Category: Politics

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DEATH TAX

It’s un-American for the wealthy to leave fortunes to their children and grandchildren. It creates a caste system, which is what we fought a revolution to avoid. Under current tax policy anyone who dies can leave up to $5.5 million tax-free to relatives. Any excess above $5.5 million is taxed at 40%, generally speaking. It’s a bit more complicated, but taxation always is. Loopholes are important to rich people. They pay tax attorneys a lot of money to maintain their power and financial privileges.

Forty percent is not generous enough for people like our current president and his GOP associates. They want the “death tax” (as they derisively call it) eliminated. I’m arguing that the rate should be increased to 100%. Handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to spoiled brats is destroying the USA. A corrosive degeneracy is creeping into every sphere of the lives of the wealthy.

The billionaire who lived here died at age 82 from cancer in 2009.

It’s not like there is no precedent. It happened in ancient Rome. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon was required reading when I was a young man in the 1960s. Modern printing companies have consolidated the history into three volumes and into an abridged version of one.

Gibbon, an English historian, published his first volume in 1776, the birth-year of the USA. His six-volume masterpiece relied exclusively on original sources and, as the remaining five volumes flowed out over the following thirteen years, heavily influenced the builders of the American republic for seventy years beyond to the brink of the Civil War.

Gibbon disapproved of Catholicism and challenged its version of history and the role of martyrs. His history was controversial, which resulted in revisions that he continued to write until his death in 1794. His work remains controversial to this day for a number of reasons that aren’t going to be discussed in this essay.

Gibbon understood that cruelty and insensitivity in an entitled class of rulers contributed to Rome’s decline. When the barbarians walked into Rome, they were greeted as liberators by ordinary people. Rome fell like a rotting apple. Gibbon’s History was a warning to the future.

In modern-day America creative workarounds have enabled the wealthy to hand out to crazy relatives a lot of clout they didn’t earn. Yes, it’s difficult to stand up to mob bosses, crooks, and their families. It should be obvious that it’s impossible to accumulate billions of dollars legally, but many have. Behind every fortune is a dark secret — sometimes many secrets.

It’s true.

So much for freedom and equal opportunity. Freedom is easily lost to wealthy people who think that those who dare to challenge them are misguided misfits — lower and dumber than farm animals, in many cases.

Wealthy Grandpa, it turns out, had hundreds of legislators on his payroll, which bought him all the advantages of a modern-day emperor. His adult children — who haven’t done a darn thing but argue about which-of-them-should-get-what after Grandpa dies — seem to think that they deserve all the power and perks they didn’t work for and could never earn had they been born into the impoverished family whose mother got her start working in Grandpa’s sweat-shop.

Any American who has traveled outside their comfort zone has seen the poverty these children are experiencing. Is anyone doing anything about it?  This family lives in a state that rejected the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act.

I like math, so let’s do some. Divide the Gross National Product (the GNP ($17.1 trillion) by the population (309 million). Use a calculator, anyone who can’t figure it out on their fingers (just kidding!).

If incomes were equally distributed in America, a family of four would earn $221,000 per year. Yes, I agree, it’s not a lot of money — some folks would really suffer trying to raise a family on so little — but try to understand that half of black families earn less than $35,000; half of white families earn less than $70,000.

We have a fairness problem in America that runs far and deep. It includes:

  1. Segregation by race and income;
    .
  2. Unequal administration of legal protections and justice;
    .
  3. No access to health care for tens of millions (despite ObamaCare);
    .
  4. Discriminatory hiring, promotions, and firing based on race, political beliefs, and looks;
    .
  5. Defense by a mercenary military isolated from the general population — a major contributor to the collapse of the Roman Empire, according to Edward Gibbon);
    .
  6. Endemic corruption of politicians, church, civic, and business leaders.

Does anyone disagree with this list?

Go to Florida and try to find a safe place to live. Gated communities dominate the new housing markets. The majority of Americans don’t have enough money to gain access to this private world.

As for legal protections, anyone who has suffered arrest and spent time in custody knows that indigent people rot inside our jails, because they can’t afford bail or high-priced private attorneys. It’s a no-brainer.

