I don't see how something being communist (or anarcho-communist) would prevent institutional harms such as the ones described. — schopenhauer1

You are right to extend your criticism of the workplace to include communist/soviet and fascist societies and their work places, because hierarchies, institutionalized work rules, routinization, diminished executive agency, alienation, boredom, frustration, simmering rage, etc. are common to all systems, whether capitalist or communist.

Work sucks -- that's why people have to be paid to do it.

It isn't just that workers are exploited. Even if the value of their labor were not being extracted for the benefit of a cabal of capitalists or commissars, the urge to control is always present. Silicon Valley notwithstanding, employers usually don't want to see too much individuality in their workforce. Lots of behaviors are policed: Clothing and how it is warn, time and how it is used, work style and how it is governed, toilet breaks, regular breaks, lunch breaks--all rigidly set. What can be said at work is often monitored closely. Free speech does not apply to the workplace.

IS THERE ANY ALTERNATIVE?

Per Agustino and like minds, one can work for one's self. That presupposes that one has skills, interests, and temperament that are conducive to self-employment. It isn't a moral or intellectual failing to either lack these traits or just not wish to work for one's self.

One of the problems with "work" is that we really aren't able to self-sort effectively.

If one loathes detail work, highly structured work environments, close supervision, close proximity of too many other people, limited mobility (stay at your desk), etc., they won't do well in that kind of job. For those people, a loosely structured job, minimal supervision, freedom of movement, executive agency, opportunity for creative effort, free expression, a major challenge, etc. will yield very good results. Some people prefer detail work, predictability, regularity, and all that. In that kind of job they really do well.

There simply isn't much variety in work environments for people to self-sort. The exceptions to the rules are too few and far between.

Besides the formal constraints of work, there are the informal elements--all the craziness of individuals that are brought into the workplace and cultured in an environment where the worst traits rise to the top.

Every morning I thank god that I am retired and don't have to go to work today.

First about the money. It is true that money is a medium of exchange. I'm arguing that in today's world, a medium of exchange has become obsolete. — Madman

A medium of exchange might be obsolete, IF there was enough of everything for everyone, OR IF all goods were extremely scarce. In the first instance, one would just consume what one needed. In the second instance, barter would prevail. In between the two extremes, where there is much, but not enough for everyone, the sorting out of goods and needs is greatly improved with some sort of exchange medium.

Then, if we would have enough for everyone, private property is not needed since private property is money expressed through the ownership of commodities. — Madman

I don't think this is set up right. The value of private property (factories, railroads, airlines, warehouses, stores, cropland, etc.) lies in its capacity to produce commodities. Commodities (clothes, chairs, beds, food, cars, books, TVs, etc) are personal property. Money, as an exchange mechanism, doesn't drive the system. It can't, really. The average person works to produce enough value (to the society) to obtain the commodities he needs.

Some people accumulate surplus wealth (from the labor of many people) and pile up wealth for themselves, which enables them to own "real" property--factories, apartment houses, farms, railroads, stores, etc.

We don't actually have enough of everything to go around. It is not possible for all 7.3 billion people to live like first world people do. The first world--industrialized, advanced economies--consumes much more than its proportional share of stuff. There actually isn't enough oil, aluminum, iron, clean water, productive lands, etc. to produce our quality of life for everyone, and we are far short of there being so much of everything that one can just go get it, for free.

There are perhaps 1 billion people (Europe, North America, Japan) consuming a very big share of the world's resources. There are another 2.5 billion-3 billion in China, India, and in some major urban centers in the rest of the world that might attempt to fully industrialize and live like the first world does. As they do, shortfalls in raw material occur. There just isn't enough "raw material" to support a doubling of first world consumption. (Take concrete. The world is experiencing the limits of supply in that there isn't enough sand to go around. Not enough sand? Only certain kinds of sand make good concrete. It can't be too fine, too course, be contaminated with salt, and so on.

So, to make an exceedingly long story (many volumes) short, money--or something like it--is needed to facilitate trade in goods that are in short supply.

Is this just a lack of imagination? Is it just anchoring in something so as not feel the nihilistic void? :D — schopenhauer1

No. Granted, many jobs positively create nihilistic voids, but many people find some jobs enjoyable. They like the tasks involved in the job. (It doesn't have to be a high level job.)

Finding anything in life satisfying might be impossible for people whose lives seem to be enclosed in nihilistic voids. And if one does find life satisfying, one probably is not enclosed in a nihilistic void.

