patrick.net

I don't hate "capitalism" or "soc1alism," except when it reaches malfunctioning results. I don't like it even when the bad outcome benefits me, though I would obviously try to take advantage of the situation.

Income Tax is only the tip of the iceberg. It's the combination of all of the other taxes that we all pay, be it directly (i.e. Sales Tax) or indirectly (i.e. unemployment insurance). That's not even to mention the mandatory fees collected from my phone company, cable company, etc.

I don’t have any quick answers on what the best fix is. If there were a nice simple solution, someone would have thought of it long ago. Weather your for capitalism or communism, the bottom line is how do you prevent those in power from abusing said power to their own benefit?

If you think Socialism/Communism is the way to go, you should have visited one of those countries. These systems essentially destroyed the human spirit in these people and will take at least a generation to recover. Comparing the US to virtually any country in europe, especially Germany/Switz/Norway is preposterous. You have very homogenous populations with the most talented people in the world. Comparatively, our fellow Americans on the street are culturally, mentally , and even physically challenged. we have been able to make strides in the US solely based on the free market/capitalist system which has been massively debased over the last several decades which has compromised our living standards. The US critically depends on the top 1-5% to make it work. contrary to Hollywood and our politicians, it is NOT the great middle class that made the US- far from it. Allowing the most talented to reach their full potential is the only way our country can be saved. and by the looks of it, it wont. There is very little motivation for an extremely motivated, talented person to leave Europe for the US at this point. The previous brain drain that we so needed is gone. Socialized medicine? Look around you 40% of Americans are obese already. Giving them free healthcare will compound the ever growing problem. We need very strict nearly fascist guidelines for the mid-low class in the US with very open liberal business rules for the top 1%. Without it, our mid class will getter fatter/unhealthier, skip school/church, engage in absenteeism, and eventually rely totally on govt largesse. This is our future sadly.

how do you steal the mellow of a hippy? or the zen of the buddhist? do i see a flagging analogy put forth as an argument of convenience?

The "zen" and "mellow" are not themselves the transferable wealth I'm speaking of. What is transferable is the social capital associated with all the accumulated experience, learning and sacrifice necessary to achieve those.

The monk is robbed when the church decides to confer equivalent status upon others who did not make the long years of sacrifice he did. Regardless of whether the church has practical or even virtuous reasons for doing so, the monk himself has his accumulated capital devalued and redistributed.

Someone will say, "but he still has his spiritual wealth". True, but it exists only in and of himself if you redistribute the outward aspects of that wealth. By the same argument, a monetarily poor person is not "poor" unless he allows himself to think of himself as such.

Inevitably, people who take this metaphysical line of reasoning have never actually been poor. And not surprisingly, it is also these same folks who are most agitated by any attempt to devalue their non-monetary social capital.

You just try to steal that hippi's mellow by declaring lots of other foods organic (even if entirely scientifically justifiably so) and see how mellow he remains. Why do you think he's spreading manure over his moldy tomatoes with a shamanic yak horn now? It's because if he doesn't then he's no more "mellow" than the typical condo-owning Marina dweller.

Very few people are truly at peace with themselves in isolation of all else. Very few. It is not human nature. We are social animals with a built-in need for comparative status, no matter how much some people try to wish that away.

Taxes are for suckers to pay. Lovers of freedom find a way out of that oppressive system and become free riders on the backs of sheep.
Lovers of government create nothing but evil.

Randy,

I don't know about hippies, but most monastic communities (as opposed to the Xian Right, which just coinicidentally does not have monastic communities) do share their good karma with their community.

I think you're entirely too harsh on the local foods and organic community. Many of these people are very tough, practical, and serious minded. They're coming to substanable agriculture not because they have some pie in the sky idea (that sort fail very quickly) but often through experience. Commercial agriculture is horrible for the land, horrible for the workers, and horrible for animals.

I'm quite happy to pay a premium for local produce and humanely raised meats. I don't think it makes me more enlightened and I get the sense most organic farmers don't either. They're too busy with farm work to gloat.

