Do you know what kinds of games I really like? Games that favor the person who is losing. Why? Because if you being in the lead gives you advantage, the game loses its challenge and it stops being fun. It's of course no fun for the person who is losing either. The game stops being fun when you get to a point where the winner has been determined but the game is still not over.
These "level playing field" kinds of games are pretty rare though. Sports aren't like this. They favor the team that's ahead. If you are racing, the further ahead you are, the more likely you are to win. I wish it was the opposite. The further ahead you are, the LESS likely you are to win. Wouldn't that make the race so much more interesting?
With sports you can see how giving the advantage to the winner makes the endgame boring. Ever been to a baseball game when one team has 10 points on the board and the other one only 2? BORING! Once you approach a win, the game is essentially already over and finishing it is just a formality. The team in the lead might get complacent and bored and the losing team might get more determined to win, and that does balance the scales some little bit, but not nearly enough. Sure, comebacks in sports create some of the great legends in the sports world, but they are quite rare because none of the games help the loser along. I wish there was a sports game that gave advantage to the team that was losing.
There are some casual games like this though. Two I can think of are the card games Uno and War. It's hard to win UNO if you don't have any cards to play. It's hard to win War when you have all of the low ranking cards. Games like these give a disadvantage to the person in the lead so they require the person who is winning to plan and win with strategy. Well, not War. War is just random. But UNO... UNO definitely has a strategy. Of course no game is 100% level playing field. The person with the least cards in UNO can generally find a way to win and if you ever find yourself with 50 cards in UNO, uh, yeah. You lost. But the idea. Oh I love the idea of a game that provides a level playing field throughout the course of the game and you really really have to EARN your win.
I think this is why I like the reality show Survivor so much. The better you are at the game the more of a target you are. You'll see a lot of people who fly in under the radar succeed well into the late stages of Survivor. Survivor is definitely a sort of "level playing field" game. It makes the show so interesting. I can't wait to get all of the seasons. (I pretty much stopped watching when I picked up salsa 6 years ago.)
Oh if only life were the same way. You know life favors the advantaged. If you are born rich, you have an easy life. Well, obviously life isn't "easy" for most people, even the rich. But they certainly don't have to worry about one of the things 90% of us worry about. Their worries aren't about money. Much of their worries are artificial, like social status and obtaining power. If only the system was designed to give advantage to the disadvantaged.
Here's an idea! What if the poor didn't have to pay any taxes? Oh. They don't? Ok, what if the lower middle class didn't have to pay any taxes? What if every family making under $100,000 a year didn't have to pay any taxes??? What if the bottom tax bracket started at $100,000? What if the families making $100,000 only had to pay 5% of their annual income? What if the usual 20% tax bracket didn't start until a family had an income of $250,000? What if the more money you made, the more tax burden you had? What if what determined your tax burden was not your income, but your level of prosperity? Well, the majority of what the IRS takes from us is taken from people who make less than $100,000 so doing this would definitely shift the "burden" to the people making over $100,000, and especially over $250,000. This would level the playing field and allow people in the lower income levels to live their lives with more prosperity and perhaps earn the right to pay taxes. The people paying taxes would do so because they have achieved prosperity and taking the higher taxes from them wouldn't eat into it much. Here's the rule. If taking taxes from you eliminates your prosperity, or if you don't have any prosperity to begin with, you pay no taxes. BAM! Love it.
If only. sigh
Or better yet, abolish the Federal Reserve System, eliminate unnecessary governmental spending, bring the church back to where it once was and enable it to feed the poor and care for the sick*, and eliminate the need for national taxes altogether. Our country ran fine for 137 years without the need for a national tax. Why did they all of a sudden need one in 1913?
*Ever notice how a lot of hospitals are named after churches? It's not a coincidence. They were started by churches.
Today's archidose #564
15 hours ago
5 comments:
I highly disagree.
Removing the challenge or example of EXCELence in the few fosters lethargy in the whole.
When the system rewards the less productive or the less innovative or intelligent, fast, etc. it creates this blanket of dullness. By dullness I mean that laziness that you feel when you have no incentive to excel or create or produce. By rewarding this mentality you reap a slow decay of society.
I believe that the creative, intelligent, and innovative need to be rewarded. If that means that you are no longer a "winner" than go out, use your brain or body, and become a winner. It's the challenge that produces bigger, better, smarter, more efficient, etc. thus building a culture not tearing it down.
Now regarding the taxes. What you are saying is essentially the Robin Hood theory. Take from the rich and give to the poor.
Why do the rich (the bigger, better, smarter, etc.) get penalized?
It's the same concept: reward those who do not produce. Welfare. What does the welfare system foster: laziness, dullness of mind and spirit.
God created us to be creators and producers, to make a system that rewards anything less than that is dare I say, evil.
