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Climate Change: Why we failed.

The Atlantic published an article by Ed Yong entitled America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral (about the US COVID-19 failure) and I was struck by how much each of the conceptual errors he mentions also describe how the US failed to address climate change in time. While it certainly is never too late to mitigate climate disaster (lessen the devastation), our opportunity to prevent climate disaster passed quite a while ago — certainly before this year, but probably further back than that. Now, we have to move the goalposts from “stop climate disaster” to less comfortable options, like “prevent human extinction”. If we are going to do that, we can’t keep making the same mental mistakes we’ve been making since the 1970’s.

Serial Monogamy of Solutions

As with COVID-19, the US has only been able to focus on one possible approach to climate change at a time, which is unfortunate, because what is required is a massive, systemic approach addressing every aspect of the problem in a way that fits with the science. Instead, we have hyperfocused on specific things (like renewable energy, reducing use of fossil fuels, or electric cars) without bringing all the factors together. In my example, electric cars are not meaningful unless they are charged using renewable energy, and that renewable energy isn’t meaningful unless the same energy value of fossil fuels stays in the ground.

False Dichotomies

As with COVID-19, Americans have severely lacked imagination and nuance when it comes to solutions. The biggest problem is that most Americans think they’re making a choice between democracy with fossil fuels, and totalitarianism without fossil fuels. Perhaps it is because we have such a narrow view of what is good, or because we don’t understand the intricacies of climate change, or maybe it is just because so many of us have been brainwashed into believing that the only viable way to run the world is to feed our individual and collective selfishness. In fact, ignoring climate change — and continuing to increase our use of fossil fuels — has made the poverty and authoritarianism that Americans feared much more likely. And though the population of this planet is going to drop, this isn’t going to be some quick die-off like in a superhero movie, but rather a slow, dull, grinding collapse where most of the population drop comes from people choosing not to have children.

The Comfort of Theatricality

Americans love a sticker that tells them everything is fine, whether that is a starburst on a food package that says, “All Natural!”, a label on the door that says, “Sanitized!”, or something telling us that this particular approach is safer for the climate. It allows us to relax and just stop thinking about that bad thing — which means no longer taking personal responsibility for it. The latest example of this for climate was a startup that was going to build some robots that would go out into the ocean and clean up the plastic. This was a nice idea, and they received a lot of investment money, but ultimate, there’s no profit to be made from cleaning up an area that no one owns, so the startup is no more. But more importantly, while plastic cleanup is a good idea, it had absolutely no effect on climate change, which is the existential threat we should be worrying about. Amazon has a commercial in rotation on broadcast TV right now talking about how they’re going to become a net zero producer of atmospheric carbon — the problem is that they don’t let you know that they will do this with “carbon credits”. Carbon credits means that the carbon still gets produced — it’s an elaborate shell game.

Personal Blame Over Systemic Fixes

Climate is a global problem, and it will take a global, collective approach to mitigate it. If you stop buying gasoline, for example, that won’t lead to less gasoline being burned; rather, it infinitesimally drives down the cost of gasoline, and someone else will just drive a little bit more. The market sees the energy you didn’t burn, and takes it to use it for growth. Speaking of Amazon, there are people living out in the Amazon rain forest, living carbon neutral lives, and they will be destroyed before most Americans

The Normality Trap

People like to blame conservatives for climate change, but there’s no group of people who cling to normalcy more than Democratic party voters. We’ve been heavily dependent on fossil fuels for an extremely long time, so freeing ourselves from them necessarily means getting away from what is normal, and that’s going to be uncomfortable. If our collective response to this challenge is to just give up because we can’t stand the thought of varying from what we now see as normal, then that will likely mean human extinction.

Magical Thinking

Climate change mitigation requires us to somehow achieve negative carbon emissions. Given that we haven’t even figured out how to achieve anywhere close to zero carbon emissions, the suggestion that we’ll will inevitably achieve negative emissions seems insane, but that’s exactly what Americans are assuming. The difference between science fiction and fantasy is that science fiction pretends it is possible in some distant future — which is why science fiction without a concrete plan using workable technology is really just a fantasy. The fantasy that people are clinging to is called “carbon sequestration” but we still don’t have any system of carbon sequestration that scales up enough to achieve net zero global carbon emissions — and remember, we have to achieve significantly negative carbon emissions. We have to start accepting that because we failed so dramatically, we must make hard choices and following through with them.

