What Makes the Muskrat guard his Musk?
from two and-a-half years ago and unpublished, but still relevant; unsurprisingly
What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk?
The real big question, the one that doesn’t get answered, even when asked by someone with the spunk to ask, like the Senator from Massachusetts that Elon, one of the premier trolls of the Twitterverse, has taken gratuitously to calling “Senator Karen” and comparing her, disparagingly, to the ineffectual harpies of his childhood he remembers hectoring children for, according to him, no apparent reason, is what exactly justifies the tax code as it has now evolved.
Is it fair and equitable that people the stature of you and me, decidedly nowhere near that of Musk and his fellow billionaires – the preponderance of whom protect their grotesquely large fortunes by letting them sit in the form of holdings that, as long as they are not made liquid are not taxed… just like us with our picayune paper net worth – pay exactly the same taxes in terms of percentage of the proceeds of selling any equity that they do? Which is to say, though the gross sums are laughingly lopsided in comparison, and they do pay a large amount of money, whereas we pay enough to hurt a bit, but only a little, and yet, and yet… the sums they turn into filthy lucre, whether for house lots on Mars, or self-indulgence of some other form, are far in excess of what any individual can spend on oneself, in many multiples of what is necessary to keep oneself fit and healthy and safe and extremely well cared for, by whatever measure. And of course, the preponderance of any total amount of personal worth is left untouched, only to “grow” by virtue of laws governing other parts of the tax code, and almost all of the code affecting business practice. The laws do nothing, of course, to alter the lives and destinies of that percentage of the U.S. population (never mind the world’s) that still lives in poverty – however you measure it.
Or should the laws be adjusted so that the very rich – the concept of which has altered, perhaps irrevocably, since the days of the Robber Barons and altogether what came to be called, at the time, it was so blatant and distracting a phenomenon, the Gilded Age – pay an increasingly higher share of their gain in wealth, or pay a fixed percentage of the totality of their worth each year, or whatever other of a significant number of proposed adjustments to the tax code are churned out regularly by those interested in balancing what anyone conscious and cogent, beyond the earnestly, determinedly, and deliberately clueless observer, would call the inequities of wealth?
And that only touches on one question.
The others I have are questions regarding the uses of all that excessive wealth, which gets spent in growing amounts without diminishing. This happens with not quite miracles, but with the wonderfully ingenious mathematics that allow it, by enshrining that math into law, which never gets altered, all to buttress the fiscal immunity it affords the fraction of a percent of our population that holds nearly half our wealth as a nation.
It’s no doubt that for but a very few, Congress has long since been a manifestation of the principle of bought and paid for… And not a small amount of that because, again I’ll use the word, egregious amounts are spent by the likes of all classes of the obscenely rich, on the left and on the right, to ensure that legislators do nothing, by any calculus, to radically reduce poverty, to rectify inequities, to equalize risks, and to reduce the cost to the individual so that person’s wellbeing is not imperiled. And I’m not even talking about the inability of Congress to pass laws that protect the climate, the environment more broadly, the rights of individuals as citizens and as humans.
The struggle to ensure the means of “escaping” to Mars if need be (and yet, by whose determination?) is escapist and puerile, as far as I can see, seen in the larger scope of the real problems faced by the inhabitants of a planet that in less than 30 years is projected to number in excess of 10 billion souls. And I haven’t heard about Musk spending a plugged nickel to help ensure that laws that protect humanity and human rights stay in force and are reinforced. Now that would be a speculative fiction I’d like to see made real.
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