Update: 7 February 2023 Tonight, President Joseph Biden established himself, at last, leader of the Free World. He serves at the hour of Earth’s greatest danger, its greatest need. Pray, those inclined, he gets everyone through unharmed. Speech starts at minute 26.
The Editors
The New York Times surprised some readers by refusing to include the name of Joe Biden (current president of the United States) even once in the first and second sections of its Sunday issue (24 April 2022).
38 silent pages.
Think.
On the second-to-last page of another section—the Sunday Review—Ross Douthat stepped up. He wrote an editorial with the word “Biden” in it.
Joe Biden doesn’t like oligarchs, and they don’t like him. They called him Communist when he first ran for elected office. Who remembers? It wasn’t true then and isn’t now. To my mind it had more to do with his Irish roots and connections to other prominent, unpopular Irish Americans like the Kennedy’s.
How about that?
Is hatred why Americans see Trump in their daily media feeds more than Biden?
Oligarchs own media, right? A half-dozen men, give or take, hold ultimate control over 90% of what Americans see and read. Billionaires have problems with Biden because they don’t control him. It’s why they ignore everything he says and does—when they can.
Jimmy Carter had the same problem. Who is old enough to remember? Carter holds historical honor for being the only U.S. president who served his term without murdering anyone. But that was then. This is now.
Is Joe benevolent?
I really don’t know.
The entitled rich hope Biden will go away and that others more favorable to wealth and its privileges will take his place. Media announced today that a rich man bought Twitter for 50 billion dollars, give or take. The man claims to be acting in good faith to bring freedoms of speech inspired by public forums of ancient Greece.
He calls it digital town square.
Everyone knows he will unleash dogs of Trump on vulnerable Americans who lack protections afforded by wealth and gated living. Who wants to argue loud in public spaces where monsters lurk to harm their families and friends off-line?
Does anyone believe free speech emanates from the enterprise of unstable manic-depressives accountable to no one?
Not to pick on any particular oligarch—all pose dangers—but Elon Musk didn’t become a U.S. citizen until age 30—a short 20 years ago. Despite tenuous ties to America, he manages to gather popular support. He plays Congress like a fiddle. Congressional appropriations flow like water. Clearly, he keeps more than a few Benjamins for himself.
It’s not right.
Our founding fathersbelieved that power corrupts those who wield it. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s why we govern ourselves with three co-equal branches of government.
Checks and balances are fundamental to prevent fallible humans—whose success blinds them to their own flawed visions—from overwhelming the Constitutional freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights.
Who disagrees?
To cut to the chase, it is insane for civilized society to permit private individuals to accumulate the wealth and power of governments. What is the point of civilization if not to limit the horrors of jungle living?—to stanch suffering, which always follows when might makes right in those arenas where the strong disrespect and eat the weak.
Proud people create elected governance to protect their rights; they don’t hide behind private cartels who don’t really care about us,Michael Jackson warned.
Sergei Lavrov is one of Russia’s wealthiest men. Yesterday, this privileged strongman threatened nuclear war. He said, “…we must not underestimate it.”
It is never good to permit dictatorial power and nuclear weapons to mean-spirited bullies who intend to destroy civilization should they not get their way. The USA put leaders of Russia on notice that they will not outlive Ukraine.
Who is brave enough to acknowledge what everyone knows? Ordinary people are fed-up with oligarchs and dictators. People want to breathe free without fear.
Secretary of State Blinken said, “But we do know that a sovereign, independent Ukraine will be around a lot longer than Vladimir Putin is on the scene.“
The most notorious terrorist threatened by the USA was Osama Bin Laden. They fed him to sharks. Later, they killed unrepentant members of his family. Putin might be wise to apologize now and start nuclear disarmament talks. Then again, it might be too late.
Who believes he will take the opportunity? The chance to survive Hell is better, some advisors might argue.
The Russian “president” seems to think that because Bin Laden didn’t possess nuclear missiles or hypersonic technologies of war, he couldn’t win. Is it really possible that Bin Laden could have conquered Earth had he mastered the alchemies of the current crop of Russian leaders?
Who knows?
The international scene requires x-ray vision. One in five sanctioned oligarchs seem to be Israeli citizens—according to a recent analysis published in the Jerusalem Post. Say it isn’t true, Joe. Apparently, USA’s closest ally and friend is protecting powerful people who are entangled with Russian wise guys. It’s not a good look.
I’d say it’s terrifying. Who wouldn’t?
Kentucky politicians—readers, some of them, know who they are—sleep in the same bed as Russian oligarchs who control much of the world’s aluminum supply. Reports say they operate a manufacturing plant in Kentucky which employs thousands. Is there anyone who understands how difficult the situation becomes for countries where international thugs accumulate vast monies and political powers?
The mighty must know that with age comes loss. Everyone they love and know will die before them should they enjoy long life. What good does wealth and power do anyone who is confined to a wheel-chair unable to control even the beating of their own heart?
What chance is there that the powerful will give all they have to the poor to serve the cause of love for the unlovable, which is what most of 8 billion humans are. Will anyone say it out loud? Most people are unloved and uncared for by those who together have the resources to make a better world for everyone now living and for those who will come after.
It is incomprehensible to me that advantaged people would shell the shit out of people simply because they are in the way—through no fault of their own. Apart from the love of God, I don’t see how human civilization as we know it today will survive.
Perhaps the powerful have made a calculation that Earth is better off when humans are reduced to a few hundred million souls, not billions. They have the ability to minimize us all—to zero, I suppose.
The United States has the power and skills to get everyone through the current crisis unharmed.
Sounds good, doesn’t it?
I want to believe it’s true. I don’t know for sure.
Who will save us?
Joe Biden walks in the gap between civilization and Armageddon. He’s the last man standing able to rescue humanity from the slavery that follows the victory of totalitarianism.
Maybe it’s time to climb aboard his peace train while all sides still can.
Billy Lee
EDITORS NOTE: Added 8 May 2022: NYT Joe Biden blackout blooms. No mention of Joe Biden & family in Sunday Edition. In fairness, the Friday May 6 online newsletter published a briefing on page 10 titled, “Biden’s Unpopularity.”
A few months ago, I published 25 Answers to questions readers of Quora.com took time to ask me, because they trusted I knew what I was writing about. Yes, the world is easily fooled by pontificators posing as experts. I confess, I am one of them.
I am a bona-fide pontificator and intend to continue pontificating until I can no longer remember my name. For me, it’s art. My promise is truth, accuracy, and to fix screw-ups when someone points them out.
The response to my blog-bag of answers was underwhelming to the point where I wondered whether I should ever inflict another anthology of eclectic curiosities on any group of readers anywhere in the world.
Yes! I decided. Of course, I will. I love to read what I write!
When I forget what I once knew, I read the posts and remember how smart I was when I could remember stuff. It’s a good feeling. Someday I hope my grandchildren will understand why I don’t remember their names or how old they are. Someday I hope they will get what I’m talking about.
Brain-dead and happy is a wonderful combination, and I have it. Yes, I do. It is wonderful. I feel happy and content most of the time.
My mother had Alzheimer’s for years. It was a peculiar variation where she could remember twenty-five quips and jokes, which she repeated to anyone who would listen. Sometimes she wondered what was wrong with her. She asked about it, sometimes.
She always forgot the answer, but to the end she never forgot her repertoire of sure-fire laugh lines. Mom delighted us to the very end of her life, God bless her.
Anyway, I know stuff, and I’m no longer afraid to share. I would say I am becoming fearless.
