No, we don't have value added taxes here, as far as I know.

Employers and employees here both pay social security taxes (Federal Insurance Contributions Act); corporations and employees pay income taxes (to the Fed, State, and sometimes local government), which are all deducted by the employer and turned over to the appropriate processing agency (quarterly, I believe). Sales taxes are levied by the state and county, at different rates. Then there are property taxes which largely support county and city government, and schools. So, it's a lot of taxes. Sales taxes are quite selective. Food, clothing, Rx, and services are generally excluded. Interest on savings accounts is taxable too, the same as other income (for individuals, anyway). Property taxes are payable in installments or in a lump sum.

Tim Wood suggested a 40% rate. If I remember correctly, 30% to 40% of gross income is what I paid for all taxes when I was working, rolling up all taxes together, so 40% isn't bad as an upward starting figure.

Yes, some taxes do hit the tax payer twice. Maybe quite a few do. I really resented counting interest on savings as income (back when interest rates were worth thinking about). The savings came from wages; which had already been taxed. Bad policy, it seemed to me, discouraging saving.

Some people say the individual tax payer ends up paying for most of the governments' requirements, because wage payers (businesses) reduce wages to help cover their own costs of taxation. I don't know how well that works out in actuality. Theoretically, if corporations were not taxed, they would pay higher wages. (I doubt it would work that way in actuality.)

A sales tax, which can be targeted and vary with different products, seems rational to me, but why collect it at the check out? Why not back up 1 step and charge a tax on merchandise up-stream from retail? Tax it, for instance, at the point of wholesale purchase by the seller. Fewer transactions to monitor, that way.

Services need to be included as taxable, though these again can be targeted and can vary.

At least in most US states, gambling winnings are very taxable. It's hard to nail down winnings from back room games. Personally, I don't like gambling. I'm not psychologically suited. I can't play tic tac toe without a certain amount of anxiety. Gambling needs to be more widely recognized as a disease, too. Not for everyone, but a lot of gamblers are compulsive and can't stop until they've spent every last dime they've got.

VAT?

One solution would be to compel holders of huge wealth to invest their capital in productive activities (and not in currency or like trading) or have it fall to a heavy tax on very big idle money. A percentage could be allocated to municipal bonds for infrastructure (cities, counties, states); another percentage could be allocated to very small entrepreneurs through vehicles similar to the Grameen Banks. Percentages could be allocated to large projects in developing countries (water works in India, Africa; resettling island nations facing inundation by rising seas; flood protection, resettling in Bangladesh and other low-lying countries; reforestation of tropical and northern rain forests, and the like. 25 billion allocated to NGO activities in birth control, vaccination drives in polio, DPT, measles, etc. would be very helpful.

The thing would be to lose a big chunk of it to taxation or lose a big chunk through useful investment and outright donation. A lot of activities in South America, Africa, and south Asia especially need funding. The middle east needs to address water shortages, for instance, as well as food production and environmental problems.

Whatever the adjustments are needed for global warming are and will be expensive. That's another area where money can be donated or invested.

Money obtained by nations by taxing these huge cash and asset stores should likewise be used for things like paying down national debt--not for defense, not for tax rebates, and the like. These windfalls of tax or forced spending may not be repeated, so they should be used for exceptional purposes.

So let's say I take up service for humanitarian causes as the meaning of life(this is the only thing I've found to be relatively meaningful than other stuff) , but by the logic of point a.) even that is meaningless. No matter what I do, but in the grand scheme of things,it's all going down. So why bother? — krishnamurti

I would say "life is meaningless" by which I mean: The universe does not provide a ready-made meaning. I also don't mean that we start at Square One when we start to think about meaning: People have been devising meaning for a long time, and some of that is available to us in our cultures.