Believe it or not, some of the incarcerated are innocent, but they are treated as guilty and forced to plea-bargain; many are unable to articulate a coherent defense. They end up with false criminal records that make staying out of future legal traps more difficult.

As for healthcare: Aided by the complicity of the Supreme Court, twenty-eight states refused to set-up health-care exchanges under ObamaCare. Twenty-one states (where five million low-income persons with no health care live) refused to expand access to the poor under Medicaid despite it being fully funded and paid for by the federal government.

Tens of millions of poor remain outside the care of our state and national health care system of hospitals, medical specialists, and general practice doctors. Wealthy GOP donors hope to destroy health care for the poor and lower-middle class with the help of our newest president, because they don’t want to finance medical aid for indigent people — despite all the privileges and protections that they accrue by forcing a myriad of taxes on middle income folks (like social security and sales taxes), which the wealthy avoid for the most part due to their immense incomes.

Also, many of the super-rich make their money in the stock market, where the capital gains tax rate places them in the lowest tier of tax-payers. It’s hard to believe, but it’s really true.

This scene reminds me of the oft-told Bible story about the day Moses returned from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments from God. He caught his people worshipping a golden calf. In this pic the calf is grey and the worshippers are white-supremacists. It’s Charlottesville, VA, Sunday August 13, 2017. 

Has anyone ever wondered why so many of the racist, alt-right, neo-Nazi, white-supremacists are clean-cut, shaved, symmetrical, and well-dressed men?

A visitor from the Philippines who attends a weekly Bible-study with my wife said that after watching the Charlottesville riots, clean-cut white American men now scare her. The reason these Nazis look the way they do is obvious, of course. They have good jobs!  Another reason is that they hide their nasty tattoos under expensive shirts, many of them.

Mega-millionaire business owners don’t hire people they feel they can’t trust. It’s that simple. Progressive, clear-headed men and women who care about fairness tend to dress and speak freely. They can be troublesome in a workplace, especially if they question unfair practices in pay, hiring, and promotions.

If you are wealthy and run a business, why would you ever hire anyone who thinks for themselves? Hire instead an ignoramus from the alt-right or the NRA. They follow their ideology like lemmings; discrimination against blacks, gays, women, and progressives doesn’t bother them.

Look at professional football, for an example. The billionaire owners of teams (many have the reputation of Neanderthals) hire players who have a PR (public relations) personality. Skill comes in second. Any high school coach in America could recruit a football team out of America’s prisons that could win a Super Bowl nine contests out of ten. Yes, their players would be poor and in some cases, inarticulate.

In America, talent on the field of sport doesn’t work that way. Compliance is a player’s highest virtue, then charisma (as evaluated by billionaire owners), then talent. Hard work? Anyone can be forced to work hard, and most do who aren’t born wealthy. Any thinking fan knows it’s true.

Let’s move on.

How come we don’t require people to fight for their country as a responsibility of citizenship? Everyone knows the reason. The wealthy don’t want to risk their kids in a potential combat where they might be wounded, maimed, or even killed.

In this photo from 2010, reservists are preparing for deployment to Iraq. They are dressed to protect themselves from chemical, biological, and nuclear attack.

And why should they? Hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged kids line up to sign-up for service “voluntarily”, because they need a job and, hopefully, an education they currently are unable to afford, even if they have a job. The military provides both, supposedly, but in recent years cut backs in benefits for non-officers have been enacted, because, once again, the wealthy don’t want to put up the money.

We hire a lot of kids from other countries to serve our military, both as “contractors” and as a “path to citizenship”. In conflict zones, like Afghanistan, the majority of soldiers on “our side” are foreign nationals. It’s the fastest route to failure according to Gibbon. Read his history, those who don’t believe it.

Many kids won’t re-enlist after their first tour. Military service, despite all the ads on TV, is a tour into hell for many of them. Living far from home and being under 24/7 control by officers who can throw anyone in the brig without trial for any reason is too much stress for most people.

The wealthy continue to degrade the benefits of service for the disadvantaged despite the fact that without a military to protect them, the wealthy could not hang onto their privileges. Common, everyday people are not as blind as the self-serving narcissists who refuse to do heavy-lifting, even as they order drones and the young alike into the killing zones of battle.