This essay is a collection of 25 more questions that people from around the world have asked, and I have dared answer. My last Quora compilation was mostly math and physics. Not this time. Here answers focus more on politics, philosophy, religion, and other esotery.
Oh, I might slip a science or math question in here or there for nerds I know are out there who read my stuff and cling to every word.
Here goes.
1 – How is it “just” for jails to be privately owned in the U.S.?
Allowing private citizens to own the means-of-incarceration is as insane as it is unjust and undemocratic.
Since 1984, America has allowed people to sequester as much wealth as they can manage. The looting, cheating, and chicanery that followed has turned America into one of the most corrupt, cruel, and unfair countries the world has ever known.
The result is that now we have an associate of a powerful Russian cartel serving as our president. Are we really going to allow his friends to own our prisons?
Are we out of our minds?
The situation is far worse than you can imagine.
Billionaires run the media. You aren’t going to hear about ways of organizing our country that are in opposition to their consensus about how things should be done. What passes as “dissent” on shows like Rachel Maddow, for example, has the backing of some billionaire somewhere.
We don’t know the names of the people who run our country. They don’t run for office. They do buy the services of office holders on both sides of the aisle — GOP and Democrat. It’s disturbing, especially when people finally realize that they are at bottom mere slaves with no real power. If voting made a difference, would billionaires allow it? Would you, if you were rich? I don’t think so.
Even now, confidence in our electoral system is being undermined. Reality Winner, the NSA contractor who exposed Russian tampering with our election results, rots in jail; she can’t obtain bail. The media doesn’t cover her. They want us to forget all about her.
Keeping Reality incarcerated undermines confidence, because it makes it seem like the government has something to hide about our election process.
Elon believes (correctly) that the risk of a future human extinction event approaches certainty over a very short period of time that can be estimated to be in the hundreds of years or less.
Elon believes we are in a race against catastrophe; humans are special and must be protected; one way to reduce extinction probabilities for humans is to establish populations on other planets and moons.
There are 165 or so rocky (solid) bodies in the solar system with enough gravity that humans can walk on them. Places where large populations can survive are fewer than five and could be as few as absolute zero.
Mars has special problems for human survival which must be solved. It has no protection from high energy radiation and cosmic rays. It lacks a magnetosphere and the atmospheric gases like nitrogen and oxygen that are opaque to harmful rays and particles. Elon believes these problems will be solved and that risk of extinction can be reduced if we establish vigorous colonies there.
He has hope where most informed people do not. My hope is that we can avoid extinction on Earth, but volatile climate and frequent ice ages are difficult to overcome.
We also have new and unusual risks associated with our technologies —biological, nuclear, AI, totalitarianism, resource depletion, and runaway climate change.
Natural risks include asteroid strikes, super nova irradiation, and volcanism. These natural risks are likely to be the same (or larger) on other bodies in the solar system as they are on Earth.
Two human-like species are known to have gone extinct in the geological record. (Some anthropologists say it’s three.) Human populations experienced a near extinction event 70,000 years ago when the total population collapsed to less than 4,000.
I do not know what Elon Musk thinks about organized religion.
I see religion as a brake on the tendency of humans to kill each other, which history teaches has sometimes been effective and at other times not. Sometimes, strongly held religious beliefs lead to war.
On one thing humans agree: they love to fight.
3 – What is the greatest achievement in human history?
Blaise Pascal said that civilization advanced when people finally understood that being the son of a Queen did not qualify someone to be a King.
Nepotism kills civilizations and impedes human progress. An example is the president bringing in his family to manage the United States, presumably because loyalty trumps ability.
The cascading catastrophe that is enveloping us will soon teach anyone who is teachable that placing loyalty to a “king” above the ability to serve our country is one of the many roads that leads nations to ruin.
4 – Why is there a lot of woo-woo surrounding the double slit experiment?
If you shot a BB gun once every five minutes for two weeks at a steel plate that had cut into it two quarter-inch slits, you wouldn’t expect to find 25 or so tidy columns of holes in the wall behind when you were done. People who have done this experiment with atomic scale particles always say “woo” after, because the phenomenon makes no sense.
The mathematics to describe the phenomenon is the same as that used to explain wave-behavior. The problem is this: even if you shoot one wave packet at a time (using photons) instead of solid BB-like particles (like Buckyballs), no one expects that over a few weeks tidy columns will form on the back wall that look like wave interference. The reason for the pattern is a total mystery.
5 – What is the origin of geometric shapes (triangle, circle, cube, etc.)? If the universe was governed by different laws, would it be possible that these concepts would also be different?
People speculate about the origins of idealized shapes that don’t occur in nature (except approximately). People seem to crave symmetry. They don’t like cognitive dissonance, uncertainty, or ambiguity.
People who are dissonant-intolerant are easy to manipulate. Politicians prey on people’s discomfort by offering simple solutions in return for votes. The result is always disillusionment, because nothing involving people is simple.
Nothing in nature is simple, either.
Triangles, circles, and cubes seem simple because of their symmetries. They appeal to the simple-minded among us — which is 99% of the population, right? It might be 100% if mathematics and language are insufficient to understand ultimate reality.
Einstein had this theory that only mass and energy exist. They are equivalent; they are two sides of the same coin. Space and time are a consequence, not a cause.
Space-time was described by tensor-metrics, and the metrics show that space-time does not have to be flat.
Lines can be thought of as geodesics, which are “straight” only when the metrics of space-time are “flat”. When the metrics “curve” space-time (as they do near massive objects) parallel lines might be parallel in one place only, as lines of longitude on Earth are parallel in one place only — at the equator.
The laws of physics seem unlikely, because twenty or so constants in nature have been discovered that can’t be derived and seem to make no sense. All these constants have been revealed by experiments and seem to be irrational. One example is the constant “α” (alpha), which is discussed in the first link that follows this answer.
Stephen Hawking says that the odds of a universe configured like ours are 1E500 against, which is close to an infinity. But Stephen Wolfram says that at the heart of the universe is a simple algorithm. In his view the algorithm, should anyone ever discover it, will prove that our universe is the only configuration possible.
6 – What salary in the United States puts you in the top 10%, top 5%, top 2%, and top 1% in terms of salary?
All anyone needs to know about train-wreck America is that half of all black families live on less than $40K per year; half of all non-black families live on less than $75K per year. It’s hard to imagine that families can survive, let alone prevail, on so little income.
The USA is segregated by income and race. Poor people have no idea how easy life is for the wealthy; the wealthy don’t believe America has poverty.
I have five sons and one daughter. Only two of the six are in the top 1%. The most talented one, an assistant professor of kinetic art at a major university, is in the bottom half. His brothers give him money so he can get by.
7 – Modern humans appeared 200,000; civilization 10,000; and advanced technology 500 years ago. Why no advancement for something like 190,000 years?
Technology advances when survival demands it. Wars involving large populations did not become possible until about 3,000 years ago, because human populations were small.
Technology (to wage war) began to advance when population size increased; war technology percolated into the general population during peacetime.
70,000 years ago the human population collapsed to what some anthropologists believe was fewer than 4,000 individuals. The climb back took a long time because the world was in an ice age until 15,000 years ago or so. It has taken time to reach seven billion individuals.
The good news is that advances in technology and science are no longer driven by war, but by the preparation for war. Entertainment, comfort, convenience, and other factors drive inventors to bring clever technologies to peacetime populations.
Avoidance of war should become the highest priority of humankind from here on out, or we might suffer a catastrophic population collapse that would most certainly set back human development for hundreds of thousands of years.