So yes, each of us has to devise an answer to the question. We can

a) accept a meaning-of-life that already exists, as it stands, lock stock and barrel.
b) modify a meaning-of-life that already exists.
c) devise a meaning-of-life based on what you have observed, read, heard, and thought
d) accept the view that there is no meaning to life
e) keep yourself busy and just don't think about it

a = the religious option. Religions are complex constructions of meaning. Various religions suit the desires of billions of people for a meaning of life.

b = the religious heretic option. The meaning a given religion provides can be adapted for our personal needs. That might make you a heretic in the eyes of the orthodox, but as long as they don't burn people at the stake, that's OK.

c = is the hardest route. Construct a meaning of life for yourself out of your own experiences, so far.

d = the route of least resistance. Accepting a no-meaning view doesn't mean that you embrace lawlessness, suicide, joylessness, or anything else. It just means that you don't hold the view that life has some pre-ordained meaning. You can be a happy, loving and loved, joyful person or a miserable, solitary person as it suits you. In other words, the quality of your life doesn't have anything to do with whether life has a meaning.

e = a very common approach.

Follow the way that works for you. One is not better than another IF it suits you.

I used to believe that the meaning of life was provided by God. I don't believe that anymore. Now I think life probably has no ready-made meaning. However, there are activities in life that are much more meaningful than other activities. You find humanitarian causes to be meaningful. Great! Keep at it. Personally, I found most jobs (with 2 or 3 exceptions) to be pretty meaningless. That makes sense. There is a reason they have to pay people to work. I found meaning in relationships with other people (and dogs, truth be told) books, and music.

Welcome to The #1 Philosophy Forum on the Internet.

... facts are always contestable — Banno

Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are entitled to their own opinions; they are not entitled to their own facts. Per Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

the division of joint assets. ... Haven't felt so alive in a while. — Posty McPostface

Nothing like a division of assets to get the juices flowing.

Why do you consider money to be wealth? Money is a fictive commodity, that's useful just to facilitate trade. It has no use in and of itself. — Agustino

Please send me all of your fictive commodity (bank transfers are convenient) as it uselessly accumulates at AguCorp.

the 1% — Agustino

The problem with a small number of people owning the bulk of wealth (in the United States, in any economic group, or the world) is that they monopolize capital. They tend to sit on it. Consider Apple's $250 billion dollar savings account. It's been growing steadily over the last several years. What good is it doing?

The absurdly rich population can't put their extraordinary large share of wealth to productive use at the level where it would really make a huge difference (among the entrepreneurs at the bottom third of the economic distribution, give or take a billion people). They can't because the task of investing in a billion small entrepreneurs would exhaust their time-and-organizational resources.

Piketty's insight--that wealth grows faster than economic output, thus concentrating capital (and the income it produces) in ever-fewer hands--is at the root of problem. As you know wealth isn't like air -- it doesn't distribute itself to find equilibrium. It's more like cat hair -- it tends to stick to people. So, a relative handful of people -- say, 10,000 -- are sitting on more wealth than 60% of the world's population.

They can't distribute their trillions of dollars. Andrew Carnegie found that giving money away was very time consuming; he established foundations to help manage this task -- they are still giving his money away. He built libraries across the country, for instance -- quite handsome, well built, and enduring. I had the benefit of one of his libraries in the town of 1,800 people I grew up in. It's still going strong.

Suppose you are terrifically successful at your business and accumulate $1,000,000,000. Suppose you decide you want to give it to promising but starved-for-capital entrepreneurs around the world. Just how long do you think it would take you? You would, like Carnegie and others, run out of time pretty quickly.

So we have trillions of dollars accumulating, which are not benefitting anyone. Meanwhile, a couple billion small entrepreneurs need capital and can't get it.

If printing more money to finance government operations devalues the coin of the realm, isn't that a form of taxation?

Unless a government engages in commerce to generate its own revenue, I don't see how you can avoid a tax of some kind, no matter how rococo the scheme.

Taxation plans do not need to be complex or opaque. Our tax system got that way as a result of Congress and legislatures inserting programs into taxation (benefits, subsidies, rebates, incentives, etc.).

The government used to finance itself by taxing imports and excise taxes. That was fairly simple as long as the amount of money needed wasn't too great. The Civil War resulted in a need for more revenue, so an income tax was imposed (and discontinued after the war). World War I presented the problem that imports dropped during the war, so again, alternative revenue sources were needed. Prohibition ended the revue stream on alcohol. Again, necessitating income taxes.

The important thing in the current tax bill working its way through the gaseous constipated, festering bowels of congress is that by giving more money to corporations and rich people, the deficit will be increased, making the economy more precarious for the many.