Never mind trigger warnings in classes, media broadcasts, and the like. Never mind alerting people to foul language or violence. We should have an alert system which advises people that they are approaching a nihilistic void, or they are about to enter an area which has a number of nihilistic voids. For instance, one might be about to sign up for a class in some weird Disadvantaged Studies Department. There should be an audible warning that proceeding with registration for that class may locate one within a nihilistic void.

Similarly, if one is about to take a job in data entry (out of sheer desperation for a job) a klaxon should alert one to the depths of existential despair and nihilism which await the person doing data entry.

Robotic production isn't the norm yet, but a lot of production work in factories and offices is now done by computers and computer-operated machines (robots). In the years ahead, more work will be performed by robots.

Replacing workers with robots will not, in itself, usher in the kind of revolution you are proposing. The whole relationship of property and persons would have to be abolished.

The hours necessary to produce what is necessary could be reduced right now for many people. Some people (brain surgeons) will have to continue working long hours. There is no reason to have many classes of workers spending 8 hours+ at work. It isn't just that machines can take their place, a lot of work would be superfluous in a more rational economic system.

Whether work should be eliminated is open to question. Many people find the work they do reasonably satisfying, and many people define who the are by the work they do. On the other hand, a lot of jobs are so devoid of meaning they should absolutely be done by machines. A lot of clerical work fits into that category (for me at least).

the real problem with money is that the amount of it in circulation is greater than the amount of resources available for production and consumption. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

If that were the case, the money supply could be reduced, solving the problem. Too much money in circulation chasing too few goods causes inflation.

Metal coins (gold, silver) are not impervious to inflation, either. In ancient times currency was inflated (or debased) by adding base metals to the precious metals, allowing for more, less valuable, coins to be struck.

Vote NO on MoutainDwarf Utopia.

You have all these grand ideas, but when it gets down to details, you're going to set the minimum wage at $12/hr??? Why not $9/hr? Or $99/hr? Or do away with wages altogether?

Is the world really broken? Actually the world is working the way it is supposed to work--which doesn't mean that everything is just peachy keen, of course. The world can be quite unpleasant, but its unpleasantness is quite explainable, and given the assholes that are running things, its really amazing that things aren't much worse. Give it time...

Consider Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola. They make simple products: drinks made out of water, a secret syrup, carbon dioxide plus aluminum, plastic, and (mostly in the past) glass. A significant portion of their income comes from selling just water in a plastic bottle.

What is there not to like about Coke and Pepsi? Nothing. Actually, 50% of hard core Stalinists prefer Pepsi, and the other 50% prefer Coke

How could one criticize these inexpensive universally loved products which people individually choose to buy and drink? Who wouldn't like to buy the world a coke? It's the real thing! So buy it, asshole.

First, soft drinks, without regard to the brand or the maker, are expensive forms of nutrition-free beverages. The drinks are high in sugar, contain caffeine, a mildly addicting alkaloid, or are sugar free but contain artificial sweeteners which have zero positive function in the body.

Second, they are environmental unsound. It isn't so much the syrup (which is a combination of cola nut extract, fruit juices, and some other unknown stuff). It's the environmental costs of petrochemicals and aluminum used to contain the product. There is also the cost of shipping and cooling the nutritionally useless product. (It isn't even as good as plain water.)

Speaking of water, in India Coke and Pepsi are drawing down critical aquifer to make their products. They also draw down aquifers containing unusually good water to sell as... water. How much does Pepsi and Coke pay for the water diverted from normal human usage to abnormal "bottled water" usage? Nothing.

Coke, Pepsi, Fanta, Royal Crown, 7UP, and every other bottled drink company externalize the cost of the 200 billion cans per year. 2% of the world's energy is used in mining and refining aluminum, the highest energy cost for any metal. The energy needed to make 4 aluminum cans is about the same amount of energy in a 12 oz can of gasoline.

About 93,250,000 cans have been recycled so far this year. 93.5 million vs. 200 billion made and wasted.

17,000,000 barrels of oil 535,500,000 gallons per year go into making plastic bottles. 190,000 homes could be heated with the the energy needed to make a years worth of plastic bottles. Last year the average American used 167 disposable water bottles, but only recycled 38.

Bottled water is not more healthful than typical tap water in Europe, OZ, NZ, and North America (and some other countries, as well).