Moving to number six on the list — endemic corruption — let me ask this question. Is it honest to accept money for political favors? Just asking. Enough said. I’m not going to waste your time or mine discussing the obvious. An encyclopedia could be written about the history of corruption in the United States. At least one volume could be devoted to corruption during the twenty-first century, a short period of seventeen years.

Hillary Clinton warned America about the current president, but few believed her.

The most honest man in the FBI, James Comey, helped the Russians wreck our last presidential election by responding to fake news reports planted by Russian agents. Comey behaved like Inspector Javert in the Victor Hugo novel, Les Miserables. He pursued the Democratic nominee relentlessly during her campaign.

Comey grabbed Hillary by the jugular in the final week by reopening a closed investigation; by holding a news conference to smear what little reputation and dignity she retained. He undercut Hillary Clinton in the final week of the 2016 presidential election. Comey tore up the trajectory of the nation’s history in ways that won’t sit well with future generations.

Corruption disguised as virtue is vice. Any idiot can figure it out. And now our country is paying the price. We elected an unqualified buffoon to be our president. We hope against hope that someday he will change. Maybe someday he will.

Who knows?

Let someone else write about graft; about dishonesty; slander; lies; corruption. I haven’t got the energy. Who wants to risk death by lunatics for writing what everybody already knows to be true?

I don’t.

My general statement is this: the United States is hiding behind a pack of lies about its past, present, and future. It’s not so easy to tell the truth to people when large numbers of them start to read your stuff.

Fortunately for me, few people see my essays. Yes, I’ve been threatened, but thus far the threats have been manageable.

I don’t know what the solution is. I do know that our current president is making a bad situation worse and less safe for average people. Character is destiny, some say, and I believe it. The president lies and slimes and slanders pretty much everyone except sycophants. He plays the bad boy on an almost daily basis. It’s not going to end well for him or us, if we refuse to do what’s right.

We are so screwed. Read my essay, RISK, those who don’t believe it.

Risk has little to do with who is president, but admittedly some presidents increase risk. The verdict is still out on our current president.

I heard Elon Musk say that our country is like an aircraft carrier with a small rudder. The president sits by the rudder — it’s about a foot wide and three feet tall — and tries to steer the carrier to the right. By the end of his term, the carrier will not have turned much. However, its forward momentum is unstoppable. Are we headed toward the correct horizon? Does anyone know for sure?

It’s not good, peeps, what’s about to come. My advice is to take things a bit more seriously and prepare as best as anyone can for the problems that always arise from boorish leadership and its hostility toward minorities, the impoverished, and the disadvantaged.

Billy Lee

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ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM

Today, as I write, the orange man (now blonde) who stole our election on behalf of the Russians held a meeting with Russian diplomats. He allowed only one press organization to cover and release photos. I asked some reasonably well-informed, smart people what press organization they thought it might be. They answered, Fox News.

Of course, their answer was nonsense. Fox News is clueless. It always has been. It’s run by a group of non-native Americans (their countries of origin are China and Australia) who have their own idiosyncratic ideas about what they want the USA to become. Their women parade around on camera half-dressed; recent lawsuits have disclosed that executives use many of them for sex.

They pretend to be patriots and Christians. Of course, anyone who isn’t deaf, dumb, and blind knows they are neither. They aren’t reporters either. Cheerleaders for GOP politicians is a better descriptor.

No, the correct answer is TASS, the Russian news agency, which is an arm of the Russian government. TASS made the press announcements. They released the photographs. And of course, life goes on. No one seems to care. On Tuesday, the FBI director — who led the investigation into ties between our leaders and Russian mafia-oligarchs — was fired.

On Wednesday (today), we learned that it was the president — he remains under investigation — who fired the FBI director; he celebrated by meeting with his Russian friends. They wore black suits, as if to highlight their bonds of power. The president lied, it turns out, about both the process and his reasons — according to members of his own staff, who leaked to major news outlets.

The president’s bodyguard, who delivered the FBI director’s pink slip. Note: on 20 Sept. 2017, the bodyguard left White House service. The Editors

The FBI director learned that he had been dismissed when he saw the announcement on television — the place where most folks get the news they trust most.