Extinction is another possibility. At least two intelligent hominid species are known to have gone extinct during the past 200,000 years. There may be others.
Sorry for the short answer. The list of technologies and natural catastrophes that can annihilate homo sapiens is long. Click the following link to read about most of them.
8 – Should the USA build a competing Status-6 Oceanic Multipurpose System (Doomsday) Nuclear warhead?
Enough Pu239 has already been produced in weapons and processed from nuclear fuel rods to sterilize planet Earth of all life.
One country, Japan, has isolated 47 tons of Pu239 from fuel rods, is adding 8 tons per year, and has complained on NHK television that they don’t know what to do with it. Ten pounds is enough to make one atomic bomb.
Plutonium 239 is bomb making material. Japan has 94,000 pounds. It is producing 16,000 pounds per year. Twelve pounds makes one high-yield bomb.
The level of toxicity of Pu239 dust has recently become controversial. My understanding is the traditional one: the speck of brown dust that kills you, you will never see.
The half-life of Pu239 is 24,000 years. Risk studies (which include about a dozen hazards not related to plutonium) have shown that the chance that homo sapiens will survive a catastrophic population collapse during the next 24,000 years is less than one-in-a-million.
Humans cannot baby-sit all the plutonium that exists in facilities on every continent and keep life on earth safe from annihilation by contamination. The warheads and storage facilities are going to rot over time, and the earth will soak up the poisons left behind like vinegar in a sponge.
Doomsday is not a question of whether-or-not but of fast-or-slow. There is no upper limit to the size of a hydrogen bomb, so fast is doable. A rogue group with enough resources could construct a bomb powerful enough to obliterate Earth.
No one can undo the poisons that now exist, so slow is inevitable.
9 – What is the evolutionary reason that human beings are superficial and attracted to external appearances more than towards intrinsic qualities such as intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity?
My reading and life experience tell me that humans are attracted to symmetry.
There could be any number of reasons, but it is easy to argue that symmetry seems to create less stress in those who encounter it, which may make them more receptive (and less reluctant) to mate with those who have it.
Reduction of cognitive dissonance is a major driver of conscious-life; symmetry seems to reduce dissonance in sentient beings like humans.
Interest by humans in mathematics and art seems to confirm, at least to my mind, that folks are driven to imbibe “harmonies” and “patterns” in nature; these symmetries provide them with reassurance that the world is not hostile and that happiness and reduction of stress is possible in the face of accidents, disease, and predators.
Intelligence, character, integrity, honesty and virtuosity are qualities that are not easily perceived and can even be illusory. People are good at feigning all these qualities to manipulate others to satisfy their needs — especially their sexual appetites and their desire for power over others.
Symmetry is not easily disguised (or the lack of it, even with good grooming) and can be an indicator of good mental and physical health, because symmetrical (attractive) people tend to have higher status and are in general less traumatized by mistreatment (on average) than people who do not have this physical quality.
People may mate with high symmetry individuals and later discover than the intangible moral qualities that they value in a life-partner are missing. Such a discovery can lead to separation, but meanwhile offspring have been spawned who have high levels of symmetry, and the process of selection for this quality continues unabated into future generations.
Yes, I have no evidence that this conjecture is correct; it’s not my field, but it seems to be a factor in the world I find myself.
10 – How does Russia stay on par with the USA in many high-tech military systems when their GDP and military budget is so small by comparison? Shouldn’t we be light-years ahead of them by now?
USA military spending is deceptive and classified.
The United States has 800 bases inside 70 countries. It is at war with every country that doesn’t do what it’s told.
Since the end of WW2, the USA has attacked one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth. Depending on who counts, the USA has killed between 10 and 65 million people, most of them civilians. Injured people are uncountable.
The high casualty rates are due to the way it fights. The USA bombs the enemy to rubble, then moves in a few troops supported by large numbers of indigenous mercenaries to deny the rubble to the enemy.
Take two countries the size of the USA and put them side by side. The land area is less than Russia. Russia is huge. Its entire population is technically literate.
In the USA, only elites are educated. The vast majority of Americans are poorly trained, because public education is underfunded and neglected. Under the American system, education doesn’t generate profits for the wealthy, so they won’t support it.
Because America is segregated by race and income, it is difficult for visitors to get a sense of how poor the general population is. Wealthy Americans are in complete denial of the simple truth that their country is a train wreck for 75% of the people who live in it.
People with the money to travel don’t explore urban ghettos or rural wastelands. They don’t know things, nor do they want to know.
The USA has the world’s biggest and cruelest prison system for a reason.
Think about it.
Every country in the world, including Russia, is trying to avoid the wrath of the United States. They say nice things to us, so we won’t hurt them. They build as much deterrence as they can to avoid being attacked or embargoed.
11 – Has anyone considered leaving the USA because of the gun laws?
Anyone who has to carry a gun to feel safe is living in the wrong place. My recommendation is to move to safety ASAP.
The guns that many civilians own today inflict shattering injuries that no one who is shot can recover from. The slugs are high velocity and tumble. They are designed in non-conformance with the Geneva accords and are diabolical workarounds.
I would rather die myself than fire one of these weapons at another human being, no matter what they’ve done.
We have police and soldiers who are trained to inflict mayhem when necessary to protect civilians from human predation. Why not let them do their jobs while we civilians throw our war guns away?
Carrying a high-powered weapon into a wild area that is rife with people-eating predators might be a good idea under some circumstances. I don’t have a problem with defense-by-gun against wild animals who might be trying to kill for food or fun.
My recommendation is to travel in wild areas in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily encourage attack by dumb and innocent animals — because, can we face facts? — they don’t know any better.
Animals have a right to live in a natural way and not be provoked. People are smart enough to travel in the wild and avoid unnecessary contacts with carnivores.
12- What would happen to Hitler if he was captured today?
Well, I believe he would be released and featured in the next GOP presidential debates, win the Republican nomination, lose the popular vote by millions in the general election but win the electoral college, and become president.
As a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, he might do very well indeed.
I don’t think he would kill nearly a hundred million people like he did the last time around. It is more likely closer to two billion. But hey, that leaves five billion humans to abase themselves before him, so it would be worth it, right?
13 –Would you consider the USA a noble superpower when compared to other superpowers like Russia and China?
The billionaires who run the USA believe that private ownership is noble and that public ownership is ignoble. They are in a war against any form of socialism or collectivism.
Since the end of WW2, the wealthy have used the military power of the United States to attack one-fourth of the 195 countries on the earth to prevent a cascade of civilizations into communism. This war has, with a few exceptions, been enormously successful.
Today, they are fighting to consolidate their power. The billionaires of Russia, China, Israel, and the USA are dividing up the world like the New York City crime families of a few generations ago (watch the Godfather Trilogy or read the book by Mario Puzo).
Private ownership (called Capitalism) is a permutation of slavery that can be corrupting to democratic governance — as is obvious to any observer of U.S. history.
14 – How do you interpret human consciousness? Are you the center of the universe?
Consciousness is the fundamental and foundational principle of the universe. Conscious life plugs into this foundational consciousness in a way analogous to televisions plugging into a cable outlet. A television can be unplugged and replaced. But the cable programming continues. It is eternal. Consciousness is at the center of the universe. Conscious life is at the periphery.
15 – How would slavery have evolved in society if it was not seen as morally wrong?
“Capitalism” is the modern term for slavery. Owners of plantations, factories, and other businesses accrue the benefits of the plantation owners of former times.