Coke gives life? Not really.

Yah, but you keep talking as if you were in the stone ages of business when you put the whip on workers and forced them to work while starving in your factory... Today it's not the same, at least not in the West. That may happen though, unfortunately, in places like China. Business has evolved and changed. — Agustino

Of course I am aware that industry and business has changed. Only 9% of American workers labor in factories. Larger percentages work in transportation, warehousing, wholesale, and retail of physical products. Service work employs the bulk of the remainder in a wide variety of fields, everything from bio-molecular research to fabric design to night watchmen. You are a service worker, albeit self-employed. There are also a large number of people engaged in entrepreneurial work, mostly providing one kind of service or another.

The nature of business, however, has not changed since the stone age. Whether a product is being made or a service being performed, the object is to add value through labor (in your case, typing furiously away on your computer). When hired help perform service labor, the value they receive in pay for their work must be considerably exceeded by the value of the services sold. If it isn't considerably exceeded, then either no profit is produced, or not enough profit is produced to satisfy the desires of the proprietor. So whether one is talking about workers in an early 19th century cotton mill or workers writing code for a killer iPhone app, it's pretty much all the same.

Your POV of business is from the proprietors' side. My POV is from the workers side. I could enthuse about the glories of free enterprise from your POV, but you are already doing that. NO NEED further adulation.

The situation of labor--excluding elite laborers in academic institutions, industrial research, civil service, the arts, entertainment, and such--is not great. I'll speak only for the US situation. Here there has been a continual slide of income and purchasing power since the 1970s. It has gradual, rather than precipitous. The "good times" of the post-WWII economic boom ended in the 1970s, It isn't that people were suddenly reduced to begging on the streets, such as happened in the Great Depression. Rather, the average worker's standard of living has been ratcheted down, notch by notch.

The reason people have not experienced worse consequences is that workers have greatly increased the number of hours worked. First spouses (e.g., women) started working part-time jobs to supplement household income. Then these spouses started looking for full time jobs. The previous full-time male started adding small part-time jobs. sometimes older children also started taking jobs (like 15-17 year olds)--and not stuff like mowing lawns.

The increased labor helped a great deal. Another approach that households have used to hold on to the standard of living that they previously had, or if younger--think they should have--is credit card debt. Buy it now! Don't save up for some decent furniture; the replacement car; the replacement or new whatever -- buy it on credit. This works quite well, as long as one limits credit use and pays it off as quickly as possible. That's not usually what happens.

Home equity loans are another approach that many workers have employed to hold on to what they felt to be reasonable expectation. Their house needed work (normal wear and tear, added children, relatives moving in, etc.). The quickest and supposedly least risky way to obtain the funds was through a home equity loan: You have, say, $40,000 in equity. You might borrow $30,000 against that. It's essentially a second mortgage. What often happens is that some of the money is spent on repairs (new roof, kitchen replacement) and then credit card debt is paid down. However, the kitchen product didn't get finished, and credit card debt starts recurring. Plus, there is the second mortgage to pay on.

At this point, any slippage in standard of living is likely to be permanent, because the options to stave it off have been used. All this has been going on since the 40+ year decline in income and living starts started. A substantial share of the working class has now been economically dried out. They don't have any more.

Some people, in the upper portion of the working class--the people who call themselves middle class--have had to do the same thing, except that their incomes are higher and generally they have not been drained of economic resources.

The uppermost portions of the working class, the actual petite and haute bourgeoisie, and the super rich have, of course, not experienced any losses at all. They have benefitted from the economic policies since the Reagan administration (1980-1988) and following that were intended to benefit them. People like you (not you, personally, of course) take well off people as the standard model, who if they need to work are often quite industrious, and say to the working class: "Well, if you were industrious, you too could be well off! All that you have to do is get off your fat asses and get to work."