Director Comey thought it was a prank. He was preaching to a new class of recruits somewhere in southern California. He read the announcement on the scrolling news ribbon.

Later, the leader of the president’s civilian bodyguards hand-delivered the director’s pink slip. One report claimed that the FBI head hired a commercial aircraft to make his escape home. (ABC News reported that he was able to secure a government plane.)

Unless the Russians go door to door arresting people, no one will ever care — certainly no one in the GOP, it seems. The typical American lives inside a psychotic bubble of evil. Some act like they’ve lost the ability to assess realistic threats to their way of life; to the things they hold dear. They’ve watched too much television, too many movies, too much pornography; they’ve explored too many fake news sites — sites designed by experts to manipulate them into believing absurdities.

The typical American takes too many drugs — some wake up with caffeine and amphetamines; some struggle through stressful work days that last way too long; they sustain themselves by swallowing tranquilizers or derivatives of heroin like oxycodone; some put themselves to sleep with barbiturates or alcohol or both. Some drugs are prescribed; they’re necessary. Others are illegal.

It doesn’t seem to matter. The appetite for drugs is massive; Americans spend billions of dollars each year for drugs they might be better off not taking. They might more realistically assess threats to their freedoms with minds less anesthetized.  Feeling good while living in a high-tech prison bult by billionaires is unnatural and, if anyone thinks about it much, sad and more than a little pathetic.

Howard Hughes (1905-1976) inherited the Hughes Tool Company. It became the nexus of a defense contractor empire worth billions of dollars.

Many Americans would strap syringes to their arms if they believed that no one would notice — as did Howard Hughes, the billionaire industrialist from yesteryear. Some readers may recall that our government confiscated his many businesses to make it easier to build and secure our country’s infamous war machine; the process drove Howard insane; he became dependent on drugs only they could reliably supply to keep him docile and compliant. He lived his last days wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet, because the tissues cushioned his arches and comforted him.

Howard Hughes watched movies all day long — movies he once produced; they often featured his long-lost Hollywood friends. When he felt sad, which was often, he tapped the end of the plungers in the syringes strapped to his arms. Sometimes he cried.

The Mormon FBI agents who baby-sat him allowed him to wallow. They left him to himself for the most part. He never traveled unless they took him. He never fled his gilded prison. His addictions made flight impossible. He might as well have been left to die on a sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He dropped off the face of the earth. Members of Congress, some of them, worried about him.

The public was asking, Did Howard Hughes die?  He had vanished from view like a ghost. No one ever saw him. He must be dead, some argued. Others knew better. They arranged a phone call with his handlers — to allay the fears of those few who believed that bad actors held him against his will. Powerful congress members wanted to know the truth and share it with the public.

During the call — which was broadcast to the world via speaker-phone before a full congressional gathering — Howard said that he was OK. He was alive. Someone asked, almost as an afterthought, if he was happy. His reply stunned Congress into silence. He answered, No… I’m not happy.

The phone called ended, and that was that. A few years later, Howard died. The coroner said that he found broken needles embedded in the bones of Howard’s arms and legs. He weighed less than ninety pounds.

Escape from Freedom; Amazon.com

Erich Fromm published the book Escape from Freedom in 1941. It was a required read in my high school during the 1960s, which was a long time ago — for some people. It seems like yesterday to me.

Fromm was a German psychoanalyst who argued that true freedom, if it ever came, would scare people so bad that they would embark on an unhealthy search for security; for certainty. The search would be a kind of escape; a frantic fleeing from the painful dissonance that the dissimilarity between people with disparate values can induce.

This discord intensified inside the USA during the past decade or so. Does anyone really want to go through the list of things that Americans hate about each other? Must I mention gay marriage, abortion, liberal politics, civilian access to weapons of war, religion, race, ethnicity, politics, viewing habits, Facebook rants, Twitter smears, and on and on?

People follow; they unfollow; they block; they unblock. They flip channels. They jump from Facebook to Instagram and back again. Nothing works; nothing helps.

Erectile dysfunction, for example, is a subject that has been thrust into everyone’s faces; into the deepest recesses of our subconscious minds. It’s relentless. It’s been discussed with commercial intensity on every media channel. People who watch sports programming can’t escape it.