Instead of providing slave quarters and food to their slaves, they pay a tiny stipend (called a minimum wage) to their laborers, which frees owners from the additional responsibility of caring for and protecting workers.
Putting the burden of housing, food, health care, and transportation on the backs of low-paid workers is called “freedom.”
The legal system disciplines unruly workers, while the state unemployment system helps dissatisfied owners replace those workers they believe are unfit.
For a small percentage of Americans, it’s a beautiful system.
Because the USA segregates workers both by race and income, most poor people don’t interact with the wealthy. This lack of contact between rich and poor reduces conflict and promotes peaceful living.
17 – Which among these countries is the best to live? Canada, USA or Australia? Why?
My question is, which country is the best place to live if you are poor? Most people are born poor.
If people go on living by being born again after they die, the odds that they will be born impoverished is high regardless of how well they lived in their prior life. That’s why its important to make the world a good place to live for impoverished people.
Does anyone seriously believe that they only live once? Consciousness continues somewhere, and it’s all there is, right? Absent conscious-life the universe can have no meaning.
I believe Cuba is the best place to live if you are poor, because it has a good climate and the government tries to provide services to ordinary people that are available only to the well-to-do in places like Canada, Australia, and the USA.
People might want to go to Cuba to find out how the poor live on that island. Then come back and observe how the poor live in their own countries.
The United States is segregated by income and wealth, so it’s hard to find poor people if you are rich, and if you are poor it is impossible to meet rich people.
18 – Trump wants to develop a lot of smaller, “tactical” nukes. Should the US use these against North Korea?
The USA bombed North Korea back to the Stone Age during the Korean War.
It killed an estimated two million civilians. The bombing was led by General Curtis LeMay of the Strategic Air Command who later partnered with George Wallace when he ran for president back in the 1960s and carried several states including Michigan (if I remember it right).
Wallace was a white supremacist. The Air Force’s own official historians have called LeMay’s bombing of North Korea the cruelest use of military power in world history.
This is the same General who destroyed 67 Japanese cities and burned their populations alive with napalm (fire-jelly) during WW2.
North Korea has done nothing to justify a military strike against its territory.
Nuclear weapons of any size or type should never be used in war, especially when there is nothing to be gained but the reputation for being a monster.
What does Korea have that we could possibly want? The answer is, nothing.
We have a choice to make: are we good or evil? Our destiny depends on how we answer that question.
19 – I am terrified of single-payer systems as implemented in socialist countries. Can this happen in the US? Was Obama trying to give everyone healthcare all along?
The USA is based on a slave system (now referred to as capitalism or free-market) where the owners of the plantations have doctors, which they share with their favorite house slaves. The field hands get nothing. The plantation owners are terrified that they might have to share their doctors with “unworthy” people should a slave revolt occur, so they have built the world’s most massive prison system to isolate slaves who might dare challenge the status quo.
In other words, people have to work for the right company and have the right job to get access to free health care. Very few do.
The system is so simple, a child can understand it.
Obama threw a wrench into the system by making it possible for people who work for the wrong companies (or who don’t work at all, for whatever reason) to buy access to health care for a reduced fee. Care is still expensive, but it’s not totally out of reach anymore for about three-quarters of the population.
In Cuba (for example) every neighborhood and apartment complex has a doctor assigned to it. What could be more effective than walking down the hall or across the street to be evaluated? If necessary folks are referred for further treatment to a hospital. Otherwise they get the meds they need, and that’s as complicated and inconvenient as it gets.
I grew up in a Navy family. We had free health care. If you got sick, you just drove to the base hospital and the doctors evaluated you. No paper work, no fees. It was a “single-payer” socialized system of medicine. It was better than what we have today as civilians except that protocols, equipment, and medicines are more effective today than they were sixty years ago when I was in that Navy system.
It’s hard for me to believe that this is a serious question by a serious person, but clueless people in the USA are subject to sophisticated behavioral modification protocols due to the immense amount of money that is involved in medicine and drugs, as well as guns, entertainment, food, and transportation.
So it isn’t surprising that people fear a lot of things that aren’t dangerous and are oblivious to dangers that are serious. It’s all about helping a relatively few families and cartels sequester the lion’s share of our nation’s resources.
Someday, maybe things will become more fair than they are now. I hope so.
20 – Why is it assumed that America invented slavery when slavery has been around for much of human history?
America practiced one of the cruelest forms of slavery. It is the only country in the western hemisphere where slave revolts were successfully suppressed.
Today, slavery has been renamed; it is called capitalism. In the USA, slaves are called workers and are free to live outside the gated communities of the wealthy. Workers are segregated by income to minimize the possibility of unrest.
The USA continues to prevent a successful slave revolt by maintaining the largest prison system by far that the world has ever known.
Two-thirds of white people came to America as slaves, called indentured servants. This practice started 150 years before the country became a constitutional republic and continued for many decades after. Indentured servitude was a seven year term of slavery that ended in freedom.
For Africans slavery was permanent. 100% of Africans came to America as slaves for life. There were notable exceptions. Billy Lee, George Washington’s slave and best friend, was set free when George Washington died; Billy Lee continued to live on GW’s Mount Vernon estate as a free man until his death.
22 – Is it true that until humans become one nation, we will never go further than Mars?
Organizing a human mission to Mars is expensive and dangerous. A coalition of nations might be able to manage the expense and risk.
Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, is planning a Mars mission. I haven’t heard how the company plans to finance it.
Mars has an iron-nickel core like the earth, but it froze solid many millions of years ago. The magnetic field collapsed, which permitted the solar wind to blow away most of the planet’s atmosphere.
Any biological life forms on or near its surface will have to withstand the stress of continuous, high-energy radiation and the bombardment by cosmic particles with the energy of baseballs.
Travel to planets or moons as far as Jupiter and beyond will take many years.
Unless humans are heavily sedated, it is doubtful that they will be able to endure a journey of several years in a cramped space vehicle. They will lose muscle mass and possibly their sanity — certainly their perspectives that help them maintain a sense of normalcy.
Successful functioning by humans on an alien moon or planet after a journey of several years might not be possible no matter who organizes the trip or what precautions are taken.
23 – To Christians: Which scientific claims are incompatible with your faith, and why?
Science confirms my faith, because it seems to be saying that reality is mind-boggling; the odds against a universe constructed like ours with its unusual forces and constants seems to be infinite.
Jesus came to save the ignorant and the despised of the world, which is pretty much everyone. He avoided the subject of science altogether, for good reason.
No reasonable person can believe that the universe started with the big bang of a singularity that then inflated rapidly to create the conditions for conscious life with enough intelligence to understand its origins. That’s cray-cray, but it’s how some astronomers explain the universe.
Even with all we know, the underlying reality of existence remains a complete mystery. If Jesus came to Earth today, would he talk science to humanity?
I seriously doubt it. I don’t believe humans are hard-wired to understand how the universe works or what reality is. We evolved in an unusually safe place and time in the universe and carry with us all the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that accompany our unlikely presence.
The Bible says plainly that one day people who have ridiculed God will be asked why they didn’t look up at the night sky and wonder why it is that they are so small and dark while the night sky is so large and bright.
How could serious people have missed such an important clue? How could anyone misunderstand their predicament and not concede the possibility that one day they might realize their hopes and dreams through the love of God who created, cares for, and protects them?
24 – Keeping the knowledge you have today, would you rather travel a thousand years into the future, or a thousand years into the past?
The risks to survival that faced individuals a thousand years ago far exceed the risks that people will face a thousand years from now—if humans survive another thousand years.