I can agree with BC, which I do, without subscribing to the boilerplate Marxism you've been peddling in this thread. — Thorongil

Haven't you noticed the boilerplate Marxism I've been peddling?

making the world safe for capitalism... The Marching Song of the Covert Battalions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-yRKfD2GIk

Here we are, seeking out the reds
Trying to keep the communists in order
Just remember when you're sleeping in your beds
They're only two days drive from the texas border

How can a country large as ours
Be scared of such a threat
Well if they won't work for us
They're against us you can bet
They may be sovereign countries
But you folks at home forget
That they all want what we've got
But they don't know it yet

We're making the world safe for capitalism

Here we come with our candy and our guns
And our corporate muscle marches in behind us
For freedom's just another world for nothing left to sell
And if you want narcotics we can get you those as well

We help the multi-nationals
When they cry out protect us
The locals scream and shout a bit
But we don't let that affect us
We're here to lend a helping hand
In case they don't elect us
How dare they buy our products
Yet still they don't respect us

We're making the world safe for capitalism

If you thought the army
Was here protecting people like yourself
I've some news for you
We're here to defend wealth
Away with nuns and bishops
The good lord will help those that help themselves
I've some news for you
We're here to defend wealth

We're making the world safe for capitalism

No, the real question is "Which side are you on?"

Which side are you on?
They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there.
You'll either be union man or thug for J. H. Blair.§
Which side are you on?

§ Harlan County Kentucky is coal country. J. H. Blair was a County Sheriff in the pocket of union-busting miner-killing coal companies.

Pete Seeger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iAIM02kv0g

Barry Bragg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbddqXib814

Wealth is a measure of your control over (1) value-creating mechanisms (production), and (2) distribution networks that can make them widely available. — Agustino

And how does the Hinduja family have control over production and distribution? They do it the old fashioned way. They own it.

Well someone like the Hinduja family, they would help maybe 40-50 million or more people per year. — Agustino

Regular Mother Theresa's they are.

It would be more accurate to say that 40-50 million people help the Hinduja family. Without their 75,000 employees and millions of consumers, the Hinduja family would be back in Karachi peddling used pots and pans from a small cart.

Look: I think everybody understands that successful businesses are run by talented, hard-working, more-or-less honest opportunists and exploiters. The legal and political systems of the West, and some developed/developing countries is structured to disproportionately favor and facilitate opportunism and exploitation.

Capitalism is based in that legal and political framework. Without it, opportunists and exploiters would have to resort to crude and primitive methods (a la mafia) to succeed. Capitalism avoids individual mafia operations by legalizing and enforcing exploitation of both workers and consumers by the opportunistic companies it spawns. At least it does now. In an earlier era of capitalism, there wasn't all that much difference between a crooked operation and a righteous one.

I don't know how big your operation is. I am guessing you are more like a hard-working farmer who works by himself. He has to do all the hard work of running the small farm--and it is a lot of hard work. His profit at the end of the year are his own. If, however, he is a bright opportunist and owns many farms and employs many people, he will--of necessity, since he is a capitalist--exploit the people that work for him. He will get rich, they will not, though they are doing all the work and he merely cracks the whip.

He will pay them as little as possible. He will fire them if they start organizing a union to protect their own interests. He will probably fire them if he thinks they are not working hard enough. He might not offer any health insurance. He might not give them vacation time. If unemployment in his neck of the woods is high, he will feel very secure. There's always somebody else who wants a job. If unemployment is very low, he might be forced to pay more, or offer benefits. If things get too bad, his employees might organize a walkout, leaving crops unharvested and several thousand cows waiting for their twice daily milking.

Enlarge the situation to the size of the Hinduja family, and that will explain how they got where they are.

I have to go now. I didn't get into the selling side of opportunism and exploitation.

Where good detective and police work are most needed is in the violent slums, where detectives and police don't like working very much. It is unacceptable for multiple killers to not be tracked down and arrested. Yes, it's difficult in the ghetto to do that, but it can be done.

I'll have to give your reply more thought.

If the rich see that their wealth might be confiscated in the near future, they will simply move it elsewhere before the law is passed — Thorongil

It should be well within the capabilities of the G20, or G30, to bring an end to tax sheltering by pisspot countries.

Maybe Sapientia can, but I can't guarantee that wealth distribution would not decrease the standard of living. Taking all the wealth of the rich and dividing it up evenly among the population would almost certainly not work out well. A better approach is to bring about change in the distribution of wealth more gradually.

In one of my quoted passages, the economist noted that the present extremely disproportionate distribution of income was not always the case. The present imbalance has accumulated since the 1970s. Within the structure of this society, the best bet would be to squeeze the wealth out of the rich by a series of tax reforms which would aim at two things: Putting idle cash to work (like buying municipal bonds for infrastructure), and secondly, extracting the wealth through taxes. Tax law could make receiving an out-of-proportion income very disadvantageous.