No one can turn off the voices that are driving us mad, because the people who manipulate the public don’t agree with our points of view; with our sense of life. Do I suffer from erectile dysfunction?  No; Hell no!  I wish I never heard the term.

Do I yearn for a leader; a guide; someone to stand things up; to set things right?  Yes. Of course I do. But it seems like Christ Jesus is not going to visit anytime soon. Maybe a Second Coming is fantasy. Maybe we’ve been stood up. Maybe we need a Führer. Yeah, that’s it.

I said earlier that I borrowed this essay’s title from the book of the same name published in 1941 by the German-born psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. I don’t know if the book is required reading today or not; perhaps it should be; better books might have replaced it.

I considered a different title; I did. Maybe the Stockholm Syndrome would have been better. It’s about the ten percent of hostages who take on the values of their tormentors. I thought and thought. No; Escape from Freedom was best.

At least for now.

Billy Lee

Note from the Editorial Board: The details of the life of Howard Hughes included in Billy Lee’s essay are based on his memories of events as recorded in press accounts written and televised in real time as they were unfolding. Billy Lee’s memories do not in every case align with current historical accounts, because the history of Howard’s life has been reconstructed and fictionalized by many sources — according to Billy Lee. Billy Lee believes current accounts are revisionist, and in some particulars may in fact be inaccurate. Billy Lee witnessed the congressional interview with Mr. Hughes as it occurred.

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SEPARATION ACCELERATION

During his Thursday April 20th sports-talk television show, The Herd, Colin Cowherd asked a question he couldn’t answer. The question bothered him, he said. It puzzled him to the point that he asked viewers to message him with their perspectives; he felt discomfort not knowing. Something wasn’t making sense.

He said that he had spent time thinking about why it is that no matter what anyone does to bring about parity in sports or in life, nothing seems to work.

Despite rule changes and new regulations designed to do the opposite, good teams emerge that always seem to dominate their leagues season after season; great players leave the mediocre in the dust; even the gap between the rich and poor in society seems to be accelerating — despite safety-nets such as the Affordable Care Act, which have become pervasive and more accessible than ever before, at least in the United States.

Colin Cowherd is an outspoken sports commentator and media personality who recently signed with Fox Sports 1 to host a number of popular radio and television shows. He has published two books: You Herd Me and RAW.

Nothing works. The rich get richer faster than the poor; the talented become more talented; performance gaps become more pronounced; inequality increases. Nothing anyone does anywhere ever changes anything. Inequality persists and intensifies.

The Bible quotes Jesus to have said, The poor will always be with you. For some conservative Christians, that statement alone seems to make equality a hopeless aspiration; fairness will always be just out of reach. It’s pointless to try to organize government to address an unfixable problem.

It’s true that Jesus added, You can help the poor anytime you want, but most folks understand that it just isn’t going to happen. It never has in the past — not consistently.

People, many of them, simply don’t care. It seems like the more wealth a person has, the less they care about the poor and the ruined. Providing parity to teams, countries, and ordinary people who are challenged by adversity seems to be an impossible endeavor; a pipe-dream of weak-kneed liberals who lack common-sense.

But why? And is Colin right? Is it true? Are hearts as hard as Jesus implied; are people so cold, so ruthless, that no one has the will to make parity work; to make life a fairer process for everyone who lives it?

Is parity in sports and in life a fool’s goal?  Is the situation hopeless for the vast majority of people who find themselves living in squalor, in ill-health, and in hopeless despair?  Does anyone care enough to search for an answer? — if they find it, is anyone strong enough to set things right?

Well, I have an answer. I do. The problem is that I’m weak; I’m an anonymous blogger; I pontificate in a pile that is 7.4 billion humans high.

Most don’t blog. Most don’t own iPhones or computers. It doesn’t matter. The pile is a teeming mass of screamers. Only a few voices at the very top of the pile are ever heard by the crush of misery that groans beneath their weight.

I live somewhere very deep in that mass of misery. I broadcast from inside the pile.