The counter-intuitive statistical reality is that the odds against species survival are actually higher than odds against survival of any individual human, should individual humans achieve viability during the next thousand years.
Most analysts of risk are suggesting that homo sapiens do not have much time left before extinction overwhelms them.
The geological record shows that at least two human-like species have already gone extinct. The particular species that thrives today (us) faces risks brought on by its technological expertise, which is certain to destroy it eventually.
I would choose to go forward in time, but I would do so with a great deal of fear knowing the old adage that curiosity kills the cat.
If everything turns out all right, the big question would be, how do uneducated, stupid people do in this new world?
Because uneducated and stupid is exactly what anyone will become who dares travel into a future one-thousand years more advanced than today.
25 – What are ways one can approach a complex idea that we don’t understand?
Complex ideas are of two kinds: ideas that one or more people understand but others don’t; and ideas which no one understands.
In the case where certain humans exist who understand a complex idea, the objective should be to learn what they know either by talking to them or reading what they have published. By this process, maybe folks can gather enough clues to guide them to further inquiries, which will lead eventually to understanding.
Many complex ideas require skills in certain subsets of knowledge like mathematics, languages, logic, philosophy, and the technical arts (such as metallurgy or whatnot) to make progress.
In the case where a complex idea can be demonstrated and stated but no one understands it (an example is “entanglement” in quantum physics), the approach is different. In these cases, it may not be possible to create a model of any kind in anyone’s mind to reduce the annoying dissonance that comes from not understanding.
People waste a lot of time — some go mad — trying to understand ideas no one understands or will ever understand. Most people seem to believe (in error, it seems to me) that everything can be understood if smart people work hard and are clever.
The idea, which I believe, is that complete understanding is not possible; it is a complex idea that no one understands, including me.
BONUS QUESTION 1 – In history, humans have fought and killed each other for every piece of land on the Earth. Why has the massive continent of Antarctica always been out of that conflict?
This absence of conflict may be coming to an end. A National Geographic reporter has been reporting on alarming developments in Antarctica over the past several years that the fake news has all but ignored.
BONUS QUESTION 2 – Why did mankind invent religion?
As far as I can tell, no records of an ancient civilization without religion have been discovered. I think that it is very scary to be suddenly aware that you exist and not know why — especially at night when wild animals roam freely, and the sky is full of lights that should not be there.
Editorial Board Recommendation: We are encouraging readers to visit Quora.com to read responses by Billy Lee (and others) to hundreds of questions asked by curious people from around the globe.
It’s un-American for the wealthy to leave fortunes to their children and grandchildren. It creates a caste system, which is what we fought a revolution to avoid. Under current tax policy anyone who dies can leave up to $5.5 million tax-free to relatives. Any excess above $5.5 million is taxed at 40%, generally speaking. It’s a bit more complicated, but taxation always is. Loopholes are important to rich people. They pay tax attorneys a lot of money to maintain their power and financial privileges.
Forty percent is not generous enough for people like our current president and his GOP associates. They want the “death tax” (as they derisively call it) eliminated. I’m arguing that the rate should be increased to 100%. Handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to spoiled brats is destroying the USA. A corrosive degeneracy is creeping into every sphere of the lives of the wealthy.
The billionaire who lived here died at age 82 from cancer in 2009.
It’s not like there is no precedent. It happened in ancient Rome. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon was required reading when I was a young man in the 1960s. Modern printing companies have consolidated the history into three volumes and into an abridged version of one.
Gibbon, an English historian, published his first volume in 1776, the birth-year of the USA. His six-volume masterpiece relied exclusively on original sources and, as the remaining five volumes flowed out over the following thirteen years, heavily influenced the builders of the American republic for seventy years beyond to the brink of the Civil War.
Gibbon disapproved of Catholicism and challenged its version of history and the role of martyrs. His history was controversial, which resulted in revisions that he continued to write until his death in 1794. His work remains controversial to this day for a number of reasons that aren’t going to be discussed in this essay.
Gibbon understood that cruelty and insensitivity in an entitled class of rulers contributed to Rome’s decline. When the barbarians walked into Rome, they were greeted as liberators by ordinary people. Rome fell like a rotting apple. Gibbon’s History was a warning to the future.
In modern-day America creative workarounds have enabled the wealthy to hand out to crazy relatives a lot of clout they didn’t earn. Yes, it’s difficult to stand up to mob bosses, crooks, and their families. It should be obvious that it’s impossible to accumulate billions of dollars legally, but many have. Behind every fortune is a dark secret — sometimes many secrets.
It’s true.
So much for freedom and equal opportunity. Freedom is easily lost to wealthy people who think that those who dare to challenge them are misguided misfits — lower and dumber than farm animals, in many cases.
Wealthy Grandpa, it turns out, had hundreds of legislators on his payroll, which bought him all the advantages of a modern-day emperor. His adult children — who haven’t done a darn thing but argue about which-of-them-should-get-what after Grandpa dies — seem to think that they deserve all the power and perks they didn’t work for and could never earn had they been born into the impoverished family whose mother got her start working in Grandpa’s sweat-shop.
Any American who has traveled outside their comfort zone has seen the poverty these children are experiencing. Is anyone doing anything about it? This family lives in a state that rejected the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act.
I like math, so let’s do some. Divide the Gross National Product (the GNP ($17.1 trillion) by the population (309 million). Use a calculator, anyone who can’t figure it out on their fingers (just kidding!).
If incomes were equally distributed in America, a family of four would earn $221,000 per year. Yes, I agree, it’s not a lot of money — some folks would really suffer trying to raise a family on so little — but try to understand that half of black families earn less than $35,000; half of white families earn less than $70,000.
We have a fairness problem in America that runs far and deep. It includes:
Segregation by race and income;
.
Unequal administration of legal protections and justice;
.
No access to health care for tens of millions (despite ObamaCare);
.
Discriminatory hiring, promotions, and firing based on race, political beliefs, and looks;
.
Defense by a mercenary military isolated from the general population — a major contributor to the collapse of the Roman Empire, according to Edward Gibbon);
.
Endemic corruption of politicians, church, civic, and business leaders.
Does anyone disagree with this list?
Go to Florida and try to find a safe place to live. Gated communities dominate the new housing markets. The majority of Americans don’t have enough money to gain access to this private world.
As for legal protections, anyone who has suffered arrest and spent time in custody knows that indigent people rot inside our jails, because they can’t afford bail or high-priced private attorneys. It’s a no-brainer.
Believe it or not, some of the incarcerated are innocent, but they are treated as guilty and forced to plea-bargain; many are unable to articulate a coherent defense. They end up with false criminal records that make staying out of future legal traps more difficult.
As for healthcare: Aided by the complicity of the Supreme Court, twenty-eight states refused to set-up health-care exchanges under ObamaCare. Twenty-one states (where five million low-income persons with no health care live) refused to expand access to the poor under Medicaid despite it being fully funded and paid for by the federal government.
Tens of millions of poor remain outside the care of our state and national health care system of hospitals, medical specialists, and general practice doctors. Wealthy GOP donors hope to destroy health care for the poor and lower-middle class with the help of our newest president, because they don’t want to finance medical aid for indigent people — despite all the privileges and protections that they accrue by forcing a myriad of taxes on middle income folks (like social security and sales taxes), which the wealthy avoid for the most part due to their immense incomes.
Also, many of the super-rich make their money in the stock market, where the capital gains tax rate places them in the lowest tier of tax-payers. It’s hard to believe, but it’s really true.
