t want to forget.
Fiddling along with my simple understanding of human thought as it affects our economic, national, and political lives today, I come to a useful understanding. Early in our cultures we thought in sensory, experiential terms about concrete harvesting, making, and operating things. Fish, corn, digging and carving were real and “haptic”, in one’s hands. There’s thinking about this right now:
I got my start with Tim Ingold’s book called “Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture.” That’s more formal than Baking, Making a Bird House and Needlepoint, but simply more formal and academic. Ingold’s book is the result of a class that studied basket weaving, making a shelter, or chipping a handaxe from stone — among other things. One of the points is that when working like this, one merges with the materials and holds them in the mind afterwards.
This is the way life was until the invention of symbolism for objects, meaning counting, keeping count, and expanding math into writing. This second level of knowledge grew until it more or less dominates our culture. Everything, including Broadway musicals, is desribed in terms of money.
I was thinking about people’s incomes and noting that life is pretty much like “making” until a lot of money is involved and then it leaves reality for working with numbers and largely goes to an urban constructed environment. I was thinking about our taxation system which converts the wor- based lower income into numbers, then sends a percentage. But high income people do something which is complex and distant from what it symbolizes. So what sense does it make to use the same metrics for people with such different kinds of assets — between salaries and stock and investments. Capitalism: making money from the raw ownership of money. The capital may or may not be in terms of ownership of land or buildings, a few other assets like mines or businesses. But they are always described in terms of money.
All this leads me to think that we should treat extreme wealth entirely differently than a living wage. Rich people are different and live in a different world. They entirely lose track of everything but a constricted life largely controlled by the money. When a person is very rich, they rarely keep hands on the awareness and management of their money. Too much regulation, inspection, and decision-making, is required for anything less than a team with a few experts on it. To consider and design a fair relationship with what needs to be a supportive contribution to the state of the nation has never been looked at that way where I could see it.
Old left-over European ideas about inheritance, primogeniture, relationships with religious institutions, entailments, debts, interest — this is very intricate stuff with many consequences, not least the dependence of some of the salaried folks on the fortunes of the wealthy, and the benevolence of those who have a lot. Taxation then should not be a flat code, but an individualized and probably negotiated amount, kind, timing and so on. Not that different from what lawyers do now, but with an outcome focused on the nation more than the individual.
That’s one side of the problem and it is being approached in public articles now.
That’s one side of this discussion but the other side has not been connected in this way earlier, I don’t think. That is the effect of extreme wealth on the quality of the demographics. The wealth of a country is not just money but also the quality of the people — not just smart but also wise and compassionate. Organized, in sympathy and coordination, full of systems providing safely.
If the wealth encourages narcissism, separation, envy and a distortion of the uses of money in maintaining a hierarachy of supposed quality that is just not there — like our phenomenon of empty education from formerly respected universities for the sake of their material assets and endowments, then it is s form of rot. When a respected newspaper (NYT) joins in the conspiracy of lies, the country is impoverished, even endangered. It enters an unreal world that has no connection to anything a person can put their hands on.
It is physically interfacing with the physical world that created humans to be what they are. Valuable as ideas are, holding real things leads to real thinking.
Another consideration rarely invoked, is the impact of great wealth and the burrowing animals it attracts, on a human being identified as rich. I envision a taxation program that somehow evaluates how the rich person is holding up. In advanced age, they need to be checked for dementia, esp. since it is so ubiquituos now — drugs, of course. Mafia incursions should be converted into evidence. Blackmail, kidnapping, extortion. It’s dangerous to be rich.
This is a little coherent but it’s a beginning.
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