The Complacency of Inexperience

In all of human history, we’ve never come this close to completely killing ourselves via a climate process with a 30-year lag. So, as with COVID-19 in the US, we really don’t feel the urgency required to take action now. We’re still looking around waiting to see what happens so we can decide what to do. If we’d lived through this before, we’d know how serious the problem is and likely would have already done everything required.

The Reactive Rut

COVID-19 takes weeks to show itself in a population, so by the time you react to an uptick in cases, it’s already too late. Climate change is the same, but instead of a 2-week lag, it takes 30 years to see the results of the mistakes you made today. Yet, here we are waiting to see what happens next so we can all decide what to do about it instead of listening to the climate experts who have been warning us about this since the 1970’s.

Habituation to Horror

You’ve heard the metaphor about the frog who gets boiled because they don’t notice that the water they’re in is being slowly heated to boiling. In real life, a frog reaches a temperature threshold, and then jumps out. Humans on the other hand are so incredibly adaptive that we’re the ones who will end up being boiled to death. (OK, it’s true that all the amphibians will be killed by our recklessness first.) We’ve already habituated to a ridiculous amount of horror. I suppose it will be interesting to see if we ever notice how destructive we are and jump out of the proverbial pan. (The pan is capitalism.)

Liberal vs. Neoliberal

This post is part of our series defining words. Defining words might seem trivial, but one of the most effective strategies authoritarians employ is redefining what specific words mean. The most famous example of this might be when the Nazis tried to redefine socialism. At the time, socialism was extremely popular, but just like today, most people weren’t paying enough attention to really understand it. That made it easy for the Nazis to add the word “national” to create “national socialism” which sounds like a kind of socialism even though it is exactly the opposite. The confusion they created didn’t just help the Nazis of the 1930’s — it continues to help authoritarians today.

The words “liberal” and “neoliberal” are being redefined in the same way today. If you talk to a self-described conservative, they’ll tell you that “liberal” is a synonym for “socialist” which is a synonym for “communist” (not true). And if you ask them to define “neoliberal”, they’ll tell you it’s the same as a liberal but even more “communist”. Again, that’s not what it means.

Liberal

The ideas we call liberalism today started out in England in the late 1600’s. They still had a king at that time, and though most people didn’t want to get rid of the monarchy, they did want normal people to have some rights, so they created a constitution that limited the power of the king, declared that the elected government was a higher authority than the king, and created a bill of rights. They still had a monarchy, which is a form of authoritarianism, and the elected government wasn’t very democratic at all, but this was a huge step up.

So that’s how liberalism started: Just the people deciding that normal individuals should have some rights. Liberalism has some inherent flaws. For one thing, it easily coexists with authoritarianism – the idea is that if the people have a list of rights, actual power can remain within a single class of people instead of being shared by all. In addition, it only sees government as a source of tyranny and doesn’t recognize the fact that there are other types of power that can by tyrannical.

Since its invention, conservatives have been opposed to liberalism because they like the traditional form of society. When you give people the option to do whatever they want, a significant number of them will not behave the way tradition would like. Conservatives actually liked the monarchy – they really believed the rule of the king was ordained by God and they were terribly offended that the law would shift power away from God. Modern British conservatives still like the monarchy, which is why British taxpayers spent $86 million on supporting the royal family in the previous fiscal year, even though the British royal family is worth around $88 billion.

This tension between individual rights and tradition exists in the US as well, with liberals asking for individuals to have unlimited rights to self-expression and religious belief, and attempting to establish truly equal treatment under the law, while conservatives only want the freedom to express traditional ideas and practice their traditional religions, and support different levels of protection for different classes of Americans (for example, complete legal protection for police officers, and absolutely no protection for anyone they say is not a citizen, which includes people who were not born here, but sometimes includes people who are trans, Black, Jewish or even Native American).