This scene reminds me of the oft-told Bible story about the day Moses returned from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments from God. He caught his people worshipping a golden calf. In this pic the calf is grey and the worshippers are white-supremacists. It’s Charlottesville, VA, Sunday August 13, 2017.
Has anyone ever wondered why so many of the racist, alt-right, neo-Nazi, white-supremacists are clean-cut, shaved, symmetrical, and well-dressed men?
A visitor from the Philippines who attends a weekly Bible-study with my wife said that after watching the Charlottesville riots, clean-cut white American men now scare her. The reason these Nazis look the way they do is obvious, of course. They have good jobs! Another reason is that they hide their nasty tattoos under expensive shirts, many of them.
Mega-millionaire business owners don’t hire people they feel they can’t trust. It’s that simple. Progressive, clear-headed men and women who care about fairness tend to dress and speak freely. They can be troublesome in a workplace, especially if they question unfair practices in pay, hiring, and promotions.
If you are wealthy and run a business, why would you ever hire anyone who thinks for themselves? Hire instead an ignoramus from the alt-right or the NRA. They follow their ideology like lemmings; discrimination against blacks, gays, women, and progressives doesn’t bother them.
Look at professional football, for an example. The billionaire owners of teams (many have the reputation of Neanderthals) hire players who have a PR (public relations) personality. Skill comes in second. Any high school coach in America could recruit a football team out of America’s prisons that could win a Super Bowl nine contests out of ten. Yes, their players would be poor and in some cases, inarticulate.
In America, talent on the field of sport doesn’t work that way. Compliance is a player’s highest virtue, then charisma (as evaluated by billionaire owners), then talent. Hard work? Anyone can be forced to work hard, and most do who aren’t born wealthy. Any thinking fan knows it’s true.
Let’s move on.
How come we don’t require people to fight for their country as a responsibility of citizenship? Everyone knows the reason. The wealthy don’t want to risk their kids in a potential combat where they might be wounded, maimed, or even killed.
In this photo from 2010, reservists are preparing for deployment to Iraq. They are dressed to protect themselves from chemical, biological, and nuclear attack.
And why should they? Hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids line up to sign-up for service “voluntarily”, because they need a job and, hopefully, an education they currently are unable to afford, even if they have a job. The military provides both, supposedly, but in recent years cut backs in benefits for non-officers have been enacted, because, once again, the wealthy don’t want to put up the money.
We hire a lot of kids from other countries to serve our military, both as “contractors” and as a “path to citizenship”. In conflict zones, like Afghanistan, the majority of soldiers on “our side” are foreign nationals. It’s the fastest route to failure according to Gibbon. Read his history, those who don’t believe it.
Many kids won’t re-enlist after their first tour. Military service, despite all the ads on TV, is a tour into hell for many of them. Living far from home and being under 24/7 control by officers who can throw anyone in the brig without trial for any reason is too much stress for most people.
The wealthy continue to degrade the benefits of service for the disadvantaged despite the fact that without a military to protect them, the wealthy could not hang onto their privileges. Common, everyday people are not as blind as the self-serving narcissists who refuse to do heavy-lifting, even as they order drones and the young alike into the killing zones of battle.
Moving to number six on the list — endemic corruption — let me ask this question. Is it honest to accept money for political favors? Just asking. Enough said. I’m not going to waste your time or mine discussing the obvious. An encyclopedia could be written about the history of corruption in the United States. At least one volume could be devoted to corruption during the twenty-first century, a short period of seventeen years.
Hillary Clinton warned America about the current president, but few believed her.
The most honest man in the FBI, James Comey, helped the Russians wreck our last presidential election by responding to fake news reports planted by Russian agents. Comey behaved like Inspector Javert in the Victor Hugo novel, Les Miserables. He pursued the Democratic nominee relentlessly during her campaign.
Comey grabbed Hillary by the jugular in the final week by reopening a closed investigation; by holding a news conference to smear what little reputation and dignity she retained. He undercut Hillary Clinton in the final week of the 2016 presidential election. Comey tore up the trajectory of the nation’s history in ways that won’t sit well with future generations.
Corruption disguised as virtue is vice. Any idiot can figure it out. And now our country is paying the price. We elected an unqualified buffoon to be our president. We hope against hope that someday he will change. Maybe someday he will.
Who knows?
Let someone else write about graft; about dishonesty; slander; lies; corruption. I haven’t got the energy. Who wants to risk death by lunatics for writing what everybody already knows to be true?
I don’t.
My general statement is this: the United States is hiding behind a pack of lies about its past, present, and future. It’s not so easy to tell the truth to people when large numbers of them start to read your stuff.
Fortunately for me, few people see my essays. Yes, I’ve been threatened, but thus far the threats have been manageable.
I don’t know what the solution is. I do know that our current president is making a bad situation worse and less safe for average people. Character is destiny, some say, and I believe it. The president lies and slimes and slanders pretty much everyone except sycophants. He plays the bad boy on an almost daily basis. It’s not going to end well for him or us, if we refuse to do what’s right.
We are so screwed. Read my essay, RISK, those who don’t believe it.
Risk has little to do with who is president, but admittedly some presidents increase risk. The verdict is still out on our current president.
I heard Elon Musk say that our country is like an aircraft carrier with a small rudder. The president sits by the rudder — it’s about a foot wide and three feet tall — and tries to steer the carrier to the right. By the end of his term, the carrier will not have turned much. However, its forward momentum is unstoppable. Are we headed toward the correct horizon? Does anyone know for sure?
It’s not good, peeps, what’s about to come. My advice is to take things a bit more seriously and prepare as best as anyone can for the problems that always arise from boorish leadership and its hostility toward minorities, the impoverished, and the disadvantaged.
During his Thursday April 20th sports-talk television show, The Herd, Colin Cowherd asked a question he couldn’t answer. The question bothered him, he said. It puzzled him to the point that he asked viewers to message him with their perspectives; he felt discomfort not knowing. Something wasn’t making sense.
He said that he had spent time thinking about why it is that no matter what anyone does to bring about parity in sports or in life, nothing seems to work.
Despite rule changes and new regulations designed to do the opposite, good teams emerge that always seem to dominate their leagues season after season; great players leave the mediocre in the dust; even the gap between the rich and poor in society seems to be accelerating — despite safety-nets such as the Affordable Care Act, whichhave become pervasive and more accessible than ever before, at least in the United States.
Colin Cowherd is an outspoken sports commentator and media personality who recently signed with Fox Sports 1 to host a number of popular radio and television shows. He has published two books: You Herd Me and RAW.
Nothing works. The rich get richer faster than the poor; the talented become more talented; performance gaps become more pronounced; inequality increases. Nothing anyone does anywhere ever changes anything. Inequality persists and intensifies.
The Bible quotes Jesus to have said, The poor will always be with you. For some conservative Christians, that statement alone seems to make equality a hopeless aspiration; fairness will always be just out of reach. It’s pointless to try to organize government to address an unfixable problem.
It’s true that Jesus added, You can help the poor anytime you want, but most folks understand that it just isn’t going to happen. It never has in the past — not consistently.
People, many of them, simply don’t care. It seems like the more wealth a person has, the less they care about the poor and the ruined. Providing parity to teams, countries, and ordinary people who are challenged by adversity seems to be an impossible endeavor; a pipe-dream of weak-kneed liberals who lack common-sense.
But why? And is Colin right? Is it true? Are hearts as hard as Jesus implied; are people so cold, so ruthless, that no one has the will to make parity work; to make life a fairer process for everyone who lives it?