In theory, a combination of consumption taxes and estate taxes could stike a good balance. The consumption taxes discourages frivilous consumption. The absence of an income tax encourages productive activity. The estate taxes reduces intergenerational accumulation of wealth. When paired with the consumption taxes, it hopefully creates the following scenario: You can't leave your fortune to your kids, and so you're encouraged to spend it in a way that will enable your kids to be productive (e.g., education, creation of businesses, etc.) if they want to maintain a wealthy lifestyle.

I am sorry, but I still don't understand why we need anything other than local and (maybe) state taxes.

I agree with most of what HARM posted in the topic today, but why accomplish social objective by taxation at all? Let us call charity what it is - charity. And charity should always be voluntary, not forced.

I know I am one of the very few who think this way, but I just put my 2 cents in (voluntarily, of course).

"in my book. Australian Aboriginals have no strong sense of personal property, everything is the collective property of the tribe and is exchanged freely on request as the need arises to use it"

How noble. At that level of development, the hunting and gathering grounds can be owned collectively. Personal items are easy to defend and easy to replace. This is the level of society where soc1alism works. Once you evolve to agriculture or industry, where some individuals must own property to have the incentive to produce (that is, without the king-priest-slave approach), then soc1alism becomes obsolete.

How about a more mobile approach? If you prefer to make your fortune like Randy or Malcolm, stay in a market economy like the USA. If you want a light work week and prefer lower wealth but more social time, move to England. And if you do not mind being poor as long as everyone else is too, try Cuba. Variations on these themes are available in Canada, OZ, France, Sweden, etc. If you want to be "noble," live with the Australian Aboriginals, or various African or New World Indian tribes.

You had me there DS, until this line:

the ’self made’ millionaire was able to manipulate others and their economic relations in a way that disproportionately benefitted him or herself at everybody else’s expense.

This is where we part ways. You think that economics is a zero-sum game, where one person's success inevitably comes at another's expense. That is simply not the way the world works, not even in Late Capitalism. Does Google add value to the world? Should the people who created that value share in the gains?

If you really think the Aboriginies are the way to go, go move in with them, no one is stopping you from adopting the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer. Personally, I think that Penicillin, hot showers and the Internet are great inventions, not ones that I would voluntarily do without. What was the life span of your Noble Savage?

I part ways with RandyH on the appropriate level of taxes. Clearly, they are too low right now, since we are running budget deficits. Even if we left Iraq, we still need to pay off some of the public deficit before the Boomers retire, though thanks to the Republicans, we probably blew our best chance to do so. We will all be poorer in the future because of this economic foolishness.

I would be willing to bet money that the marginal tax rates are going to go up in 2009, probably to the Clinton-era levels. Are you really planning on making good on your threat at that point and leaving the country RandyH? Most places worth living have even higher tax rates than the US, so I don't know where you would go. Monaco is quite nice though.

DS, per capita GDP doesn't work for me because I am more interested in what the median worker makes in different political and economic systems, not what the overall society makes. In the US in particular, the top 5% has done very well the last three decades, while income in the middle has been stagnant. You don't see that by looking at per capita GDP.

It is the old "five guys in a bar and in walks Bill Gates" problem with talking about average wealth.

Off Topic, but here's a guy who was going to be a "Self Made Millionaire" and has just gotten a clue.

http://tinyurl.com/2r2dlp

Bleeding 3k a month, not counting taxes/insurance/repairs/unrented downtime! Ouch!

"Bleeding 3k a month, not counting taxes/insurance/repairs/unrented downtime! Ouch!"

I wonder who he expects to take his offer? And how does putting up $175,000 qualify as "No down payment?"

Who ever does take this offer is the one we should tax.

At least he is honest about them loosing cash, and I believe he's trying to sell them at the price of the outstanding loan, not making any equity money on them.

sriram:
If we are going to have state and local taxes, they could be consumption and estate taxes as well, instead of income. I don't think our ideas for taxes are intended to be an addition to the existing schemes, but rather a replacement of them.

It's easy to think of taxes as charity in order to make an argument against them, but social engineering is always going to be present in some form. For "national security" alone you might want a study transportation infrastructure. You'll also want people developing new technologies, which means a strong educational system. Finally, you want to prevent epidemics, which means some form of public health monitoring/control. The question, as always, is where the line is drawn.

