Noblesse oblige

Thom Hartmann nails it yet again.

The right, particularly in the States, likes to whine that taxes are an unfair imposition on their earnings, that they should be allowed to keep what they have gained.

They ignore that they did the gaining through the mechanism of everyone else, in a world we all pay to maintain, with colleagues we educated, in businesses we often funded the startups of and supported, in an infrastructure we paid for. They forget that their taxes pay for their military, without which they could not enjoy the foreign adventurism that has led them to believe that their nation is the "greatest".

They like to imagine that their taxes are unfairly paying for welfare mothers and widows: the former should not exist because they are an affront to the institution of matrimony; the latter should simply starve if they were not fortunate enough to have been wealthy.

Corporations, it is often said, should not be taxed heavily because they "create wealth". Well yes, they do. That's their purpose. But forgive us if we do not see why exactly creating wealth for a privileged few is in itself a good thing. When we see the disparity between rich and poor grow, and full-time jobs become casualised partwork with the same wages but none of the residual benefits (so that they are in effect lesser paid), and our schools and hospitals are in crisis because our governments, having slashed corporate tax, do not have the revenue to fund them at the increased rate they need, we might ask whether "creating wealth"
is actually something that is good for us.

Hartmann says:

We are quickly shifting toward a corporate-run state in countries all over the world. It appears "free" and even allows elections, albeit they are only among candidates funded and approved by corporate powers, held on voting machines owned by those corporate powers, and marketed in media owned by those corporate powers.

We do not own our nations. That was the promise of democracy, the promise of America. That the government should be for the people and precisely that it should not be for the rich.

When the governments of the west rid themselves of the higher rates of progressive taxation, they told us that they did so because high rates were a disincentive to wealth creation. So now the executives of corporations take decisions that are almost solely in the interests of increasing their salaries (through the bonuses and stock options they accrue) and are very rarely in the public interest. (As an aside, rightists might consider this: they claim that wealthier companies create more jobs. Well, it's true that Exxon hired a thousand new engineers last year. Is that a good return on $25 billion? If the increases in profits brought by "outsourcing" your job are pocketed by your CEO, how exactly have you benefited? If casualising your job saves $20,000 in benefits, do you think that the company rushes out and spends that twenty grand on hiring an apprentice, so that there will be a skilled workforce in the future. (Well no. They rely on the government to train the workforce for them. Sometimes it's the gov't of India they rely on.)

We are not materially wealthier than we were 30 years ago. Does it strike you that back then a man could keep a whole family on one wage? Now families must almost put their children up chimneys. We have more goods (yes, competition in industry increases efficiency, so that there are found newer ways to make washing machines cheaper -- usually by getting Malaysians to do it for peanuts) and this tends to make us feel more comfortable.

The right needs to be told that they did not "earn" it. They are part of a broader society and the latter did the earning. They are fortunate that they are part of it and can benefit from it. If they are educated they barely even have to work to get it. I certainly wouldn't consider what I do to be half the work that the guys I can hear fixing up my neighbour's house do (although, to be fair, they spend a great deal of time talking about what they are going to do rather than actually doing it). If they are executives, they can spend their days in meetings, chatting, while others beaver away, making them rich.

They did not earn it. We earned it together. And it's ours to share out as we see fit. We should remind them of that and begin our reclamation of our nations by taking more, much more, of the cream that they have been skimming off for far too long.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:35 am