Helping to Bridge the Divide

Politicians in Washington are wrestling over the budget again, with Democrats insisting on increasing taxes and Republicans wanting to cut spending. Democrats  tend to treat people with high incomes as cows to be milked and villains  to be punished. It is basically an article of faith with them. Since Republicans do not like higher taxes, we get an impasse and fearful warnings from people in the traditional media that those in Washington must compromise and find common ground or we are doomed.  Despite my aversion to higher taxes and taking those claims to heart  and  in the spirit of all of us just getting along, I would like to offer a proposal for increased revenues from some rich folks as the Democrats demand as a condition before considering cuts in spending.

 There is one class of high income people who produce no valuable goods and services,  get their incomes solely from actions of the government, and receive huge payoffs from processes often resembling the randomness of a lottery. I refer of course to trial lawyers.  So, to satisfy demands for more revenue,  I propose a 98% tax on all income to trial lawyers from lawsuit settlements above an annual amount of $150,000.  (As a matter of fairness, we would have to give a dollar for dollar credit for state and local income taxes, Medicare taxes, and Obamacare taxes to prevent the actual tax from being over 100%. We don’t want to be harsh here.) Republicans and ordinary citizens probably would find this plan fully acceptable and good for the country, and trial lawyers and Democrats should have no problem with it either. Trial lawyers assure us all the time that they are not grasping shysters out for the money, but rather disinterested altruists only seeking justice for wronged plaintiffs.  With this plan they would be able to pursue their selfless objectives in a manner more nearly unsullied by the taint of pecuniary interest. It should make them feel even more virtuous than they do now.  Some economists  might argue that the tax is too punitive and might discourage trial lawyers from working as much as before, making it harder for plaintiffs to find lawyers and perhaps even generating lower revenue from some lawyers than is being collected now. However, since Democrats are on record as believing rates of taxation have no material effect on how much a person works or tries to earn, they would have no reason to object on those grounds and every reason to support the plan on grounds of their stated notions of fairness. Additionally it would  give Democrats a chance to show the public they are pure at heart and uninfluenced by the interests of their most important  political donors. It should be ideal, from their point of view.

So having found something so fully in the spirit of the Democrats’ passion for revenue but nonetheless probably acceptable to Republicans, I offer this proposal, free of charge, to the president and the Democrats in the Senate in the hope of making some modest contribution to bridging the partisan divide. I know they will wish they had thought of it themselves. 

Guessing on a Puzzle

Ayn Rand is more than controversial. She is  hated – both in her lifetime and now thirty years after her death. The hostility is so intense, and the efforts to  ignore or misrepresent her so vigorous that it is interesting to speculate on why she inspires them. Some reasons seem obvious. Her ideas were unconventional, challenging, and threatening to powerful people and organizations. She enjoyed shocking readers and listeners with the apparently incongruous or outrageous -  not surprising for someone  who grew up on Nietzsche and Hugo but still disconcerting to some.  She did not  tolerate disagreement very well, and her criticisms of and attacks on opponents could be brutal. Particularly in her later writing, she often did not just call a spade a spade, but, as the old joke goes, insisted on labeling it a goddamned shovel. All of this can explain a lot of the hostility, but by no means all of it.  After all, one could say most or all of the same things about any number of thinkers and writers who are not so despised.

I think a part of the rest of the answer may be that she is dangerous in a particular way. The enlightenment ideas of liberalism and scientific rationality have a great many enemies, chiefly because they leave no room for the state as anything more than a limited organization of human beings or for transcendental knowledge or beings.  Historically, antagonists have found comfort in the belief  that, however valid these ideas might be, they are too dry and  analytical, and too lacking in stirring imagery and emotion  to appeal to too large a number of people. (This sort of criticism was one basis of the romantic reaction against the enlightenment  - with romanticism’s  focus on feelings, symbol, and passion, its fascination with primitive life, the Middle Ages, and the experience of myth and religion, and its glorification of the experience of a person’s being swept up in something greater than himself.) Then along came  Ayn Rand changing the game by presenting many of  those ideas in a manner unprecedentedly passionate and emotionally vivid and compelling. That could be worrisome to people.  Since fear and hatred often go together, it  could also explain a few things.