Neil Boortz's "The FairTax Book" addresses much of this.

Why do you think he’s spreading manure over his moldy tomatoes with a shamanic yak horn now? It’s because if he doesn’t then he’s no more “mellow” than the typical condo-owning Marina dweller.
I know that some of you none Bay Aryans think that Randy is kidding. He is not (plus he is smarting from the Mill Valley May numbers: a 6% increase in price per sq. ft... come on DQ, please post the June breakdown... this madness must stop).

I refer you to this Chronicle article on biodynamic farming.
Although Kinch couches biodynamics in "voodoo" terms, he insists on participating in all of the preparations, such as filling cow's horns with cow manure and burying them, then retrieving them six months later, making a watery preparation with the aged manure and flicking that solution over the crops with a paintbrush.

Some other formulas include those injected into compost. One consists of dried chamomile flowers stuffed into intestines (natural sausage casings) and buried underground for six months. A yarrow compost preparation consists of dried yarrow blossoms stuffed into the bladder of a deer, hung from a tree for six months then buried underground for another six months. Oak bark preparation, also used in compost, must be placed in the skull of a domesticated horned animal and buried for six months before it is used.

Wow, this thread really struck a nerve, I see. Of course, given the title, what should I have expected? Lots of excellent responses and ideas out there.

A federal VAT or federal GST-type doesn't seem out of the question to me, but, like some here, I don't see how you can attain less wealth disparity long-term without also having some form of estate tax and/or capital gains tax. If all you have is sales and income tax, then you end up with inter-generational asset barons that shuffle their family investment trusts/portfolios around, but avoid *real* productive work and (visible) consumption as a general rule --living off passive capital gains and passing entire fortunes along to their birth lottery descendants. End result: greater wealth disparity and even less class mobility.

Now, if we completely eliminate income tax, but keep a "flat" more-or-less asset-class neutral capital gains tax and similar estate tax & VAT/GST, that might fit the bill of "fair" and workable. Of course, what is likely to happen over time is, executive bigwig compensation will shift away from stock options in favor of salaries, but at least they have to do *something* taxable with the money (i.e., spend it, invest it, bank it). Then there's the added possibility of companies padding their payrolls with non-existent ghost "employees". But, hey, that's game theory 101 and no system's perfect.

In terms of mobility, where else but in France/Old Europe, could a Hungarian immigrant's son grow up to be President?

Oh, and for the record, I am not against people "making it" through hard work and brilliant ideas. Far from it --in fact I want more opportunities for people at the bottom to start small businesses and move up. However, where I part ways with some people here is in the (false) assumption that rich = exceptional, or the "most millionaires are self-made" canard.

This may be true of a very small minority of the wealthy & super-wealthy, but most rich people today either (a) inherited the bulk of it from parents/family, or (b) had a HUGE leg-up on everyone else by getting a free Ivy League college education, benefitting from having critical family/fraternity business connections, or (c) both. Even if Bill Gates Jr. had never inherited one thin dime from Bill gates Sr., he would *still* have had huge competitive advantages, connections and opportunities that simply do not exist for the rest of us common rabble.

Astrid

I am not meaning to unfairly attack organics and sustainability. I see the logic in it and think it has its place. But I draw the line at mysticism, voodoo and superstition. If people believe in that, and derive value from it, so be it. But when those premiums are hoisted upon me in any way as unavoidable costs then I object and call bullshit. I've argued previously that there is no practical mechanism, given scale, to feed the world over the next century without hyper efficient scale farming (so called factory farms) and hyper efficient GMO crops. But the sustainable crowd won't come out and say that their solution also means a magical reduction in population. I don't believe in magic. In my universe human populations are only reduced materially over short time frames through two methods, neither of which are particularly attractive.

By the way, I level the exact same set of criticisms at the homeopathic/naturopathic crowd when it comes to health. There's value in those practices, but when they try to discourage immunization programs or run around Africa trying to get people to not see the Doctors-without-Borders for their 4 year old's infection, instead engaging in some ritualistic hot rocks and massage therapy, I call bullshit. Perhaps they and their kids should go through a round of exposure to 1800s infectious diseases for a bit to educate them about the role science has played in allowing them to run around healthy and happy while thinking it was the gods and incense sticks that enabled their good fortunes.