I have no idea whether your paper deserved its score, but producing good, clear writing can be difficult. Don't despair -- practice will result in improvement. Your philosophy course, however, is not a composition class.

You probably already have heard of ways you can improve a paper:

It's always important to understand the topic you are going to write on. Not really grasping the topic at hand can send one into the weeds. I don't know what you did or did not understand -- that's just general advice.

outline it before you write it. If you can't outline it, maybe you need more preparation to write. Read more, that sort of thing. (So, do as I say, don't do as I always did--wait until the last minute to write the paper.) It's too late to learn much more knowledge and get the paper written the night before it is due.

Use a minimum of jargon. (not because a given jargon is bad, but because writing in plain language forces you to explain, without the shorthand of jargon. Tim Wood made some good suggestions.
Straight-forward sentences are always a good idea.

If you have a particular idea about David Hume, check out some other sources on Hume (if you can find something handy) to see whether other people say the same kinds of things you are thinking of saying. If you are going to buck the standard view, then you have to write a really good paper; otherwise you'll be shot down.

See, Henri, believers have the word of God that tells them what they should do. The ONLY thing believers need to worry about (with respect to God) is whether they are doing what God told them to do. Following this advice should simplify your life considerably.

Henri, Henri. I have no objection to either the belief or the disbelief in Gods. It is quite possible that the gods, or God, exist. But from what I can tell, there is no justification in the western tradition, at least, for thinking that anyone can know anything about God.

Why is that?

Because, by the western tradition God is unknowable. Hindu gods actually live in their temples; there they are, made of ivory, gold, metals, fabrics, etc. Not so with God.

God has all sorts of descriptive terms heaped up. Immortal; omnipresent; invincible; omniscient; eternal; omnipresent, perfect, glorious, etc. By thinking of God in these terms, God is placed well outside our knowing. We can't conceive of what a being is like who is eternal, knowing everything that was, is, and will be, is present everywhere, both in the past and the future, and is fully capable of changing everything around, should that be deemed... whatever it is that God deems.

Believers should stop talking about God AS IF God is a knowable object, and AS IF they have a slice of that understanding on their plate. I'm not claiming that you don't have that understanding. I'm claiming you CAN'T have that understanding. Neither can I, of course.

it's about doing the most useful work for society that you can do. — Agustino

Yes, very good idea. I think most people have striven to do that.

That requires money to scale and finance your efforts. — Agustino

Of course it requires an expenditure of money. Most of money which made my work possible (health education, social services) came from social investment. The non-profit NGO sector is, in general, socially financed. (I don't know about where you live, but in this part of the US, non-profits form a significant sector of the economy.)

You seem to have missed all my posts about money being irrelevant to wealth ... where money is just a shadow. — Agustino

No, I just didn't buy those points. A nation's wealth surely is composed of the resources of its people, an asset that isn't readily measured in dollars. Individual wealth IS measured in dollars, pounds, euros, or some currency; wealth consists of property, cash, and shares. Your talents and potential just don't count as "wealth" in any ordinary usage. Features of your mind are too intangible to count as assets.

You have to get a feel for whether people will cheat you or not here — Agustino

"Here" is no different than everywhere. There are crooks everywhere. So, how do you protect yourself? Through established legal institutions or do you employ your own goon squad as enforcers?

Why doesn't everyone become an entrepreneur like Agustino of the giant AGUCORP? Are they all stupid, fat, lazy, addicted, welfare dependent, uneducated morons?

Some people are, of course. That's just the normal distribution. At the opposite end of the distribution are highly motivated, energetic, acquisitive, skilled individuals who have stumbled upon opportunity and have sunk their teeth into it's haunches. What will happen to most of them? Many of them will fail in their entrepreneurial projects. Some will do as well in their business as they would have done if they had worked for someone else. A diminishing number will make it into the big time.

In the middle of the distribution are about 80% of the population. We are people who are reasonably smart to very smart, energetic, educated, motivated, etc. who are not interested in becoming individual entrepreneurs. Perhaps we have other interests which are more important than working 16 hour days trying to establish a business. Perhaps we are interested in spending time with our families; pursuing our demanding careers in education, welding, medicine, carpentry, accounting, bricklaying, architecture, cooking, civil service, sales, auto repair, or whatever.

