The Long Now, Pt. 4 - Snip!
December 26, 2019·22 comments·Politics
For two decades, the relationship between what government collects in taxes and what it spends has been deliberately severed. The tether that once connected these two functions has frayed so completely that taxation and spending now operate as entirely separate political tools. The consequences of this disconnection are only beginning to materialize, and the institutions insisting this separation is sustainable are about to discover what happens when the bedrock assumptions of fiscal reality no longer apply.
• Words have been quietly redefined to mean whatever serves power. "War" no longer includes drone strikes and missile campaigns conducted daily across the globe. "Capitalism" now refers exclusively to asset price inflation, not productive investment or risk-taking. When the meaning of language shifts without debate, so does the meaning of reality itself.
• The severing wasn't sudden or partisan, it was methodical. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have steadily dismantled the concept that taxes fund spending. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the final cut, leveraging the entire country the way a private equity firm levers a company, distributing windfalls to corporations and the wealthy without reducing a single dollar of government spending.
• Taxation and spending have become pure instruments of political power. Republicans use tax cuts to reward corporations and boost stock prices. Democrats propose wealth taxes framed as moral punishment, not fiscal necessity. Neither side pretends anymore that these mechanisms exist to balance a budget or fund government services.
• The same corporate beneficiaries profit regardless of which party controls the levers. Whether the next administration calls their spending plan "Infrastructure Bonds" or "Green Bonds," the outcomes will be identical. The Fed will monetize at least half of the issuance. The multinational corporations dominating capital markets will pocket the gains. The mechanism changes its costume but not its function.
• If taxes and spending operate independently of each other, what happens to the concept of fiscal constraint itself? Once that constraint dissolves entirely, both become pure expressions of whose vision of justice, equity, and retribution will be imposed. And whoever controls that definition controls the future.
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Comments
Sign me up! I knew all of the long form notes were coalescing around a central idea. The ideas and examples that you highlight put what I have been seeing in the real world into perspective. It’s a good explanation, but unfortunately, it’s not a strong, moving narrative. Too many people need to think about what you have written and frankly, they have no framework to understand. We live in a world where a simple, easy to understand lie is the only useful tool. A complex, difficult to understand truth has no place in today’s world. In the widening gyre, nuance is lost and you cannot remain in the tribe if you deviate from the accepted catechism. There is no room for independent thought. Technology and the Internet were supposed to bring people together and allow for differing viewpoints to find homes. Instead it has turned into a tool to destroy difference, enforce uniformity, and allow the powerful to control the population. Yeats was right. The center cannot hold. The Enlightenment is dying. We are becoming less free to do as we wish and the powerful are becoming more able to harm us. The most disappointing part of all of this is we are allowing it to happen. Sometimes through direct action, but much more frequently through inaction. Humans are terrible at thinking about the future. We cannot say that we weren’t warned. Everyone has seen the signs, but it’s an exponential progression. It doesn’t look like much now, but it won’t take too many iterations to overwhelm everything. Thank you for identifying, labeling and telling the world about this. Now we just need to expand the Pack. One Suggestion: Don’t eliminate billionaires just because they are billionaires. Our issue is not the accumulation of wealth. It’s using the power of wealth to maintain, consolidate and grow your wealth at the expense of others. I believe in a world of abundance. Good people coming together with a goal of improving things can become wealthy. It’s what happens after that causes most of the problems. Money is not speech, but money is power and opportunity. If we eliminate billionaires just because they are billionaires, we may lose a valuable opportunity to accelerate our message.
My $0.02.
FYI pdf file download is not working right, wants me to upgrade to professional maybe? ??♂️
Edit: works fine on desktop but not mobile.
Can you elaborate more on the type of help you are looking for at this point?
Most of what you’ve explicitly asked for to date is personal/attitudinal (e.g. clear eyes full hearts) which is important but doesn’t directly suggest specific next steps.
Your past mentions of “building the pack” has always vaguely implied “building a political movement”. (I’m using “political” here in the most general, non-pejorative sense). This seems reinforced by this note’s explicit mentions of future “actions” and “conferences” .
This and other recent posts also suggest a major tension between public action (openly fighting things like the bastardization of language, financialization central banking as a political utility, etc etc) and recognizing that the forces that created those problems are overwhelming and entrenched, and thus retreating to some version of the Planet Tatooine in order to gradually build up a Rebel Alliance.
I’m sure you don’t want to impose one specific view of this “movement” on everybody at this point, but without widely understood beliefs/objectives/boundaries (however flexible) there’s no movement. If you are just looking for emails with ideas, it would be helpful to have specific proposals/alternatives to react to. If you want people to invest time and effort into more substantive actions we need greater input as to what “helpful actions” would actually be helpful.
Yeah Ben, This is your best effort yet. I can feel myself drifting off with George. Truly inspirational!
There are a lot of really important points in TheCoeus’ response:
1.) “It’s a good explanation, but unfortunately, it’s not a strong narrative. Too many people will need to think about what you have written and frankly, they have no framework to understand.”