Neoliberalism: Where liberalism went wrong

If you take the long view of history, every major social change involves one class of people taking power from the previous ruling class. In the early “slave era” there were enslaved people and lords, with no justification for slavery but violence. Next, came the feudal period; slavery had not worked out because the enslaved people rebelled, so a new class of people added a religious justification to get working people to go along with their own exploitation. Liberalism was the idea that helped people move from feudalism to the next order: capitalism. It did so by adding another justification: That only a government can be tyrannical. Based on this logic, an individual who is not part of the government cannot by a tyrant even if they literally own everything.

Capitalists identified this workaround early on, and they were able to steer the liberal movement away from freedom for everyone and instead toward increasing their own power. In place of the ineffable plan of God, they used the Invisible Hand of the Market as their justification for abusing working people. They grabbed as much power as they could, but comforted working people by pointing to the Bill of Rights and various contractual agreements as indicators that working people have rights. Again, liberalism can coexist with authoritarianism of all kinds if it has a laundry list of rights to make things seem OK; democracy is not required. In fact, liberalism tends to laugh at the idea of democracy, saying true democracy is an unattainable utopian dream, so it is best not to even try to create it. We are supposed to be content with a list of protections instead of holding true power — even though the power to grant us those protections lies with the same people who would abuse us.

Liberals try to take credit for the great advances toward democracy that took place in the industrial age, but if you look a little closer, liberals are not usually the vanguard of those movements. Instead, “dangerous leftists” are the ones leading the charge toward democratizing power.

Neoliberalism elevates the ideology of market capitalism to the status of a religion that makes capitalists the avatars of God. With the market being the will of God, everything it does is justified, no matter how horrific or insane. If the government sells all the water in my area to capitalists, and the capitalists take all that water to make a product that I can’t afford, and I and everyone I know dies of dehydration, that isn’t a crime against humanity – rather, it is a sad but ultimately good outcome of following the will of God. This may seem absurd, but “water privatization” is a real problem all over the world, including in the US.

Neoliberalism tries to turn everything into a problem to be solved by the market – not just business, but government, education, and every other aspect of human behavior. Even our sexuality is frequently subjected to an economic analysis. If you’re sitting there thinking, “Well, yes, everything should be subjected to an economic analysis – economics is a science and science is good,” then your mind has been colonized by this meme. There’s a lot I could say about it, but in the interest of time, I’ll just say that ethical behavior is not usually the most economically advantageous behavior, and if your economics assume ethical behavior without teaching ethical behavior, what you will get is evil that’s been justified by math.

Neoliberalism believes that the market is the will of God, but to follow the will of God, the people participating in the market need data. Without data, the actions of the market are chaotic; with perfect data, the market perfectly reflects the will of God (or so neoliberals believe). Therefore, neoliberals are obsessed with counting beans. Some jobs have become so beholden to bean counters that most of the job is creating bean reports. Once the beans have been counted and analyzed, then workers receive important guidelines from the supervisors on how to be more “efficient” which doesn’t mean efficient, but rather means maximizing the number of dollars in the pocket of the capitalist. Again, if you’re thinking, “But maximizing dollars is the same as efficiency,” then your mind has been colonized by this meme. There are serious limits to the ability of money to accurately reflect value, because the only thing money can really reflect is the values of human beings with their limited knowledge and inherent fallibility; moreover, markets reflect the values of wealthy people far more than people who don’t have much money.

There is a relationship between identity politics and neoliberalism, it just isn’t quite what conservatives claim. As I’ve said, neoliberalism claims that we can achieve a perfectly rational market that adheres to the will of God, and as such is completely morally good. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and the myriad of other discriminatory behavior that is traditional in our society are all irrational and therefore are usually considered to be an affront to the market. Neoliberalism frowns upon them because they are irrational – not because they hurt people. It is just as likely to actively ignore human prejudices as it is to try to do something about them. One example would be the fact that women in the US are paid about 82 cents for every dollar men are paid. We can try to fix this somehow or we can justify it by saying that women choose to stay home with their children, thus (irrationally) opting out of the market.