There is nothing especially exalted about individual entrepreneurial effort. If you like it, I am sure it is most enjoyable. It's probably like the public health job of syphilis contact tracing: it requires training, considerable skill, dedication, attention to detail, persistence, and intelligence. If you enjoy doing syphilis contact tracing, tuberculosis case finding, optometry, repairing alternators, religious work, garbage hauling, milking cows--whatever it is, it's enjoyable and useful.

Getting rich? For most people, getting or being rich is an idle fantasy or unimportant, and in any case, not a fixation that people should be encouraged to dwell on. Riches are not good for people's morals.

Who created wealth for the past 200 years? Only a handful of industrious people. — Agustino

A handful of industrious people like (not mentioning all the well known current rich folks)

Samuel Crompton (Spinning Mule) Great Britain
Thomas Newcomen (Steam Engine) Great Britain
Johns Hopkins (commercial, banking, railroads) USA
John D. Rockefeller (Oil) the world
Andrew Carnegie (Steel) USA
Cornelius Vanderbilt (Railroads) USA
John Jacob Astor (Fur, Real Estate (like... Waldorf Astoria Hotel) USA
James Hill (Railroads) USA
Jamsetji Tata (Shipping, Steel, Hotels...) India
Richard Trevithick (Sugar) Germany
Coco Chanel (Fashion) France
Enzo Ferrari (Sports Cars) Italy
J. R. D. Tata (Everything) India
Richard Branson (Media, Transportation) UK
Rod Aldridge (Business process outsourcing), UK
Hernán Botbol (Internet) Argentina
Strive Masiyiwa (Telecommunication) Zimbabwe

Sure, a handful. But... none of these people actually produced much wealth themselves. Andrew Carnegie wasn't shoveling iron ore into the coke ovens; Jamsetji Tata wasn't steering the freighters; Strive Masiyiwa wasn't bolting together cell towers in Zimbabwe.

It just isn't possible for one person to invent and develop large industries which produce millions or billions of dollars of income. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did start working on computers in their families garages (so they say), but before long they, like other entrepreneurs, had to start hiring people to develop and produce code, pieces of gadgetry, and so on. Generally setting up production (plant and people) requires loaned capital.

You, AGUCORP, sitting at your desk somewhere in Eastern Europe, providing some services to other businesses, are not going to become rich. At some point you will have to start hiring other people to sit at desks, answer phones and emails, and to do this you will need to obtain capital, probably first with a loan, then with maybe selling shares. If Big Finance thinks you have the makings of becoming the Bloomberg of Business in Bosnia, Bulgaria, Belarus, and Botswana, they might back you, then you might become rich.

But no matter how rich Agustino gets as founder of AGUCORP, it won't be on the basis of your personal labor. Your ideas, sure; certainly the ideas of your employees too.

You are too wrapped up in the idea of the Glorious Solitary Knight of Commerce to see that wealth is created socially by dozens, hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of people working to produce wealth. And then, in order for you to become very, very rich, you have to expropriate a slice of the value all those people created, and keep it for yourself.

You don't have to be a physically powerful ox of a man to personally do the expropriating. Expropriation is a social affair, and the rules of commerce (assuming there are rules of commerce wherever you are operating out of) allow for, and facilitate the expropriation. The armed services of the country you are working in are paid to make sure your employees do not turn on you and seize your business services goldmine (expropriating the expropriators). The Courts are there to make sure that your patents, trademarks, and contracts are protected. The stock markets are there to facilitate your IPO, and various business already exist to facilitate your financial operation.

Ah, yes. Now I git it. Thank you for shining your ever-bright LED flame into my abyssal darkness.

Bag your baguette and get. — Wosret

You mean, "Bag your baguette and git. "Get" as in "get going" is too close to proper. "Git" has the eau d'outré you are looking for.

Just a suggestion. Here, let me run your life for you.

Yes. By official forensic psychiatric definitions, many (not all) are functioning normally. They may be very bad people, but bad people can be mentally normal.