And while we're clearing the record, I'll address the requisite "you only got rich by exploiting others" reactionary tripe.

a) It is economically untrue because economics are not zero-sum (as already pointed out).

b) Even if you don't buy (a), life isn't fair. You can make the same straw man argument about *everything*. In the 80s in undergrad I heard this over and over about gender disparity, racial disparity, geographic disparity, height disparity, beauty disparity...

c) Therefore the only truly fair thing to do is not try to be subjectively fair. Trying to be fair means picking winners & losers, which means picking losers, which cannot be fair to the losers. The honest thing to do is set a baseline, ignore subjectivity, and then allow people and the markets people create to organize themselves around those baselines, thereby having a say in whether they are winners or losers.

The problem with DS' argument is that I only was able to establish wealth because my planet happens to be close enough to the sun that its oceans didn't evaporate or dissolve, thereby enabling a species of sapient beings to arise. So my being rich is only because of the unfairness of my pre-determined advantages I had over the Martians.

In my universe human populations are only reduced materially over short time frames through two methods, neither of which are particularly attractive.

Are these what you had in mind?:
1) war/genocide
2) natural catastrophe (famine, plague, asteroid strike, etc.)

In my utopian fantasy of the world there would be some kind of flat tax with one and only one huge personal deduction. I don't think any kind of income, either passive investment income, capital gains, or salary, should be exempt from it. This would put a ton of accountants out of work, and eliminate the need for 90% of all tax lawyers, politicians, tax collectors, etc.

I think we should tax inheritances as well, or at the very least, disallow the current practice of people being able to "step-up" the basis upon inheritance. Right now, people can just totally avoid taxes on gains this way. It is not clear to me how this benefits society in any way whatsoever. There probably needs to be some kind of large exemption here, to avoid people having to break up the family farm or whatever.

There also needs to be some kind of way to charge people for externalities that they impose on others. This is where it gets tricky though, and opens the tax code to all kinds of social and political and economic issues.

But the truth is, I don't think we can implement any kind of radical change overnight, because it would cause all kinds of strange economic shocks. The current tax code is far, far too complex though. It is a huge drag on small businesses.

Randy,

I agree that some people take organics too far, into the realm of superstition. However, many organic techniques are a great thing. With those techniques, the Chinese in the Pearl River and Yangtze deltas intensively farmed for centuries without deterioration in their environment. Things like crop rotation, eating less meat, diverse agriculture, and not force feeding corn to cows (and the antibiotics that entails) are help everybody involved except Big Agra.

You can argue that the market should sort itself out...but are we as a society really willing to let nature sort itself out? Can this society really practice pure survival of the fittest AKA social Darwinism? Should society deny people who are genetically disposed to obesity die AND not support any children they leave? Should we let industrial agriculture run amuck and lay waste to our farm lands while the market sort itself out? (A similar policy didn't work out so well for Butte, MT).

I think the framing of this issue is all wrong and I do believe enlightenment lies elsewhere. Right now, we as a society think growth is desirable and inevitable...I don't think either is true. To grow further on this already crowded Earth means either depleting our resources at an ever faster pace until we all starve (much like natural animal populations boom and crash), or hoping and praying that miraculous technology advances will bail us out.

Why must it be this way? Can't humanity simply learn to live within its means? A few past communities have managed this before they overreached and its too late to turn back. However, as I mentioned before here, I'm not optimistic about humanity's chances.

Astrid

Who's being the Utopian? How, precisely and practically, are you going to bring such a revolution of sustainability about? I mean, not to sound like I'm baiting political ideologies (because I'm not), but wasn't that experiment tried by the Khmer Rouge?

Technology is inevitable. It is what defines homo sapiens as a species. We evolved as tool users. Our survival, quite to the contrary of your premise, depends exclusively upon our ability to create social organizations enabled by extrasomatic tools and learning.