No one in the pile cares what anyone thinks or even what the facts are. The top of the pile is covered by a slime of celebrities whose value is that they mollify the mess beneath them; they entertain and distract; they bring a flicker of pleasure to a miserable landfill of very uncomfortable humans who have no more chance of being heard or noticed than do sea mollusks dying in the Mariana Trench on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

This layer of celebrity slime is green because it lives closest to the sun. The dark mud of humanity that nourishes it lies beneath; the mud never sees the sun; many in the pile don’t believe the sun exists. During their lifetimes, they will never see it; they will never know anyone who lives green under a warm sun and gentle breeze. For them, the top of the pile is an unknowable, unreachable destiny; an incomprehensible fantasy.

The rewards for being clever are astronomical. There are no limits. The clever can hide behind walls and gates — beneath radio-frequency shielded domes of invisibility, hidden from the eyes of GPS and governmental surveillance. They live on the best land, in the best climates, among the most exclusive people; they dress well; they flash beautiful teeth, skin, and hair; they possess the most exquisite material possessions — luxury homes, cars, planes, boats, and art.

The last thing the green-slime people on the top of the pile want is to share their space with the organic mud that holds them up; that supports them; that pays them homage. It’s the very last thing they want.

Right now elites are reasserting their control over the entire earth. Billionaires are taking control of governments around the world and securing their advantages at a frenetic pace. Any idea of governance that even hints at equality, of parity, or fairness — any idea of sharing advantages — is ridiculed, suppressed, and ignored.

Old political ideas designed to bring fairness, like socialism, are laughed out of consideration. Simple solutions, like progressive tax policies and estate size limits, are never mentioned.

Only morons and losers would ever espouse something as unworkable as parity; it’s as unfair to the worthy-wealthy as equality, right?  Billionaires control media and education. They teach the pile, they mold and shape it, and the pile learns.

What do the mud people learn? The sun is out of reach; it’s not attainable; forget about it. Get on with life and forget, forget, forget. Hang your head, mud person; shuffle your feet, look down, not up. Ignore the obvious. Give up. Surrender to the weight of the pile above you.

Sleep.  Doze.  Ooze.  Despair.  In this life, abandon all hope, all who live in the pile. Go blind. No one above is going to reach down to help. Love is cold. Hope is dead. Forget what you think you know about what life should be. Give up on what you think is right. It’s not going to happen. Not in this life; not ever.

John D Rockefeller, 1839-1937. Portrait is a section from the John Singer Sargent painting of 1917.

Capitalism is just a modern word for slavery — surely everyone must know by now that it’s true. So is Oligarchy. So is Republic. So is any system anyone can name that codifies privilege and denigrates any form of compulsory sharing. Because — can we face unpleasant facts? — the wealthy don’t share well.

Old man Rockefeller used to throw dimes to the kids who chased his Model T down the streets of New York City. That’s not sharing. It’s nothing more than throwing peanuts to monkeys at the zoo.

Billionaires don’t share well. Not really. It’s why they are billionaires.

Those of us who live in the pile are slaves. Who will admit it?  Who can bear the shame of humiliation that crushes anyone who finally understands that the green slime is pushing them down. It ruins them; it sucks them dry; its roots grind like jackboots against their heads to keep the slime on top; to keep itself green, to keep itself in the light of the sun, which it worships like a god.

I don’t know much about professional sports, but I know about salary caps. The billionaire owners of teams have no qualms about limiting the amount that teams spend on their players. It has the effect of limiting what players can earn, while doing nothing to prevent team owners from squeezing as much money as their greed and clever machinations will allow.

No limits, no caps on owners. OK… agreed. On players?  Of course not!  Caps are for everyone; everyone who lives in the mud pile, anyway. Pro athletes might not believe it, but they find out soon enough — after a career-ending injury, retirement, or replacement by a more talented player. They too live in the pile.

The pile is a vertical column of filth that — if only it could be flattened like a pancake — would provide a huge surface of exposure to a greening sun; a sun that will shine parity and hope and pleasure into the lives of the vast swarm of suffering humanity, which desperately deserves to experience good things.

It’s possible that people have one shot at life. Admit that it’s possible. This life could be all there is. This could be it. When it’s over, it’s over. The end comes quickly.

The wealthy won’t live among the poor. They won’t fix any injustice unless the pile becomes restless; unless it shakes like an earthquake, nothing changes. The green slime believes it will live forever, that the sun will keep it alive, but in the end mud and slime share the same fate — certain death.