Most people in the world think that killing a batch of people for no particular cause is insane. The same way that it is insane to establish a policy of increased fossil fuel use, when sustainable clean alternatives are available (wind, solar), given the bad outcomes of global warming: climate change, sea rise, increased forest fires, storms, floods, heat waves, increased risk of disease, and so forth.

Are US policy leaders schizophrenic, psychotic, unhinged in some way listed in the DSM? Probably not, but their policies are decidedly crazy.

To my simplistic mind it would seem as though anyone who plans and follows through on the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of human beings must be, ipso facto, mentally ill. — Erik

You are not being 'simplistic' in thinking that mass murderers must be mentally ill. Most people think mass murderers are either crazy or evil. I suppose that psychiatrists find that they are capable of effective planning and careful execution of plans, are not delusional as a psychiatric definition--hearing voices, for instance, have a clear understanding of their actions, and so on.

I agree with you that they are, ipso facto, mentally ill--mad, crazy, insane--whatever term one prefers.

I'll use Erich Fromm's formula: In an insane society, insane people are going to seem normal; mentally healthy people will seem insane. Fromm judged at least the American society to be insane. He wasn't excluding other societies from his diagnosis, but he was writing about this one.

Jesus Christ was radicalized by the mass exodus from Egypt. — Zoneofnonbeing

This seems a bit anachronistic. Are you suggesting that Jesus was a contemporary of Moses? If not, which mass exodus from Egypt are you referencing?

Maybe Jesus was a revolutionary, though I think that is mischaracterizing him. He certainly made severe demands on the people to whom he preached, offering a radical alternative.

My guess is that at some point in his life Jesus commenced a career of itinerate preaching. Whether he was on the road only for 4 years, or quite a bit longer, we don't know, can't tell for sure. He must have been doing something besides building... whatever carpenters built back then.

Unless most of his preaching was put into his mouth later, he must have been doing something to prepare for his ministry.

I read an article in which a forensic psychiatrist who had examined a number of mass killers, said he found that by most standards, at least half of them were not mentally ill, crazy, or insane. They were "normal". Some of them were unhinged, of course.

Of course, we can, we should. But it might not make any difference There are around 150 - 250 million guns already in the hands of Americans (depending whose count one goes by). How does one "control guns" when there are so many? Stop selling ammunition? That would eventually help, but not immediately -- maybe not for quite a few years. It's worth doing, still.

In a sense, the number of people killed by guns here is remarkably low, given how many people are in possession of arms.

Why is an atheist interested in Christian mysticism and the experience of the divine? — Agustino

There is a good article on Why Are Non-Believers Turning to Their Bibles? in Quillette which I recommend. Actually, i'm ordering you to read it. Students tend to ignore recommendations and pay more attention to orders, as in "Yes, it WILL be on the test."

Quillette is NOT a religious magazine.

Ok, ok, so I didn't say anything about myself. I am a very-small-town-midwesterner, which I regret in ever so many ways, but once conceived, it was too late to do anything about it. Small town life made me quite neurotic, a demolition derby of repressed homosexual libidinous urges over-seen by a typically repressive Methodist superego. I am sure I would have been happier with progressive Jewish parents in Manhattan.

Age has snowed white hair on my head, and my future is now much much shorter than my past, which is fine. I'm busy filling in the big gaps left over from college, 50 years ago. I sincerely hope there is no such thing as reincarnation. Once really is enough. I'm not very hot on the afterlife either. God, the very idea!

No matter what one writes, it's auto-bio. Of course, some autobiographies are better than others.

Welcome. Speak freely, speak frankly. Nothing here to be self-consciously humble about. Philosophy is an ancient, very badly planned and now dilapidated city in ruins with narrow, twisted avenues that end up nowhere; once elegant mansions occupied by the ghosts of long-dead questions. Remnants of the Humorless Society lurk about -- be careful. Mostly there are earnest people with nothing worse to do than poke around in the rubble hoping to find something new and interesting that nobody else has found in the last few thousand years.

Marx said, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

And welcome, again.

You mean, you recovered from your PTSD? — schopenhauer1

it was a sort of PTSD. And yes, the rococo craziness of the industrial office work space is probably a full and sufficient reason never to have children, if they have even a small chance of ending up there.