No society exists or has ever existed on Earth which was both progressive and "sustainable" as per your definition. Sustainability only occurs with stagnation. And the fate of those societies should serve as evidence of they types of animals humans are. We are what we are. Ironically we only progress though overcoming the adversities we create for ourselves. In your suggested world view everything will become static, and eventually we'll be simply gone. This way we may also be simply gone, but when that big asteroid comes our way, we'll at least (a) know about it and (b) have a fighting chance to try to stop it.

I do not buy into the hidden assumption that a sustainable, localized, fair-trade, ultimately "fair" world will cause us to somehow stop competing yet still all sit around like gilded artisans expanding our higher sensibilities. It just don't happen that way.

The real answer to all these terrible problems we face, like overpopulation, environmental decay, global warming, big scary asteroids, is to continue to develop our social, technical and scientific systems to overcome them. I could take your same arguments and roll them back to the middle ages and say that agriculture and dynasties caused non sustainability via cities and caused plagues. I'm partial to antibiotics and science solving plagues rather than killing off half the serfs and returning everyone to berry picking.

As to China, I'm not the expert as so many here, but I do know enough history to know that you're just hand picking isolated, tiny examples. China has the distinction of the longest running intergenerational period of warfare by a multiple.

Finally, you know me better than to level the market-fundamentalist charge at me. I certainly don't advocate a "social darwinism". No one except jackasses and AM radio freaks says we shouldn't care for children, the truly unfortunate and usually even self-inflicted unfortunate like drug addicts and alcoholic vagrants. I never said no taxes or no social systems. To the contrary, I want a national health care system. The responsibility for such should not lie with private companies. But why is it most of the crowd who wants social healthcare also wants to force me to pay for snake oil instead of just giving those poor kids immunizations? It's not hard, do the math. What will save more suffering? Giving welfare children education, antibiotics, and healthy diets or making sure they get yak horn blessed aromatheraputic smoky incense? But every time I talk to someone about national healthcare they start right off saying we need to eliminate immunizations or something equally as insufferable.

Randy,

I know you well enough to know you're not a market fundamentalist. Sorry if I left the impression. We both agree that a government is necessary but messy. However, once you let the government get involved, it's always going to be a scary balancing act. I'm actually willing to debate the wisdom Social Darwinism, not enough to support it (yet), but if neutrally applied, it does offer some clarity.

Or maybe I just like Solarians. I don't know...

I'm a natural gloom and doomer. I've been that way since I scaring myself half to death about typhoons at five years of age. My feeling is that this planet will a lot more sustainable with a zero population 1 billion people consuming only as much as they need, than 10 billion people all eager for more and more and more. Technology has been our savior so far. But past civilizations had advanced far on technology, only to be destroyed when their population/ecological pressure caught up with them.

If we rely on technology and markets to to continue to allow us humans to exceed the earth's carrying capacity, we may soon find that the quality of life is unacceptably low. The end of living and the beginning of survival, as they say.

Organic/biodynamic/Legba-blessed produce is, to me, an indication that someone tried to care for the land and the plants growing there, rather than depleting the soil and throwing down a lot of fertilizer and Monsanto hybrid seeds each year. An indication that someone is running a valid experiment on how to make agriculture viable in the future. Maybe they are managing to hold onto a few heirloom lines of seeds--which typically represent hundreds if not thousands of years of patient human effort, and which are being bought up by large seed concerns and not released. Seeds are good for a year, perhaps two. When they are gone they are gone. And an organic/spaghetti-monster-blessed farm may be trying to solve interesting and relevant farming problems, like how do we continue to keep land fertile as we run short of the petroleum needed to produce the fertilizer we have relied on since the 1940's? How can we get more nutrients from each acre of land? Permaculture methods wrest more nutrition from each acre than factory farming does--at the cost of more human labor, so if you are just looking at dollars per calorie, it might cost more. But if you are looking at calories per acre, farming with intensive human input comes out pretty far ahead.

Again, I have no specific problems with organic efforts. I see them as part of the self-correcting process. Fertilization and pesticides clearly were overused heavily in the past, and still are in most parts of the world outside of the US & Western Europe.