Then again, maybe people live more than once; maybe they live twice. It might improve the odds that life will be better the second time around if people reshape the pile.

Forge the pile into a shape more favorable to the majority of folks who will live in it or perhaps on it, someday. Make it better all around for the people who will come later, who might be — can anyone imagine it? — ourselves. Does anyone know anything at all about their own future for sure?

I believe that limits to income, estate sizes, and inheritances are the only effective way to flatten the pile and expose more people to the pleasures of life, which our creeds assert are these: every individual has a God given right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Success by any reasonable measure is making $20 million per year; not a dollar more. Success is accumulating $500 million; not a dollar more. No one should ever be permitted to inherit more than $5 million during their lifetime.

Caps like these encourage both innovation and the sharing of advantages. They force the successful to invest their excessive wealth in the lives of their employees, their communities, and their governments — federal, state, and local. Why? Because they can’t keep the excess. Caps prevent individuals like our current president, for example, from seizing power, because his enormous and unbalanced financial advantages made his presidential run unstoppable.

One more way to bring parity and fairness to real people: make segregation a felony. America segregates itself by both race and income. I can’t think of a more vile way to live.

Outlaw gated communities. All neighborhoods, all housing, all apartments must be compelled to provide living spaces for people from all income groups; from all ethnic and racial backgrounds. The problems we have understanding one another and living peacefully have the best chance of being solved for the well-being of everyone, including the wealthy, when people of all backgrounds live together, interact with one another, and share their unique understanding and experiences of life.

One more thing, and it’s important. The minimum income should be no less than one-thousandth of the maximum income. It means that no person, working or not, makes less than $20K per year. Businesses will have to pay higher wages to encourage people to work; that’s a good thing.

Oh yes, I almost forgot. Free health care can remove a lot of stress from a population. We can provide it, if we lower the salaries of doctors and health-care administrators. It’s counter-intuitive but lower salaries will, over time, attract better doctors and more patient-centered administrators. People who want to be rich can work in other professions. Why not?

Have I answered Mr. Cowherd’s question? Maybe not. Not yet. The dynamics of groups is complicated. It’s much easier to evaluate talent in individuals and distribute it more or less evenly into groups or teams.

It’s impossible to know in advance which players will become force multipliers on any given team. Where does the personal chemistry lie that can be identified and measured; that can transform a pack of randomly selected players into world champions?

If the owners knew, they could find it and use what they learn to create parity, where any given team has a 50/50 chance to defeat any other team on any given day.

How many times have winning coaches traded away a seemingly less talented player only to stand by helplessly as their team suffers melt-down? It happens a lot — more than some people might think. Sometimes a great player on a losing team is benched due to injury. Mysteriously, the team starts winning games.

Too many unknowns and variables make the task of predicting team performance based on individual performance evaluations impossible. When people run in packs like wolves, success or failure in the hunt can depend on the interplay among alphas, betas, gammas, and only God knows what other variables. It’s not easy.

People are not equal. It’s true. Teams are even more unequal no matter what anyone tries to do to strike that balance and get parity right.

But I want to make a larger point, which involves society and how people are punished and rewarded. Isn’t it obvious that less capable people are happier and more productive when they aren’t mistreated and humiliated?

Does any reasonable person mistreat their dogs and cats because they can’t spell their names or perform basic addition and subtraction? I don’t think so. Does anyone deny their pets health care, good food, and a comfortable place to live?  They don’t.

Ayn Rand (1905-1982) wrote the classic novel Atlas Shrugged, which portrays fictional inventors and industrialists as Christ figures.

Most billionaires won’t give the time of day to regular folks. They are predators, every one of them. They know it. They want to think well of themselves but being pigs means that they must work hard, many of them, to convince themselves otherwise. Many find hope in the books of Ayn Rand who preached when she was alive that selfishness is the highest virtue of humankind.

I hope that someday it will be a felony for an individual to possess a billion dollars — in the same way that possessing pain-killing narcotics can lead to the incarceration of Les Misérables.

I pray that someday life will change. People will learn to love others and share. Does anyone believe it is possible?

Billy Lee

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