There are three white men who possess more wealth than the bottom 50% of the population — Zoneofnonbeing

That would be Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet. The 9 richest people in the US are:

LARRY PAGE: $44.6 BILLION... Source of wealth: Google
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: $46.8 BILLION... Source of wealth: Bloomberg LP - business data
DAVID KOCH: $48.5 BILLION... Source of wealth: Diversified (oil)
CHARLES KOCH: $48.5 BILLION... Source of wealth: Diversified (oil)
LARRY ELLISON: $59 BILLION... Source of wealth: Software (like Oracle DB)
MARK ZUCKERBERG: $71 BILLION... Source of wealth: Facebook
WARREN BUFFETT: $78 BILLION... Source of wealth: Berkshire Hathaway (which owns many firms)
JEFF BEZOS: $81.5 BILLION... Source of wealth: Amazon
BILL GATES: $89 BILLION... Source of wealth: Microsoft

That's $566.9 billion. 9 people.

With a combined worth of $2.34 trillion, the Forbes 400 own more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the country combined, a staggering 194 million people. The median American family has a net worth of $81,000.Dec 1, 2015.

The point is that people are unequal. Some people are better at certain things than others. This applies to legislature too. Some people have a better sense of what is good and what is bad than others. — Magnus Anderson

People are unequal, no doubt about that: pick a trait, any trait, and you will find that it is dispersed across a mostly normal distribution, with most people in the middle, smaller numbers above average, and smaller numbers below average.

The reason for randomly selecting people to serve is to eliminate the "preselection" by the political system, which is pretty good at selecting people who are quite devoted to the interests of the ruling class. (This isn't peculiar to either parties -- its endemic to both of them.)

Some of the people picked randomly will turn out to be loyal servants to the ruling class, but most of them probably won't be.

By the way, I don't consider random selection any sort of real solution. The real solution requires either a revolution in which capitalism is thrown out, or the solution would be a very stringent reform of regulation and taxation beyond the progressive reforms of the 'trust busters' and Theodore Roosevelt.

IF the US is going to deal with all the many extremely serious problems that confront us -- from soil loss and pollution from agricultural runoff, (including the huge and growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico), growing carbon and methane emissions, forest depletion (much of it from insect damage, then fire), to growing resistance of a shrinking list of effective antibiotics and grossly disproportionate distribution of wealth (solvable by expropriating the expropriators), and so on, THEN the government will have to get tough with rich vested interests. It won't be pretty, but it really has to be done.

it isn't "expertise" so much as intelligence, thoughtfulness, insight, and interest. Most legislatures, for instance have staff that help legislators with certain technical details -- like form, for instance, or if a law annuls prior legislation, how to link the new and the old laws in the record. The State employs many people with extensive expertise who can be called upon. For instance, the legislators don't go out and look at bridges to decide whether they are deficient, or test pesticides for carcinogenic properties. These important types of tasks are done by state employees who have high levels of expertise.

Exactly.

Yes, The State requires expertise. The institutions of the state -- Commerce Dept., Transportation, Agriculture Department, Treasury, War Department, Health, Education and Welfare -- all these absolutely depend on expertise--and a high level of expertise, at that.

But what goes on in Congress or your state legislature is often quite amateurish. Not always, but often enough. The elected officials aren't supposed to bring all the expertise of The State, which is the permanent government. They are supposed to bring the concerns of the The People to the fore, and pass laws to meet their needs--laws including the Budget.

So, randomly selected officials do not present a problem of expertise. Along with random selection, I would also like to see a lobbyist sundown rule: Any lobbyist paid or paying substantial money to affect legislation would be hanged at sundown in front of whatever corporate office paid for his or her services.

Sex is about Power — MonfortS26

Sex being all about power is a recent idea coming from people like French thinker like Michel Foucault, who died in 1984 (of AIDS). True enough, some people have mixed power and sex together -- especially people who like S & M games, where some people get tied to the wall and get whipped, then fucked. Some people like that--both the S and the M. Some people impose themselves on other people because they have power. But no, I don't think sex is about power. Personally, I like egalitarian sex.