As a neoliberal institution, the Democratic party’s solution to the wage gap has been to promote affordable childcare, which brings up another of neoliberalism’s characteristics: It tries to make all workers functionally the same; it claims that with training and gumption, any worker can perform any job. We are each a generic cog that can be adapted to any machine. This thinking reduces the role of a mother to the producer of new labor, denying the emotional relationship between them and their child. It also denies the emotional relationship between a father and their child, but that happened much earlier on, so we don’t even think much about it today. We can imagine other solutions, like the state paying parents to perform the important job of parenting, but those are not neoliberal solutions because they reduce the flow of cash into the capitalists’ pockets — and when profits are reduced, that’s called “inefficiency”.

Racists can (and do) use neoliberalism and its focus on economic logic to reinforce racist institutions. For example, they may say that the police aren’t harassing people in a poor, predominantly Black neighborhood because police are only going there because that’s where the crime is – so in the economic analysis, crime is the demand which the system supplies with police violence. Therefore, the institution of policing is not racist. But the truth is that if the police spend all their time in a given neighborhood, they’ll inevitably find more crime there than they find in places where they aren’t looking. That’s not all – the police are only able to see particular kinds of crime that are both relatively trivial and more common among people who are poor. The truly horrific crimes require money and power to execute, and it is so difficult for police to do anything about those crimes, that they don’t even try.  

In conclusion:

Liberalism is the idea that normal people should have a list of rights and freedoms, but not direct control of power. Liberals demand rights; they do not demand power.
Neoliberalism is the ideology of the superiority of market capitalism, and, by extension, capitalists – an extension of liberalism that justifies capitalists as the ruling class.

Paul Kengor and the New Satanic Panic

I noticed an article in the National Review today — a rebuttal by Paul Kengor of a negative review also published in the National Review about his book The Devil and Karl Marx. You can already tell from the title that it is yet another element of conservative culture’s inevitable return to freaking out about “Satanism”.

Back when I was a kid, we had a lot of Satanic panic. I’ll just hit a few interesting examples. One narrative was about Dungeons and Dragons “turning you to Satan”. At the time, I had a group that I played D&D with that included two Evangelical Christians – both remained Christian and one grew up to become an Evangelical minister; if it was a gateway to Satanism, it didn’t work very well. I remember a girl I met my freshman year of college telling me that a Satanic cult had kidnapped her friend, tortured her, and then healed her wounds with the power of Satan (conveniently destroying the evidence of abuse) before returning her home. Candy and/or apples full of razor blades given out by Satanists at Halloween is something that never happened, but it took decades for me to learn that it had all been bullshit. Now, thanks to Bernie Sanders doing quite well in the last two elections, the people who lie awake at night worrying about Satanism have decided that the Devil is socialism.

The review by Cameron Hilditch did the smart thing, and dismissed the book entirely. That’s smart for conservatives because the more you look at it, the more insane conservatives look. I want you to look really closely at it. Get a copy and read it. Make Paul Kengor lots of money so he can write more unhinged books and bring these colorful delusions out into the light. But in the meantime, I feel compelled to make a half-hearted defense of these attacks on Marx and add a criticism of Kengor’s criticism to our national conversation.

First off, he says, “This is why our side loses.” (in reference to Hilditch failing to show enough conservative solidarity). But the thing is that Kengor’s side — that of using religion as an excuse for the exploitation of human beings — is winning and has a long history of winning. Yes, those who want justice and liberty have been losing a bit less in the modern era, but to suggest that Kengor’s side is involved in a pattern of losing is a paranoid delusion.

Next, we learn that the book’s perspective isn’t just that of a conservative, but a conservative Roman Catholic. Left-leaning Catholics have been among the most moral and courageous of proponents of freedom and justice not just in the US but in the world, while simultaneously, conservative Catholics have long had a tendency to see Satan in everything that makes them uncomfortable. It’s clear which one Kengor is.

Then, he starts to become unhinged. No surprise. He goes on at length about how Marxism is “obviously unworkable and astonishingly asinine” and an “evil” that “creates mass poverty, despair, and death”. (I disagree.) Just when you think he might cite a fact or a statistic, he regurgitates the 100 million figure. If you’re not familiar, there’s something called The Black Book of Communism that says communism has killed 100 million people. Not even the co-authors of that book agree with that figure, and accepting that figure requires you to blame various communist governments for natural disasters, economic warfare waged against them by capitalist nations, and wars against fascism and invaders. Nazis killed by the Russians are literally included in that figure. Taking a similar approach with capitalism would give it a much higher death toll – certainly higher than “communism”.