It is my belief that putting the rich on a stringent diet and gradually spreading the wealth would be constructive. Giving people a huge windfall would probably result in tons of wasted money and inflation, as way too much money suddenly started chasing the normal supply of goods.

One of the changes I would like to see is a guaranteed minimum income. The economy has changed, and we are probably not going to see anything close to full, good employment again. Long-term unemployed and people who have left the workforce (because there was no work), need a minimum stable income both for social stability and for their own good. Everything paid to them will be spent back into the economy. It's really quite doable.

Part of the problem is that the extreme positions of the NRA have driven liberals to take 180º opposite positions--perhaps in contradiction to what they would otherwise hold.

For instance, I don't have any objection to people owning guns for sport -- hunting, shooting a clay disks... that sort of thing. I don't have any objection to individuals owning guns to protect their home. A hunting gun or a pistol is more than adequate for that purpose.

I am not in favor of open carry or concealed carrying. I am not in favor of people being allowed to buy, sell, trade, or possess guns not suitable for sport or hunting (like the animals one can legally hunt in North America). No assault rifles, no sawed off shotguns, no bump stocks, no automatic (and very limited semi-automatic) guns.

Some liberals are prone to over-react and desire to eliminate all guns altogether, for any purpose. That's too extreme. There are too many of what I would call appropriate guns and gun owners to ban them. 100 million? 150 million? Way too many to collect.

We have laws which up the gravity of property crimes committed with guns. There are laws which clearly label murder as illegal. Criminals ignore laws such as these. So, the police need to do a better job of catching criminals.

What if they resist? — Thorongil

Resistance is futile. Their wealth will be distributed.

However, an olive branch: — Thorongil

Olive branches are being accepted at this time. Thank you.

How can the millions of paramedics and teachers ever be richer than the man who owns 10% of a business with annual profits of a £1 billion? — Michael

They won't be richer than your plutocrat, and after forced redistribution, your plutocrat won't be rich and will have to get a real job. He might want to be something useful like a sanitation worker. And because of the redistribution of wealth, he will be better paid than sanitation workers were before the redistribution.

He gets a real job doing something useful, and gets paid a decent wage. Win win.

See, the rich don't get richer and the poor poorer! Everyone gets rich, just the richer get way way way fucking richer. — Wosret

The rich get richer because the poor get poorer.

The enormous concentration of wealth among a very small number of people distorts the flow of capital. The small number of exceeding rich people can not invest their vast wealth in millions of worthwhile projects--that is far too time and energy consuming--so they end up sitting on it, or enlarging it by screwing around with currency trading, and the like. The millions of worthwhile projects, mean while, are starving for cash.

The poor get poorer also because the very rich hide their assets from governments, so governments have less money than they should to invest in their people.

There may be people on planets around other stars who are inconceivably richer than anyone on earth. It doesn't matter, because our economy isn't involved with theirs. But when you have people on earth who are inconceivably richer than 99.9% of everyone else here, it definitely caused economic problems.

Well, yes, to some extent it is a question of worth or value. A brownie and cookie operation might have a value of $1m, $2m, or $100 million, and in comparison to the efforts of people to save lives, not be worth much at all.

The point Sapientia is making (and I agree with his view) is that jobs that involve saving lives, or enhancing minds (teachers, for instance) are worth more than making money, and that those worthwhile jobs should be paid more.

In the world we live in, nobody will arrest you for making a million bucks when you sell your start up brownie making operation. That doesn't make your brownies as worth while as saved lives.

Sure. One of the reasons Apple has so much cash (250 billion dollars) is because I, and lots of other people, found their goods and services appealing. It isn't Apple's fault, obviously.

I would have less of a problem with a company like Apple (or 500 other ones) IF tax collection on their profits was higher, more efficient and more effective. As it is, a lot of revenue is lost owning to lobbying for favors and sheltering wealth in tax havens.

I wouldn't know -- I haven't visited your hypothetical scenario. However, the point remains: Just because your hypothetical business succeeded financially doesn't mean that you deserve to be hypothetically rich. Look, I don't want you to be poor at whatever you do in real life.

Take Bill Gates: Gates was very lucky that IBM bought his user-unfriendly operating system (DOS) for their new line of personal computers which were something of a gamble: Personal computers were not an established thing when they first came out. Neither were Apple's first products. Because he was lucky, we were stuck with that fucking operating system for a long time. I don't hate Microsoft or Bill Gates. Many of his products are fine, and once he figured out how to build a decent user interface, things were better. But I don't think Gates did anything so distinguished that he deserves to be the richest guy, or that Apple deserves to be the richest company. The same goes for Walmart, Amazon (which is now twice as big as Walmart), Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al.