Is parity in sports and in life a fool’s goal? Is the situation hopeless for the vast majority of people who find themselves living in squalor, in ill-health, and in hopeless despair? Does anyone care enough to search for an answer? — if they find it, is anyone strong enough to set things right?
Well, I have an answer. I do. The problem is that I’m weak; I’m an anonymous blogger; I pontificate in a pile that is 7.4 billion humans high.
Most don’t blog. Most don’t own iPhones or computers. It doesn’t matter. The pile is a teeming mass of screamers. Only a few voices at the very top of the pile are ever heard by the crush of misery that groans beneath their weight.
I live somewhere very deep in that mass of misery. I broadcast from inside the pile.
No one in the pile cares what anyone thinks or even what the facts are. The top of the pile is covered by a slime of celebrities whose value is that they mollify the mess beneath them; they entertain and distract; they bring a flicker of pleasure to a miserable landfill of very uncomfortable humans who have no more chance of being heard or noticed than do sea mollusks dying in the Mariana Trench on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.
This layer of celebrity slime is green because it lives closest to the sun. The dark mud of humanity that nourishes it lies beneath; the mud never sees the sun; many in the pile don’t believe the sun exists. During their lifetimes, they will never see it; they will never know anyone who lives green under a warm sun and gentle breeze. For them, the top of the pile is an unknowable, unreachable destiny; an incomprehensible fantasy.
The rewards for being clever are astronomical. There are no limits. The clever can hide behind walls and gates — beneath radio-frequency shielded domes of invisibility, hidden from the eyes of GPS and governmental surveillance. They live on the best land, in the best climates, among the most exclusive people; they dress well; they flash beautiful teeth, skin, and hair; they possess the most exquisite material possessions — luxury homes, cars, planes, boats, and art.
The last thing the green-slime people on the top of the pile want is to share their space with the organic mud that holds them up; that supports them; that pays them homage. It’s the very last thing they want.
Right now elites are reasserting their control over the entire earth. Billionaires are taking control of governments around the world and securing their advantages at a frenetic pace. Any idea of governance that even hints at equality, of parity, or fairness — any idea of sharing advantages — is ridiculed, suppressed, and ignored.
Old political ideas designed to bring fairness, like socialism, are laughed out of consideration. Simple solutions, like progressive tax policies and estate size limits, are never mentioned.
Only morons and losers would ever espouse something as unworkable as parity; it’s as unfair to the worthy-wealthy as equality, right? Billionaires control media and education. They teach the pile, they mold and shape it, and the pile learns.
What do the mud people learn? The sun is out of reach; it’s not attainable; forget about it. Get on with life and forget, forget, forget. Hang your head, mud person; shuffle your feet, look down, not up. Ignore the obvious. Give up. Surrender to the weight of the pile above you.
Sleep. Doze. Ooze. Despair. In this life, abandon all hope, all who live in the pile. Go blind. No one above is going to reach down to help. Love is cold. Hope is dead. Forget what you think you know about what life should be. Give up on what you think is right. It’s not going to happen. Not in this life; not ever.
John D Rockefeller, 1839-1937. Portrait is a section from the John Singer Sargent painting of 1917.
Capitalism is just a modern word for slavery — surely everyone must know by now that it’s true. So is Oligarchy. So is Republic. So is any system anyone can name that codifies privilege and denigrates any form of compulsory sharing. Because — can we face unpleasant facts? — the wealthy don’t share well.
Old man Rockefeller used to throw dimes to the kids who chased his Model T down the streets of New York City. That’s not sharing. It’s nothing more than throwing peanuts to monkeys at the zoo.
Billionaires don’t share well. Not really. It’s why they are billionaires.
Those of us who live in the pile are slaves. Who will admit it? Who can bear the shame of humiliation that crushes anyone who finally understands that the green slime is pushing them down. It ruins them; it sucks them dry; its roots grind like jackboots against their heads to keep the slime on top; to keep itself green, to keep itself in the light of the sun, which it worships like a god.
I don’t know much about professional sports, but I know about salary caps. The billionaire owners of teams have no qualms about limiting the amount that teams spend on their players. It has the effect of limiting what players can earn, while doing nothing to prevent team owners from squeezing as much money as their greed and clever machinations will allow.
No limits, no caps on owners. OK… agreed. On players? Of course not! Caps are for everyone; everyone who lives in the mud pile, anyway. Pro athletes might not believe it, but they find out soon enough — after a career-ending injury, retirement, or replacement by a more talented player. They too live in the pile.
The pile is a vertical column of filth that — if only it could be flattened like a pancake — would provide a huge surface of exposure to a greening sun; a sun that will shine parity and hope and pleasure into the lives of the vast swarm of suffering humanity, which desperately deserves to experience good things.
It’s possible that people have one shot at life. Admit that it’s possible. This life could be all there is. This could be it. When it’s over, it’s over. The end comes quickly.
The wealthy won’t live among the poor. They won’t fix any injustice unless the pile becomes restless; unless it shakes like an earthquake, nothing changes. The green slime believes it will live forever, that the sun will keep it alive, but in the end mud and slime share the same fate — certain death.
Then again, maybe people live more than once; maybe they live twice. It might improve the odds that life will be better the second time around if people reshape the pile.
Forge the pile into a shape more favorable to the majority of folks who will live in it or perhaps on it, someday. Make it better all around for the people who will come later, who might be — can anyone imagine it? — ourselves. Does anyone know anything at all about their own future for sure?
I believe that limits to income, estate sizes, and inheritances are the only effective way to flatten the pile and expose more people to the pleasures of life, which our creeds assert are these: every individual has a God given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Success by any reasonable measure is making $20 million per year; not a dollar more. Success is accumulating $500 million; not a dollar more. No one should ever be permitted to inherit more than $5 million during their lifetime.
Caps like these encourage both innovation and the sharing of advantages. They force the successful to invest their excessive wealth in the lives of their employees, their communities, and their governments — federal, state, and local. Why? Because they can’t keep the excess. Caps prevent individuals like our current president, for example, from seizing power, because his enormous and unbalanced financial advantages made his presidential run unstoppable.
One more way to bring parity and fairness to real people: make segregation a felony. America segregates itself by both race and income. I can’t think of a more vile way to live.
Outlaw gated communities. All neighborhoods, all housing, all apartments must be compelled to provide living spaces for people from all income groups; from all ethnic and racial backgrounds. The problems we have understanding one another and living peacefully have the best chance of being solved for the well-being of everyone, including the wealthy, when people of all backgrounds live together, interact with one another, and share their unique understanding and experiences of life.
One more thing, and it’s important. The minimum income should be no less than one-thousandth of the maximum income. It means that no person, working or not, makes less than $20K per year. Businesses will have to pay higher wages to encourage people to work; that’s a good thing.
Oh yes, I almost forgot. Free health care can remove a lot of stress from a population. We can provide it, if we lower the salaries of doctors and health-care administrators. It’s counter-intuitive but lower salaries will, over time, attract better doctors and more patient-centered administrators. People who want to be rich can work in other professions. Why not?
Have I answered Mr. Cowherd’s question? Maybe not. Not yet. The dynamics of groups is complicated. It’s much easier to evaluate talent in individuals and distribute it more or less evenly into groups or teams.
It’s impossible to know in advance which players will become force multipliers on any given team. Where does the personal chemistry lie that can be identified and measured; that can transform a pack of randomly selected players into world champions?
If the owners knew, they could find it and use what they learn to create parity, where any given team has a 50/50 chance to defeat any other team on any given day.