But let’s talk about whether Marxism is “workable”. The majority of the writings of Marx are criticisms of capitalism. Marx’s writings are boring, overly wordy, and highly hypothetical, yet no legitimate expert on politics or economics dismisses those criticisms; they may disagree about some details, or believe that capitalism can be reformed to work in a way that is beneficial, but they don’t dismiss those criticisms. Anyone who dismisses those criticisms of capitalism — which again are most of what Marxism is — is an ideologue and clearly up to something. So it isn’t about whether it is “workable”.

Regarding the last 10% or so — the part where Marx suggests solutions to capitalism — and whether it might be workable or not, I can tell you that even self-described Marxists are constantly debating solutions to the problems of capitalism. It’s just like how Sigmund Freud was a brilliant analyst of human minds and we all agree that he is the Father of Psychiatry, but no psychiatrist today would follow his advice for treating a patient. So what proposed solutions of Marxism is Kengor even criticizing? Marx himself famously said, “I am not a Marxist,” because he wasn’t a fan of the more violent approach to achieving communism that was popular in France (around 1880), so if it is soviet communism he is up in arms about, Kengor is barking up the wrong tree.

The critic of Kengor’s book (Hilditch) makes a good point, that the way to persuade people away from the left is to somehow convince them that an ideology based on unbridled selfishness (capitalism) is somehow more morally good and effective toward achieving morally-desirable ends than an ideology based on the concept of community good. No matter what type of Marxist ideology you choose, I don’t think it can be done – which is why Kengor would rather rave about Satanism than take that approach.

Finally, we get to the real meat of Kengor’s argument: That Marx was a Satanist! He says there are a bunch of poems and plays by Marx that are “rife with satanic elements”. To be clear, he’s not saying that Marx promotes Satan directly or that Marx claimed that his religion was Satanism — no, just that his more arty works were “rife with satanic elements”. From the perspective of American conservatives, a man choosing to sit to pee is a Satanic element, so pardon me if I don’t care.

During Marx’s time there was, in fact, a big uptick in the popularity of “the occult”; these were pseudo-recreations of older pagan religions that had long been destroyed by Christians beyond the potential for recovery. They aren’t Satanism, but some Christians like to conflate the two. Marx was an atheist and as such didn’t believe in Satanism; it’s Christians who believe Satan is real (and most Victorian era occultists were also Christians). If Marx’s artistic projects contained occult elements, it’s because all the artistic writing of the time (early 1900’s) contained them and it doesn’t indicate that he was promoting Satan; it was just the fashion of the time. Saying that Marx is Satanic because he used these kinds of ideas is the equivalent of saying that Cardi B, Trace Adkins, or Destiny’s Child are Satanic for talking about butts in their work — which is honestly something Kengor probably also does.

One of my pandemic masks is a reject from my wife’s collection because she doesn’t like how it fits. The fabric is a print with tiny little occult objects on it: a book, a chalice, magic wand, dagger, Ouija board pointer, and many others. My wife says it is “spoopy” which she tells me is a combination of “cute” and “spooky”. Are these “satanic elements”? Satanic panickers quite often cite child rape as a satanic element, and yet the institution that is associated with more of that than any other on this entire planet is the Roman Catholic Church that Kengor is so fond of. I find a few spoopy things on a mask or sprinkled through a poem to be a lot less serious than child rape. So which is the most Satanic: Marx’s poems and plays, my pandemic mask, or the Catholic church?

And which person is more Satanic? Marx, me, or Kengor? Before you answer, please consider that until May of this year, 60% of Catholics still supported Donald Trump, who is truly one of the most immoral leaders of the modern era, so there’s no relationship between identifying as any particular kind of Christian and being a moral person. Kengor undoubtedly still supports Trump because he’s under the false impression that Biden secretly has a (Satanic?) altar to Marx in his bedroom.