You made a million dollars because you externalized the costs stemming from your business. Your homemade brownie operation was never inspected, and you caused an epidemic of intestinal distress amount your customers (you used ingredients you picked up at a warehouse that dealt in products damaged during shipping). 3 people died of heart attacks because your admittedly delicious, succulent candies were loaded with heart-stopping fat. Your workers were all illegal aliens from Switzerland where automation has resulted in a lot of laid-off chocolate workers. Consequently, you didn't have to pay them much. Plus, one of your workers lost a foot when it was caught in a chocolate milling machine. (And just where did that foot end up?) The county hospital spent 800,000 on his care, unreimbursed. Now the American People have to decide what to do with all these Swiss aliens who speak German, French, and Italian but no English.

We have anti-trust laws to ensure that wealth and power aren't too concentrated within specific corporations. — ProbablyTrue

Yes, the laws are on the books, but are honored in the breach fairly often. It may not be the case that one company, for instance, controls all television cable systems, but in fact a handful (like, two or three big ones and a bag of very small operations) control cable.

When you add in the cross direction of companies (called interlocking directorates) there is a practical monopoly for many industries.

What have they stolen? — Thorongil

Wealth and services which workers produced. Executives do not produce. They are there to insure profitability for stockholders.

Wealthy stockholders, in turn, are not productive either.

Paramedics, hospital cleaners, nurses, doctors, lab workers, public health workers, sanitation workers, food inspectors, sewer and sewage treatment plant workers all save lives by either treating disease, identifying disease, teaching the public how to stay healthy, or preventing disease by keeping cities clean. All these functions are critical services.

All of these jobs also pay way, way, way less than the CEOs of hospitals, food corporations, construction and excavation companies, bureaucrats at the top of civil services, and so on. CEOs do not save lives, and actually, they don't facilitate the saving of lives. Their job is to make sure that in commercial operations, they are as profitable as possible, and in government operations, making sure that corporations are not annoyed too much.

In general, highly paid topic executives and board members function as parasites in the bowels of companies which provide important services. These companies should be wormed regularly.

Sapientia views these facts through a frame of theft — Thorongil

Property is theft. Highly paid executives, receiving perhaps $40 to 100+ million dollars in compensation, are way way way more fucking thieves than the average workers. Especially since they frequently do not deliver greater values to shareholders, in proportion to their increased salaries. Boards of directors are, in general, families of thieves, so they approve these high salary packages.

Fact:

CEO pay in the U.S. has grown exponentially since the 1970s, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), rising almost 1,000 percent compared to a rise in worker salaries of roughly 11 percent over the same time period (adjusted for inflation.)

It wasn't always this way. In 1965, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in the United States stood at about 20-to-1, according to a 2015 report by the EPI.

But starting in the 1970s up through 2014, "inflation-adjusted CEO compensation increased 997 percent, a rise almost double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.9 percent growth in a typical worker's annual compensation over the same period." — https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/ceo-pay

Traumatic brain injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, alzheimer, and such are not all-or-nothing conditions. They generally occur on a scale from mild to severe. Some people with TBI, CTE, and other brain disorders are able to function quite well in ordinary situations. That doesn't mean they aren't seriously impaired, in general.

There are people with alzheimer disease who have written books, and there are people with alzheimer's who have no mental coherence or control over their bodily function. Then too, we don't know how much assistance the alzheimer book writer received. The effects of brain trauma may suddenly come to the foreground when a person is under stress, and they just fall apart.

A professor friend who does bio-research had a very bad concussion from slipping on ice. There was extensive bleeding, surgery was required, etc. He seems fine in ordinary situations, but he reports memory problems and problems managing the mass of details involved in research. His wife who has always worked with him in the lab has taken up the slack.

Even people without PTSD, TBI, CTE -- just people whose lives involve a lot of ordinary stress -- may display decreased mental functioning. Take them out of the stressful situations, and they return to normal.

Social skills may not be affected as much as cognitive functions. Some brain injured people display normal social affect. That really helps a great deal. But, others have difficulty socially -- and they tend to be judged as more severely affected. (Some of us have social difficulties without any brain injuries.)

Normal social behavior is pretty important.

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.