I guess you haven't met that many smart driven hardworking people who just can't catch a break. I have, especially in this economy. The rich are not necessarily "bigger, better, smarter, etc." In fact, the vast majority of the rich that I would tax have barely worked a day in their life. You don't improve society by fostering an environment that encourages the fortunate to tread on the unfortunate.
Lemme axe you something. When a homeless man asks you for spare change, do you give it to him? I know you do. Why? Do you throw money at him to get rid of him? Do you give it to him to ease your conscience? Or do you do it because Jesus says "what you have done to the least of these you have done unto me?"
When the homeless used to approach me for spare change I would lie and say, "I don't have any." But 6 years ago I saw you give a homeless man a dollar once. It changed my heart. I realized that it is better to give a dollar to a hundred lazy shysters if it means I will sometimes help that single genuinely down on his luck poor sap who actually really just lost his wallet and ran out of gas. My approach to the economy is the same. And I am also pretty sure it's the philosophy advocated in scripture.
It is true that hard work should be rewarded. But doesn't Jesus say, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on Earth, but store up for yourselves treasures in Heaven?" I think a lot... a LOT of Christians need to read Matthew 6. Seriously. Especially those who believe in prosperity theology. The Bible is quite clear on this issue.
I really looked for scriptural evidence to support prosperity theology and I just can't find any. None. It's all about giving to others and not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing and not judging and living your life for God and for other people. There is nothing, NOTHING in the Bible about receiving any reward for your selfish self.
Now, I will say that I support the idea that a hardworking man should get a just reward for his labor. I'm working on a blog article about this. I started last week but didn't get far yet. See, prosperity is best understood when you keep money out of it. Money has too much baggage so I use two cabins in the woods as an example. These two cabins belong to two brothers living in the 1800s. One brother is hard working. He gets up at the crack of dawn and feeds the chickens and milks the cow and tends his garden and throughout the day he does his chores. Over the course of the year he works on his house. He fixes the things that need mending and he gradually makes improvements. He works very hard all of his days. So when visitors come to stay, they are greeted with a warm, friendly cottage surrounded by lovely flowers and a nice fountain and a white picket fence. They get to sit on the swing on the wraparound porch or on the second floor balcony to look up at the stars. They can sit by the roaring fire and read in the comfortable chairs the brother made with is own hands. Their room is nice and cozy and they sleep well because his wife is also hard working and she makes these wonderfully comfortable quilts. The whole cabin is this dream home. You would die happy there.
Now, this man's brother lives across the street. He does not work hard. His house is falling apart. Weeds are growing all around the house. Windows are broken. The door is hanging on one hinge. The roof leaks. The front porch needs repairing. All this brother does all day long is sit on the porch and drink his moonshine and smoke his pipe. He is lazy and accomplishes nothing. No one pays him a visit and if they did they would have to sleep in the living room because he doesn't have a spare bedroom. This man has never made any furniture so his guests would have to sleep on the cold hard floor. He doesn't chop wood so there wouldn't be a fire for them to keep warm. He is not married and if he was his wife would probably be too lazy to make anything to keep themselves cozy and warm. His life is miserable and all he can do all day long is grumble about how he hates his successful brother.
Both of these boys grew up poor, but one is prosperous. Neither of them have any money but one is in many respects more wealthy than many people living in modern society. But his wealth is a direct result of his labor. He lives off of the land and the sweat off his back. This I believe is all the prosperity the Bible advocates. Hard work equals prosperity.
Now if we bring money into the picture it would mess everything up because we would have to talk about exchange of value and one job being worth more than another and bargaining and manipulation and middlemen and interest and supply and demand and market speculation and even theft. Money gums up the works so much so that prosperity becomes too convoluted to understand. But at the end of the day, I do believe that you should receive just reward for your labors. But when you begin to have riches at the expense of other people, you have gone too far. When you start to use your riches to buy and sell, not because a middleman is needed, but instead because you can insert a middleman somewhere, then you are abusing your wealth. The old traders made money because trading was necessary. How did goods arrive in Rome? They had to be transported. This middleman paid his dues and deserved the money he received. But today, the rich man who puts his money into buying oil at $80 a barrel and then sells it for $100 a barrel is a leech. He is in fact more of a leech than that brother who lives all by his lonesome in that dilapidated old cottage, even if that man lives off of welfare. The welfare class might cost society millions, even billions. But the investment class costs society trillions.
These are the people who should be taxed. I wouldn't want to punish the people who work hard and succeed. They generally don't make THAT much more money than the lazy anyway. Maybe an additional $100,000. The people I would tax... the people I would want to punish are the people who do NOT work hard and still succeed. These people make millions more than other people and they produce nothing. Remember, 90% of the wealth is controlled by 10% of the population. This 10% should be taxed. Not the lower 90%.
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