Please don’t think I am disparaging Catholics, though. As I said, Catholics have been some of the most moral and courageous fighters for liberty and justice. I think the answer here is that while it would be hard to find a better teacher to follow than Jesus, there are plenty of Hypocrites around, loudly announcing their faith, claiming that their specific faith is the most pious, and accusing others of heresy. If you want to identify the people whose ideas you should listen to, look at their actions. Who is actually doing something to make the world a better place? It isn’t Paul Kengor – he’s busy spewing bullshit about things he doesn’t understand and sewing the seeds of conflict. The Pope himself noted that it is better to be an atheist who does good works than a Christian who does not, even going so far as to say that atheists who do good are redeemed through Christ. I don’t know if that applies to Karl Marx or not, but I can say that he saw human suffering and wanted to do something to make the world a better place. The approach of Paul Kengor – to tell people that this is as good as the world can be, so you should just shut up and stop complaining – does not lead to good works.

This post is a response to It’s High Time We Tell the Truth about the Evils of Marx and Marxism by Paul Kengor.

Marginal Tax Rates

Years ago, I somehow ended up at a dinner party with a brain surgeon. He’d been having some trouble at work and was looking for a new job. He mentioned that there was a job in another state that paid $50k/yr more, but it wasn’t worth it, he said, because it would put him in a higher tax bracket. There’s a good chance that he didn’t understand marginal tax rates, and he’s not alone — there seem to be very few people who do. Marginal tax rates are perhaps the most important tool toward peacefully resolving the many practical issues Americans face today.

Let’s consider a pretend country called “Smurfia”. Smurfia only has two tax rates: 1% for $99,999 and below, and 37% for $100,000 and above. I’ve used 37% because that is the top US marginal tax rate. There are no deductions or credits available. Bob is paid $20,000 per year, so he is going to pay $200 per year in income tax; 1% of $20,000 is $200. Stephanie is paid $99,999, so she is going to pay $999 per year. Ernie is paid $100,000 per year. This does NOT mean that Ernie pays $37,000 in taxes. Ernie pays 1% on the first portion of his income ($99,999, so $999 in tax) and 37% on the second portion ($1, so 37 cents in tax). Ernie pays $999.37.

With a marginal tax rate, you never bring home less money because you were paid more money. That can’t happen. (There are snafus like this for other aspects of taxation, but not for marginal tax rates.)

So what are the US marginal tax rates? What are the margins and what are the rates?

SingleMarried Filing JointlyMarried Filing SeparatelyHead of Household
10%$0-$9,875$0-$19,750$0-$9,875$0-$14,100
12%$9,876-$40,125$19,751-$80,250$9.876-$40,125$14,101-$53,700
22%$40,126-$85,525$80,251-$171,050$40,126-$85,525$53,701-$85,500
24%$85,536-$163,300$171,051-$326,600$85,526-$163,300$85,501-$163,300
32%$163,301-$207,350$326,601-$414,700$163,301-$207,350$163,301-$207,350
35%$207,351-$518,400$414,701-$622,050$207,351-$518,400$207,351-$518,400
37%$518,401+$622,051+$518,401+$518,401+

In the US, things are a lot more complicated than Smurfia because we have tax deductions and tax credits, but we can apply the same example to these real marginal tax rates. Below are Bob, Stephanie, and Ernie’s income, marginal tax, rate, and the amount they pay in taxes. They are all filing as “single”.

IncomeMarginal RateTax
Bob: $20,00012%$2400
Stephanie: $40,12522%$4815
Ernie: $40,12824%$4816

Ernie makes $3/yr more than Stephanie, and ends up paying $1/yr more in income tax.

Thanks to deductions, none of the people in my example will end up paying very much tax. Bob won’t pay anything. You may have heard that roughly half of tax filers don’t pay any tax. Most of that is because of people like Bob who don’t get paid very much money (he’s paid about $10/hr, so still better than minimum wage), but a significant chunk of that is due to very wealthy people who are able to use tax deductions and credits to their advantage.

There are two interesting things about our current marginal tax rates, though. First off, we are in an age when we have people making millions of dollars per year — and even millions of dollars per hour — and yet the margins stop at $518,401 (for people filing as single). In addition, the top rate was much, much higher during the time period when the US economy had massive growth (92% in 1952, 91% from 1952 to 1961), and that growth benefited both wealthy and working class people. That’s not a coincidence, but rather a direct causal relationship. More reasonable marginal tax rates benefit our whole society, making it more healthy and stable.