How many times have winning coaches traded away a seemingly less talented player only to stand by helplessly as their team suffers melt-down? It happens a lot — more than some people might think. Sometimes a great player on a losing team is benched due to injury. Mysteriously, the team starts winning games.
Too many unknowns and variables make the task of predicting team performance based on individual performance evaluations impossible. When people run in packs like wolves, success or failure in the hunt can depend on the interplay among alphas, betas, gammas, and only God knows what other variables. It’s not easy.
People are not equal. It’s true. Teams are even more unequal no matter what anyone tries to do to strike that balance and get parity right.
But I want to make a larger point, which involves society and how people are punished and rewarded. Isn’t it obvious that less capable people are happier and more productive when they aren’t mistreated and humiliated?
Does any reasonable person mistreat their dogs and cats because they can’t spell their names or perform basic addition and subtraction? I don’t think so. Does anyone deny their pets health care, good food, and a comfortable place to live? They don’t.
Ayn Rand (1905-1982) wrote the classic novel Atlas Shrugged, which portrays fictional inventors and industrialists as Christ figures.
Most billionaires won’t give the time of day to regular folks. They are predators, every one of them. They know it. They want to think well of themselves but being pigs means that they must work hard, many of them, to convince themselves otherwise. Many find hope in the books of Ayn Rand who preached when she was alive that selfishness is the highest virtue of humankind.
I hope that someday it will be a felony for an individual to possess a billion dollars — in the same way that possessing pain-killing narcotics can lead to the incarceration ofLes Misérables.
I pray that someday life will change. People will learn to love others and share. Does anyone believe it is possible?
If the United States divested the wealth of the 100,000 wealthiest Americans but allowed divested persons to keep one million dollars to sustain themselves, what could it do with the money?
The question deserves an answer.
The answer may surprise people. Some say the United States could completely pay off the national debt of 17.4 trillion dollars and run the government at current spending levels (5.6 trillion dollars per year) for the next five years. Taxes on everyone, including the wealthy could be completely eliminated for half a decade — until 2020.
Tools of a typical tax accountant: calculator; complicated forms; toy blocks.
As a practical matter, the United States can’t divest 100,000 of its wealthiest citizens — not without crashing the economy. And, sadly, information about wealth and its distribution is frustratingly opaque. Economists can’t trust what they think they know.
Nevertheless, the United States can put in place tax policies that lift the burdens of filing and paying taxes from the backs of the vast majority of citizens. It can easily pay for things like education, health care, research, and retirement while stimulating economic investment and growth. And it can protect our freedoms and egalitarian way of life from individuals who have sequestered an unreasonable share of our resources. (Read Capitalism and Income Inequality elsewhere on this site.)
This is the visible hand.
The wealthy, and those who support them, tell us that the closer a civilization resembles the natural order of things — that is, a state with the least amount of government possible — the better off that civilization will be. The invisible hand of free markets will enhance the destinies of all. Free markets, fewer taxes, fewer regulations — policies like these take the brakes off the economy and improve everyone’s lives.
Since we all plan to be wealthy someday, what could possibly be wrong with reasoning like that?
Bullies rule on unregulated playgrounds.
Well, for one thing, it ignores why folks create civilizations in the first place. In the eons before civilization, humans made little progress. Think of an unregulated school yard or imagine a jungle with no rules. What always happens? Bullies and predators end up running everything. The meek and the fragile have to hide or be eaten. Whatever ideas or contributions they might make to enhance the quality of life get lost.
It’s been like this in jungles and on playgrounds for as long as jungles and playgrounds have existed. It’s never going to change. It’s why folks need playground teachers and yes, civilization. With civilization we can organize ourselves. We can make rules to protect the weak and improve the lives of both predators and prey.
We know from history, it’s the powerful who create civilizations to protect their advantages. For thousands of years bullies in expensive garb have run the show on every continent on Earth.
Our nation’s founders said that all people were created equal before God.
Two-hundred-and-forty years ago something new came along. Our ancestors won a revolution. They organized a civilization that would eventually empower the powerless and give voice to the weak.
Yes, they codified slavery, because what else could they do? Africans had been slaves in America for a hundred years already. For a hundred-and-fifty years two-thirds of whites had come to America as indentured servants, a temporary form of slavery that ended, typically, after seven years of servitude.
The habits of history weighed heavily on our founders, and being unsure of their steps, they gave-in to the pressures of greed to better form the consensus that would permit the birth of something new in the world. And guess what? Our new-born civilization grew up, matured and ninety years later ended slavery in the United States of America.
Earth needed a new way — a way based on the dignity of people, their rights before God, their need to be free from humiliation by others more powerful and crafty than themselves. They needed a new kind of civilization, and our founders found a way to build it, blemished and imperfect as it was.
It took time; it didn’t happen overnight. I was twenty years old before black folks got the right to shop freely; to buy a soda in a drugstore; to buy a house; to get a loan. Maybe two-hundred years seems like a long time for a constitutional republic to get serious about freedom for individuals and families. It is a long time. We might as well admit it.
The flag should stand for what is right, just, and fair. It is the symbol of our civilization.
Today, as the civilization we built slides into the shadows of an unregulated jungle, people need to stand up and shout, No! This can’t be right. In a civilization built by hundreds of millions, we can’t let a few thousand of the most clever humans sequester twenty-five percent of the wealth. It’s an unreasonable reward for cleverness, and it’s unfair.
Why did our ancestors build the civilization we call America? Why did they take hundreds of years to shape and change our way of governance?
It’s because they intended to make America succeed for everybody. I’d like to believe that they didn’t want it looted and plundered by the powerful. They didn’t intend for average people to be “gated” out of the desirable places to live, or for the disadvantaged poor to be locked away to rot deep inside our inner cities.
We still have work to do. The work falls on each generation to make the world a fairer, safer, more loving place for every person who lives and breathes.
Thomas Piketty was an instructor of economics at MIT during the 1990s; he is the founder, Paris School of Economics; Director, Department of Social Sciences, Ecole Normale Supérieure; and Director of Studies, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
Fortunately, America has allies around the world ready and able to help do what’s right, if we only listen. One is Thomas Piketty, the French economist.
I’m excited about this book. Many reviewers say it’s important. It is the culmination of years of research by a brilliant scholar. It presents, I’m told, a paradigm shift in thinking about the problems economies have delivering fairness to average people.
If Piketty’s book strengthens the courage of economists in the United States to speak openly about the touchy subject of inequality, he will have done our country and its people an enormous favor.
Gold jewelry and coins held in an overseas bank.
The United States, though proud of its wealth, seems to go to great lengths to under-report it. It’s primary focus is to collect taxes, I guess.
Assets not subject to taxation hold little interest for government accountants. The Feds limit their count to households and tell us that our total wealth is 54 trillion dollars. Other economists say it is higher — maybe as much as 188 trillion; they include in their tally many assets not normally taxed.
The subject of how wealthy America really is — who holds the wealth and in what amounts — is murky at best. According to John Cassidy, Thomas Piketty’s call for households to declare their net worth and be taxed on it will provide the reliable statistics needed to un-muddy the waters and enable policy makers to fashion the sound and fair tax policies required to protect the benefits of civilization for everyone.
Billy Lee
Post Script:Billy Lee advocates for a standard of maximum personal-incomes and estate-sizes established by the United Nations as ratios pegged to each country’s minimum wage. Violations would be treated as felonies by international courts.
Billy Lee’s proposal and some of its economic and moral advantages are described in the article, Capitalism and Income Inequality. The Editorial Board