There are some popular misconceptions, though, in Eliza's statement. I attended a seminar on global agriculture in London a couple years ago. I was surprised to learn the actual metrics on agricultural productivity. The US & Canada are significantly more productive than Europe, and an order of magnitude more productive than the rest of the world. The reason is we have extremely low human labor input requirements and we deploy significant capital assets towards the business of ag. The reason the WTO died in the last round was because the world wanted the US to open to open wide to importing ag while all US exports of ag would continue to be heavily tariffed. The reason is fair. If the US exported ag at market price we'd destroy most of the world's markets because our marginal costs are so much lower and our yield is so much higher.

There is always room for sustainability improvements, and we probably still overuse petrochemicals in the process. But, it is not fair to say such techniques hurt our yield, productivity or costs. They do the opposite, which is precisely why we use them. So don't make the case that we *need* bio dynamics to save agriculture for reasons that aren't supported by the facts. Perhaps there are other reasons.

As to technology and carrying capacity. The notion of carrying capacity is not static, it is a reflective system affected directly by technology. We are only constrained by the resources on the planet, and even that is not a fixed constraint since we can import resources from off planet given technology. The system is only as closed as our current ambitions and needs.

But don't believe me, jump in a time machine and go back to any arbitrary point in the past when the earth was "sustainable" in terms of population or production. Don't choose some fabled isolated indigenous tribe living off the fish in the river, but choose at place you'd statistically be likely to be actually have been born. Then tell me how much higher quality your life was in that alternate reality. The truth is that aside from the tremendous suffering of the impoverished crush of humanity stuck in the same old parts of the world, humanity has experienced explosive improvements in the quality of life. The fact we can argue about this on the internet instead of worrying about selling our youngest daughter into indentured servitude just to eat is testament to that fact.

But I guess people only find the time for the deepest self criticism when times are treating them the best. Another irony.

Randy,

No need to put humanity's egg's in one basket. Progress is inevitable, and there is plenty of historical examples of short term positive innovations that ended up destroying a culture.

There's more to agriculture than today's productivity. Industrial agriculture contaminate ground water, cause soil erosion, decrease soil fertility, etc. Comparing Americans to Europeans doesn't really sway the argument one way or the other, Europeans have smaller farms, but most do not practice sustainable agriculture.

How sustainable is "sustainable?" I admit that today's "sustainable still runs on fossil fuel and they don't solve the demand concerns. However, with crop rotation, integrated pest management (not voodoo, I don't spray and the ladybugs take care of the aphids nicely), low drip irrigation, and shallow tilling, such farms will actually improve fertility/reduce contamination.

There's nothing wrong with finding the contemporary world troubling. America itself is on the brink of "something" -- will it blow off like an inconsequential vapor while we move on to bigger and better things? I hope so, but there are many troubling signs.

As for "times are treating them the best." Misery is relative. Happiness is relative. A large plurality takes joy in the misery of others. We had a bite at the apple of knowledge (though I won't vouch for the quality of the knowledge), we are thus burdened.

Any attempt to make everyone equally rich will make everyone equally poor. Moreover, some people will always be more equal than others in any "perfectly" equitable society.

I think we've got it pretty good here. Yes there is x small percent (pick a number between 5-15% whatever floats your boat) of people in the USA who have it rough, but man by historical standards pretty much everyone here could be considered rich. Just look at the benchmarks for being poor, no color TV OMG! What no car? What kind of loser doesn't own a car in America?

Something seems to be working, and yes there might be some class stratification but even the most pessimistic numbers thrown around on this thread sound pretty good. How many societys in history have at least 1/3 of the wealthy having moved up from lower income groups?

And I'm not even convinced of the low figures presented but San Diego, California could have a much different demographic than the old money groups that seem to be more an East Coast thing. Seems to me most people in California who have it, weren't born into it.

I guess the keyword is equally rich in your premise, verses my view of a measurable cutoff between wealth and poverty.

societies ~

This is a depressing conversation. Why do people seem to assume that wealth came at the expense of somebody else? Is anyone holding a gun to your head, forcing you to buy that iPod? No? Then don't complain that Steve Jobs is a rich guy. He isn't holding a gun to anyone's head, either.