Given these two issues, how could our marginal tax rates be better? In the context of the severity of the issues we’re facing, an extremely high top rate would be appropriate — perhaps the 95% that the US had as the top rate from 1944-45. We also need those margin points to be spread out a bit since we have people who are being paid so much more than they were in the 1960’s. That 95% tax rate might work well at $5,000,000/yr and above rather than trying to apply it to the $518,401+ income level where the top marginal rate currently falls. In fact, by repositioning the margins, you could effectively lower the tax rate for most taxpayers, have more revenue for government services, and start correcting the ludicrous inequality that we see today.

Here’s what that might look like:

Single
10%$0-$12,000
12%$12,001-$60,000
22%$60,001-$100,000
24%$100,001-$200,000
32%$200,001-$350,000
35%$350,001-$700,000
37%$700,001-$1,000,000
45%$1,000,001-$2,000,000
75%$2,000,001-$5,000,000
95%$5,000,001-$15,000,000
99%$15,000,001+

I only included the “single” filing category since I’m just spitballing here, and you get the idea. An expert with access to detailed taxpayer data would be required to really figure out where these margins should lie.

Are these marginal tax rates politically possible? Probably not right now, but we need to have idealized goals so we know what we’re working toward. If I were an aspiring weightlifter, for example, I can’t expect to walk into the gym and lift my goal weight today. I have to work toward a big goal while also setting up smaller goals along the way. I wouldn’t want to just give up on the big goal before I even started putting in the work.

There are also a lot of taxes out there that are regressive. Take, for example, taxes on food purchases. Since everyone eats about the same amount of food, taxes on food end up placing a very heavy burden on people who have a lower income, but effectively no burden on the rich. The more general sales tax isn’t quite as regressive, but it’s still regressive. Property tax is quite regressive, having no regard for the income of the person paying. The anti-tax propaganda we see in the media is focused on the income tax because it is a progressive tax — it places a bigger tax burden on the rich than on working class people — and because wealthy people own the media.

Censorship Under Late-stage Capitalism

There are a lot of things conservatives almost get right, and the nature of censorship in these times — under late-stage capitalism — is one of them. We love to laugh at them when they complain about Twitter or Facebook censoring them, but it isn’t because they’re wrong about the censorship; rather, it is because they actively promote a world that allows this kind of censorship.

If you were around in the ’90’s and early 2000’s, you witnessed the beginning and end of a truly free Internet. Back then, the Internet was likened to a new world that people were colonizing, but colonialism means destroying a civilization that was already there — this was something much better. It was as if we’d discovered a whole new world, lifeless but aggressively supportive of new life. In those early days, the Internet was real freedom — not the fake freedom of right-wing libertarianism, but the very real freedom of libertarian socialism. People built incredible things that were not dependent on huge corporations — even going so far as to use their home computers as servers.

All that changed when capital realized it could use the Internet to make money — huge piles of money. Now, normal people cannot afford to have a truly independent web presence, and the most effective platforms are controlled by neoliberal corporations and their billionaire owners. (Almost no one will see this post, for example, if it doesn’t end up trending on one of those platforms.) It’s not surprising that those platforms are hostile toward anything that threatens capitalism. Today, the flow of information has been returned to the preferred model of the elites, flowing from the elites down to the common folk, and containing a mixture of truth, strategic omission, and outright lies. They’ve again managed to poison the meanings of words so that it is difficult to even talk about what it would be to oppose their power.

Anarchy does not mean chaos. Socialism does not mean fascism. Freedom does not mean the freedom to oppress other people with your economic might. Neoliberal is a real word despite what your spellchecker might claim. And yet, if you use any of those words, you have to spend a great deal of time explaining what they mean or most people (both liberal and conservative) won’t even understand what you are talking about.