Prior to the boom in French POMO philosophy, a lot of the current memes just weren't in circulation. Just between me and the fencepost, I don't think post-modernists have helped the species. Had they never been born, we would be as far ahead as were are with them. I am eternally grateful that I graduated with a degree in English before this tsunami of bullshit hit the campus beaches.

When we speak of organisms like single celled organisms, nematodes, etc. I think it is fair to say that their behavior can be reduced to avoiding pain and reproducing. Now, the evolutionary process that produced nematodes also produced hornets, fish, salamanders, birds, dogs, and people. More complex animals have more complex behaviors that don't reduce down to avoiding pain and reproducing -- though humans do usually try to avoid pain and reproduce altogether too successfully.

The more complex the animal brain, the more that is on their minds. Dogs that get into trouble a lot generally are entirely too curious about the world, and too adept and manipulating physical objects, as well as humans. Humans go far, far above and beyond avoiding pain and seeking to reproduce. That's why we have all this complicated culture.

Of course, the US wasn't set up as a direct democracy. Even in New England, the town councils only worked while the population was small and lived closely together. When villages got bigger, and grew into even small cities, it became unwieldy to have meetings involving several hundred people. So, back in the mid-19th century, they started to switch to other systems--like city councils and mayors.

The US was set up as a representative democracy--something quite different than direct democracy. In the US system (and in most countries' representative systems) there are citizens, there is the state, and there is the parliament or congress. That's just not what the Greeks had.

One can have a monarch in this system (like the UK). It can be a socialist or capitalist country. Most capitalist systems end up with oligarchs, IF there is enough wealth potential in a country. But then, even some poor countries manage to have oligarchs. Bottom up rule (rule by the people) is a non-starter for any large system, or where much money is at stake--and one or the other is usually the case.

I have long thought that a random selection of legislators (state level) or congressional representatives would be a good idea. They could not possibly be worse than many of those who served by election.

Simple to set up: select a pool to serve. Eliminate those who are not citizens, not able to read and write, have dementia (though that didn't stop Ronald Reagan), are below the age of 18 [or whatever arbitrary age the people think best] or are very ill. And, of course, who -- if selected -- will not serve.

They serve a fixed term and then they are done. No repeats.

One of the reasons American democracy (and most other democracies, too) don't allow the cooks in the government is that, as you say, "America is not a democracy, it is an oligarchy" not just now, but from the get go.

The east-coast colonies were not set up by yeoman farmers, they were set up by the English crown for the benefit of various English oligarchs. The founding fathers were not working class people, for the most part. They were educated people of privilege, for the most part. Throughout American history, much of the power has been held by very rich people. True, ordinary people had some power, but it was dispersed, difficult to concentrate into a strong force.

The current disproportionate distribution of wealth is so extreme, (in the world, not just in the United States) it is difficult to imagine how this oligarchical rule will be undone. Theoretically, the cooks can take over the kitchen, but the hearths and stew pots are very well defended.

Sorry about neglecting a response -- I did read your earlier comment, and this one too. Yes, context matters, and the devil is in all the details of context.

Whether one is the legitimately offended, or foolishly offended person, or whether one is the legitimate offender, or the foolishly named offender, depends on details, details, details. One of the things that often happens in these kinds of discussions (not just here, everywhere) is that the details are compressed into a black cube and a white cube, decontextualizing the facts of the case.

Jack made a joke, jill took umbrage, a brouhaha ensued. Why Jack made that joke in that particular way, why Jill was so offended, will soon get lost in a new set of details located in the brouhaha. Everybody engages in the decontextualizing, because it's just much easier to talk about the black cube and the white cube than sort through all the details, which themselves will be contested.

"below the radar" you said. Yes. The last -- and worst -- place I worked at in a 40 year work life was a service agency where the forms were followed quite closely. Racist/sexist comments and "inappropriate" behaviors were scrupulously avoided by the staff. The clients were a rich mix of races, both sexes and a few transgendered, and quite a few with very troubled lives.

But "below the radar" the place was a mess of passive-aggression, subtle games of isolation and playing staff against each other, favoritism, and so on.

It took a while to tease out how this all worked, and it wasn't till after I had left that the patterns of behavior became clearer.