This is (sadly) very true. Thinking is hard. I might argue that it is more so that the many lack the motivation to understand, but at this point it would be semantics. Anything remotely abstract, no matter how essential, gets lost in the hyperbole of headlines. Which connects to the next point…
2.) “Technology and the Internet were supposed to bring people together, and allow for differing viewpoints to find homes. Instead it has turned into a tool to destroy difference, enforce uniformity, and allow the powerful to control the population.” There is no better example of this than Twitter. Lives have been upended because of the wrong opinion espoused in 140someodd characters. Instead of increasing diversity of opinions, technology has amplified the ability of those with tail end opinions to vilify anyone that may dare to think in nuances (remember thinking is hard), or worse, entertain an ‘unpopular’ opinion to the extent that doing so instantly becomes amoral, and therefore destructive to society. While Ben cites 1984, which I can certainly see as being appropriate, I think A Brave New World may be more spot on. This is because
3.) As TheCoeus says, “we are allowing it to happen”
Whether through laziness, or atrophy or our ability to reason, or because of the average person sees/hears/reads/is inundated with the extremely loud extremely tail end viewpoints with such ferocity that they become a disproportionate part of the ‘discourse’ and by definition are disproportionately validated. We live in a world where “I’m not sure.” is a completely unacceptable answer to anything.
The conundrum as I see it, is whether to play the societal game in the existing frame or to flip the frame of the game to your advantage like that fellow who vanquished a Demon by saying “I am hope”. I think Ben/Rusty and Co. are aiming for the latter, and while I’m unconvinced as to whether or not this can be successful, I am encouraged by comments like TheCoeus’. That being said, revisiting the first point, I think the message has to be distilled even further to a call to action that will function on many levels (and this may be what is being done with Clear Eyes…, Make Protect Teach etc., but that isn’t really enough for those that want to chunk ultimate victory down to what can be done immediately toward that end in the next hour, day, month. Seeing the Matrix isn’t enough if you can’t do anything to get out of it.
Take Hubert Horan’s comment below: “Most of what you’ve explicitly asked for to date is personal/attitudinal (e.g. clear eyes full hearts) which is important but doesn’t directly suggest specific next steps.” I imagine Ben/Rusty might be reticent to direct the pack in this way because then they would be no ‘different’ than any one else doing so, but the counter argument to that is that while most ET readers are willing to think, not all of us have a Ph.D in Social Science from “Team Elitist of Team Elite institutions” and so we might need a little bit more of a nudge in the right (practical) direction.
“Self-doubt is a biologically terrifying condition for a social animal like humans, and that’s why you see more and more of us becoming rhinoceroses.” - this reminds me of The Bruce Lee quote:
“We have more faith in what we imitate than in what we originate. We cannot derive a sense of absolute certitude from anything that has its roots in us. The most poignant sense of insecurity comes from standing alone; we are not alone when we imitate. It is thus with most of us! ”
Another very profound note, a great read. I agree that there is no longer any correlation between taxation and spending (and hasn’t been for some time), it’s blindingly obvious that it just does not compute.
It feels very much the same as around 2005-2007, when real estate was going bezerk. I thought (and said) so many times back then that it was not sustainable. There was no way. But not owning any real estate myself, I thought I would be unaffected. Little did I know the real estate collapse would affect the economy (and the investments I did have) as a whole. Duh!! Then I read “When Genius Failed” about Long Term Capital Management and got very angry because 2008 was basically the same thing all over again.
I might have gotten a little off-topic there, but I am absolutely in service to the Pack. Email sent!
You sound like John Galt urging Those Who Make to move to the Gulch to stop enriching Those Who Take. The kid’s gold tooth outta my paycheck. The Long Now.
In my youth I loved watching Bruce Lee’s moves, in my older years I am loving even more hearing his thoughts. Remarkably wise.
I read this note on a zoo bench while my wife is watching my son playing. I don’t know under what psychology condition Ben wants to instill the loath and fear in readers during holidays. But, Yes, I got the fear and loath . What is the fear and loath exactly? The loath is NOT for the taxation decoupled from .gov spending. I think it is “falling feels like flying”, it is “they will take a piss on your back and tell you it rained”. It is after competing in work, after cleaning up my son’s diapers, I have to think whether I am falling or flying, whether I am being pissed at or whether it actually rained. That boat has sailed for 20 years and there is nothing we can do about it other than surviving the voyage. During holiday parties, I can feel people got a sense of the going is getting weird and they try to figure out whether there is a historical period that can somehow guide the voyage. I told them Ben said there is NO predicative closed form equation, and this is a 3 body problem. So don’t even try. They say “isn’t it true that there is nothing new about money under the sun? isn’t it true that history rhymes?” I told them Ben said no matter what you try, “they” will pick the winners and losers and we all will be the loser crumb catchers while “they” will benefit and the inequality widens. The truth is, why do the make-teach-protect? why don’t everybody quit their wealth creation W2 jobs and join the too big to fail banks and sit on the table, much better than catching crumbs falling off the table doing real W2 jobs, right? In stead of being selected as loser by “them”, I want to be “them”, selecting others as winners and losers. But from deep down, I hate them, I loathe them. The moment I realized I got the impulse of wanting to wanting to be something I loath in order to NOT to lose I felt like vomiting. In order to win, you have to lose your soul. That’s the loath and fear. The going is NOT getting weird, the going is getting the worst out of me. I think it is getting the worst out of everybody else as well. No, I am not going to vote for ridiculous candidates.
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