So what is censorship? From the perspective of neoliberalism (the ideology of late-stage capitalism), censorship is when the government prevents the expression of an idea; so, only the government is capable of censorship. In contrast, individuals — not matter how powerful — and corporations — which they define as an extension of individual power — can never be guilty of censorship. This perspective is part of culture that most people take for granted, so they don’t even see it. It’s based in “property rights” — the idea that you can do whatever you want with your property no matter who it hurts — and “the invisible hand of the market” — the idea that market forces are always morally good. On closer examination, these are silly ideas. Clearly, if I have a club that is my property and I hit someone with it, I’ve caused harm. Clearly, if the market promotes slavery (which it does), the market is not morally good.

The true meaning of censorship is whenever anyone is stopped from expressing an idea, and that includes expressions of ideas that are blocked from reaching an audience. The claim that economic power can’t be oppressive is ridiculous. The claim that only government power can be oppressive is ridiculous.

Capitalists have managed to convince normal Americans that the rights of capital are the same as the rights of working class people, even though working class people don’t control the staggering power of capital. In terms of Internet censorship, the result is capital censoring people even while most of those same people are demanding the right of capital to censor people. As with anything else, it’s this dramatic power differential between capital and the people that is the problem, but in late-stage capitalism this differential is magnified because elected politicians are controlled by capital, and so the state itself is a tool of capital (rather than of the people). If conservatives would take the position that censorship is wrong no matter who does it, that the power of capital should be curtailed because it allows the wealthy to oppress the rest of us, their cries wouldn’t be so funny.

What I’d propose to you, though, is that we should stop laughing at them and instead admit that their outrage at corporate censorship in service of an oppressive ruling class is completely valid — it’s their deeply troubling misattribution of blame for this censorship that we need to address. That brings us to Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

There’s a lot of subtlety in that paragraph, but I think it is clear that some people are not “prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument”; however, there are still some conservatives out there who are, and it’s imperative that we try to talk to them. On the other hand, genocide, slavery, and other end-goals of fascism are not “rational arguments”. When Facebook chose to lump anti-fascist organizations in with fascists and conspiracy theorists, this was censorship and an escalation of the conflict between the established neoliberal order and — literally — democracy, justice, freedom, and morality. It’s yet another sign that the super rich would rather risk social collapse caused by destructive neoliberal policies than do the right thing and give up even a little of their enormous, oppressive power.

The Great FB Purge of 2020

A little after 3pm on August 19, 2020, Facebook disabled hundreds of public pages related to a popular conservative conspiracy theory, militias, and leftist organizations. Mid-Missouri John Brown Gun Club’s page — as well as the accounts of all current and former admins — were disabled in this massive purge. Facbook’s stated reason for the purge was to remove content that, “demonstrated significant risks to public safety.”

Mid-MO JBGC’s page had never been flagged for content that violated Facebook’s community standards, and we believe the main reason for our page being included was because Facebook needed to create the impression of political “balance” when it disabled the pages connected to ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories. But let’s be honest – Facebook and its owners had very little motivation to allow the left to keep criticizing powerful people and institutions on their platform.

There’s absolutely no indication that the disabling of our page or any other page had anything to do with profanity. (This was a hypothesis put forward by another organization in our area.)

Media coverage of the purge has been extremely sparse and focused on the removal of conspiracy theory pages; unsurprisingly, people are pretty OK with the removal of those pages. The fact that both Facebook and the media are so dramatically de-emphasizing the purge of left-leaning voices is extremely concerning. We’re aware that conservatives have been complaining about our existence on Facebook for years, but any equivalence between the American left and unhinged conspiracy theories is frankly offensive.

This club will continue to do our best to report the facts as we understand them, and apply analysis to those facts based on the latest scientific understanding of reality and a healthy dose of logic — we just won’t be doing that on Facebook.

Update:

The Intercept posted an article about the purge by Natasha Lennard today. It provides a lot of extra detail that you’ll want to see.

Facebook’s Ban on Far-Left Pages Is an Extension of Trump Propaganda

It bears repeating, ad nauseam, that the far right has carried out 329 murders in the last three decades; none have been attributed to antifa. Between 2009 and 2018, white supremacist and far-right extremists were responsible for 73 percent of extremist murders in the U.S. And that’s not even to mention the state-sanctioned, racist killings carried out by the police.