There was no less racism, sexism, gay and straight masculine chauvinism or feminine manipulation, etc. here than anywhere else, it was just deeply submerged. It might have been an easier place to work, and a less toxic one, if people had just come out with ordinary, run of the mill sexism, racism, agism, homophobia, etc. rather than the rococo cuckoo craziness that reigned supreme there.

There are details on the radar screen which are addressed in social rules and regulations. It's much more difficult to diagnose and remedy details that are below the radar. It is not impossible, though, and remediation has helped. Putting more women into management positions, for instance, helps. As sex, and race problems work their way up the hierarchy, it isn't only males that do the evaluation. Details matter here too, of course. A ruthless, vindictive authoritarian woman in management is as bad as a ruthless, vindictive authoritarian man -- and yes, both types exist.

How wide a range of behavior can the radar screens encompass? How does "radar" detect and display the rococo craziness of individuals and organizations? I don't know.

What about the desire for death? Not common, but some people clearly desire death, and through suicide find it. Pleasure doesn't seem to figure into it. For instance, the pleasure of escaping suffering seems far fetched. We get relief, but not pleasure per se when suffering ends.

t just seems that the evolution of altruism in any species would make more sense if it were backed up by at least a subconscious desire for pleasure, — MonfortS26

I think people do derive pleasure from altruism. Some people say one must not receive pleasure from doing altruistic, charitable, good things. That strikes me as absurd and inhuman. We can, we do, and we should experience a kind of pleasure when we do good works: it's the pleasure of achieving congruence between what we think we ought to do, and what we are doing. This is a "higher pleasure". Like as not evolution has something to do with it, but it also takes a reflective mind to feel congruence.

My guess is that the widow in the Gospel story who had nothing but a "mite" to give to the Temple, experienced the satisfaction of doing what she thought she should do, even though she was already poor, and the donation made her poorer. Experiencing a pleasure from doing the difficult thing that is personally costly isn't like getting a huge ego boost from making a big pubic donation.

Is there any reason to believe otherwise? — MonfortS26

Well, we are made up of a very complex collection of traits, capabilities, tendencies, drives, ideas, fears, and so on. It's difficult to say "everything derives from this... (whatever "this" is). Like, "Everything people do is in the service of the sex drive."--a crude misstatement of Freud's theories. Yes, some of our behavior is very much in the service of sex--or libido--but it's difficult to figure how Einstein (or a few hundred thousand scientific researchers and theorists are all trying to serve their sex drives by thinking about relativity, the Standard Model, Quarks, String Theory, or whatever the hell they are thinking about.

Similarly, people get up and go to work everyday at the same, fucking shithole of a job -- because their families depend on their income, and they want to see their children eat well. They get pleasure from that, but again, it's not like the pleasure of Ben and Jerry's. It's much more complicated.

obnoxious comments about tits and pussies — Baden

I don't recollect tits having been mentioned in this thread. Tits doesn't seem to be a frequently used words -- somebody did reference great tits in a thread, but that was literally a bird, not a breast.

Well, never mind the missing tits.

I was in the workforce for 40+ years, and there were only two places where words such as pussy, tits, and ass (as in anatomical ass/arse) were used. One was an 8 month stint at a Job Corps in 1968 where the black corpsmen were always talking about pussy. The other was 9 years at the Minnesota AIDS Project where just about everything sexual was talked about in excruciating detail at one time or another. This really was a place without boundaries. The workforce was about 50% straight women and 50% gay men. "Pussy" wasn't a term that I heard often.

in the 33 years at other jobs, really very typical work places--colleges, non-profit agencies, etc. I can recollect hearing or seeing very, very few instances of inappropriate sexualized behavior. People just didn't behave this way. Of course there was conflict -- sometimes very heated -- but it was over other issues, like office politics, personal snits, favoritism, and the like. Some of the workplaces were sick -- very bad interpersonal relations, but sexuality just didn't figure much. Maybe Minnesota is different than the coasts? Not better, just different. More tightly wrapped? Lots of Lutherans? Better levels of education? Better corporate leadership? Don't know.

Maybe my experience is abnormal; maybe I wasn't paying attention to what was happening; maybe I wasn't around when people were being naughty, don't know.