And why is everything framed so rigidly from an individual viewpoint? There is nothing wrong with accumulating value and then giving it to your offspring. Why shouldn't they have comfortable lives? Is the line of reasoning so simpleminded as to say "Because most people don't get to start with a comfortable life."? Hey, welcome to reality! Here's a thought--if you work hard from humble beginnings, eventually you might be able to create dynastic wealth for your offspring, too.

Envy of another's possessions is foolish. A wealthy person was obviously exceptional enough to create wealth from a humble beginning. If you don't have wealth but lust after it, then you're by definition not exceptional, right? Otherwise you'd be wealthy, too. Regarding the offspring of wealthy people, you're really just envying the exceptional nature of whoever amassed that wealth in the first place. You're also being jealous because you didn't "win the sperm lottery" and become their lucky descendant. Ultimately, even if your envy is negative, you're mentally hefting the exceptional onto your shoulders by badly wanting to have their talents and the eventual result of wealth.

I'm going to stick with a different idea: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor thy neighbor's goods.

If you waste time being jealous because someone got a better start in life than you, you're going to be permanently bitter, because someone always had it better. Maybe Bill Gates had a headstart on me, but since I'm not Bill Gates, that's pretty irrelevant to my life. It only matters what I do with my life--in the eyes of God, in my own eyes and nobody else's. If I enjoy my life and die above the cutline, then I've pretty much had a good run of it. I'm guessing that starting with a McMansion or a free Ivy League scholarship wouldn't have helped my cause in the least.

Brand, I totally agree with everything you say here, but if (as I hope) taxes are merely collected to pay the bills of the government isn't it more fair to tax inheritance at a high level inline with what Jimbo was saying (high exemption but then a pretty stiff rate) than the current rates for low and middle class workers?

To reiterate I do believe wealth is private and should be passed down, I don't believe it originates from the state and goes back to the state upon death.

I also agree that wealth should be considered private property and be transferable to anyone one sees fit, while alive or after death. A reasonable, flat, percentage set above the current definition of poverty level is fine to tax away upon transfer. Call it a transaction fee. Society needs something back for processing the external costs of the transfer. But beyond that wealth should be distributable on demand.

The other side of that equation assumes there exists a true, functional free market system. Such egalitarian, merit driven economy will itself tax away the wealth of lottery-winning offspring naturally if they are not also exceptional themselves. Not perfectly. There will always be clubs and favoritism. But, a merit-driven market will force businesses to hire the most qualified over the most-pedigreed or they themselves will lose their corporate wealth.

When we start picking winners and losers we create a system that can and is gamed, which perpetuates the very thing people find objectionable about "the rich".

This is already the case in America to a large degree. Except for the hyper-wealthy, many top 10% wealthy families see their family wealth massively eroded after 2 generations post originator. Usually through divorce, drugs and old fashioned laziness.

Astrid, I've been following a particular development in sustainable agriculture which, if you've already seen it, then fine, but if not pretty interesting. Thought our very accomplished gardener might be intrigued...

Cornell is working to determine the composition of soils developed in the Amazon basin in pre-Conquistador times. In place of the slash and burn practices of recent times, Amazon indigenous cultures used pyrolysis (low oxygen burning) and plowed the resulting charcoal into their soils. Although the precise methods and processes are still imperfectly understood, the resulting soils have multiple properties of current interest:

They require little or no additional fertilization.
They release no nutrients into surface water.
They generate yields superior to current methods.
They are strongly hydrophylic.
The process of generating and using them is carbon negative.

The local term for the enriched soil is terra preta negra. There is a working group, the Eprida Institute, which has developed a scalable plant using pyrolysis to produce heat, fuel, carbon sequestration and an enriched charcoal agricultural product from biomass.

What interested me particularly is that this method appears to have been employed in several ancient cultures; is capable of improving the worst of soils, clays or sands; it reduces demand for irrigation, reduces or eliminates the need for commercial fertilizers and it returns carbon to the soil in beneficial form. Treated soils release almost no NOX into the atmosphere.

In view of earlier discussion, it is disruptive technologies of this kind which can change our most basic assumptions. We tend to believe we'll never step away from fossil fuels, or feed the planet, or have enough fresh water, or reduce carbon dioxide emissions. As we sort out what we want and get better at determining what we must do, developments sometimes come along which offer solutions.