A Treatise on Basic Income

Picture a baby born in a field, for whatever reason you care to imagine.  Having been born there, on that patch of grass, she is instantly branded a trespasser.  You see, that field is private property.

She could be liable for punishment, but no one cares to expend any effort on her behalf, so she is simply left there to die.  Within a few days, she does.  The property owner then claims the remains for partial compensation for his time and trouble.

This, my friends, is what I think every time I hear someone say, "The world doesn't owe you anything!" or see one of those posts of a blank piece of paper with the title, "List of Everything the World Owes You!"

Because that's what that phrase literally means.

Child on Left: "We get a bowl of gruel per day."
Child on Right:  "And we're grateful."

Oh, true, that's not how it's meant.  It's meant to teach children to be self-reliant, productive, hard workers, and to not go about begging and whining for alms.  It's meant to get them to participate in the great economic game that's been going on for centuries now.

But it does get took too far.  It gets used, by some, to excuse a multiplicity of abuses that while not quite as egregious as letting a newborn girl die alone in a field before rendering her body for the chemicals, comes a bit too close to that at times.

First off, let's clear up the obvious.  The "world" is not a person, nor has it even sentience, let alone sapience.  So "it" cannot owe you a thing, for good or bad.  It just is.  The "world" here is being used as a synonym for "humanity" as in "all of".  The saying might well be rephrased to "No one owes you a thing" and it sometimes is re-phrased that way.

Second, let's get parents out of the way.  Everyone on all 1,000 sides of this, gets that parents do, in fact, owe their kids some minimal amount of care.  It might be debated "how much" and for "how long" and the answers might range from "food, clothing and shelter till 12" to "a million dollars to be a hotel magnate at 24" but "something" is owed for "awhile".

The parents tried to have a kid though, or at least engaged in activity that could reasonably have been foreseen to lead to one.  What of everyone else who did not get even that modest amount of fun out of this nine months prior to the birth?

This is where the liberals are likely to say, "food, clothing, shelter, education and healthcare till he's 18", or to hear some, till he dies of old age.  So there's that.  And this is also where conservatives are likely to say, "I only owe leaving him alone".  So there's that.

And while this might surprise some of my conservative friends, I agree - you personally only owe "leaving him alone".  But are you intending on leaving him alone is the question.

You see, there's a lot of assumptions about our current culture, our current way of life, that is took for granted.  I don't blame people for taking it for granted, because it's the culture that "won" over all the other tens of thousands of cultures, and now exists - in various forms to various degrees - over the entire planet.

And has for almost 500 years.

What am I referring to?

Private property.  By which I do not mean "personal property", even communist societies let the individual have "personal property" of food and clothes and such.  "Private property" refers to ownership of stuff not simply for personal use.  Notably land, but also companies and corporations and machinery and ships and such.

Private property - and the concept of "corporations" - make up the system that is generally called "capitalism", even though capitalism in a pure form does not, and has not, ever existed.

So what does that have to do with whether we can - after the parents raise the kid till 12 or 18 or 21 - "leave him alone" to fend for himself?

Well, in a state of nature, that guy would have been exploring about as a child, finding fruit trees, roots, berries, small game, maybe even big game.  He'd know where to get his food, and how to get it, and by adulthood, even if as young as 12, he'd be pretty competent to feed himself off of that, and clothe himself, too.  You could safely leave him alone, and he'd do just fine.

But such children are not allowed to roam about learning how to hunt and gather nowadays.  They quickly find out that their parent's property is not so vast, and that others do not wish their gardens raided or house pets hunted.  Nor does the city they are in care for them to hunt the birds that may be available, or the squirrels.

Not only do they not then get to learn those life giving skills, they will NOT be allowed to use them - if they some how acquire them - when they reach any age of adulthood.  They will not be allowed to hunt and gather, but instead will be expected - by conservatives most of all - to comply with what the majority of people in our culture think is a good way of doing things.

Now, if one is leaving a man alone, one may well make a case that you "owe him nothing".  But when you are actively thwarting him from feeding and clothing himself in the most natural way possible? Ahh, then yes, you do owe him something.

You are expecting that new adult human to play by rules that you so take for granted that you hardly grasped that they are "rules".  Rules that are one way, a way you're familiar with, but could as easily been other ways, that others around the globe are familiar with.  If I want a man to play any game I enjoy or find desirable, then I must consider what is in it for him, and offer him inducement.

Historically, the "inducement" we principally offer is "fear" as in "do it our way according to our rules or we will hurt you until you do".  Thus the child in school who wants to sneak out to play with his dog gets paddled or confined to a spot, and the adult who doesn't recognize private property gets arrested and confined for trespassing and/or theft.

But one of the Founding Fathers of America, Thomas Paine, realized that it would be fairer to offer a positive for people to comply with those rules, not just negative punishment.  He actually recognized it then as not a "gift", but a payment owed.  Owed by who?

Owed by all those who were accepting of, and benefiting of, the current order of things.  You see, a person who is freshly an adult did not agree to the Earth being divided up in such a way that he has nothing, and not even a place to hunt or gather in peace.  That's an arrangement that is no doubt satisfactory to those who already have land, but not so much to those who do not.

And of those who would say that they worked for their bit of land or property, well, I am glad that they overcame the inherent disadvantage they were at during the start, and I'm glad that they agreed explicitly or at least implicitly with the rules of the game that they've apparently scored some points in. But surely they can understand that not everyone is so willing to forgo their share as they were, and nor do I think they'd decline their share were it offered now.

Some still will resist, and really think that their "earning" of the land is in some way making the whole system appropriate.  It does not.  Tracing back the titles of land, it all goes back to the original "owners" who owned it by "right" of their sword.  Later it was inherited by their children, who the landless had to call "Lord" and "Lady".  Only more recently has that been swapped about for any who cared to play the game that - rather than be agreed to by all - was set up centuries ago by a few, and chiefly insisted upon by those who have benefited by it since.

No 18 year old has ever been asked to sign consent to the lands of Earth being divvied up as we see them divided today.  None are currently being asked to agree.  That 18 year old is thus the infant in the field, and unless he does as he is told by those who came before him, he may starve.  That you don't see any starving is simply that faced with that "choice", obviously everyone "chooses" to play the game.

But such coercion takes away the consensual nature of that "choice", and means that any who wish to now remind the world that a Basic Income is owed as a duty, not charity, gets to.  Or conversely, if no Basic Income is desired to be paid, then one forgoes the right to complain about folks running over farms and factory lands to hunt, fish, pick fruit and dig for roots!

Besides being owed for the land and resources withheld from him, there is the matter of the common inheritance from his ancestors that is currently being withheld from him.  As Edward Bellamy pointed out in "Looking Backwards", most of the productive value of your labor does not come from you, but from all the processes, technologies and machinery that you've inherited from those who came before you.

Consider your standard of living.  On average a two bedroom house, a car, televisions and computers and such.  Your standard of living is incomparably greater than a person of your equivalent social station 100 years ago, let alone 1,000 years ago!

Is this because you are 1,000 times the superior of a man from the year 1017?  Is it because you work 100 times harder than a man from 1917?  Or is it that mankind as a whole has grown and progressed, learning more things, specializing in more things, cooperating in more things, and accumulating more wealth and knowledge each year, each generation, each century, so that your own labor - no greater or lesser than that of your ancestors, is magnified by the accumulation of the entirety of humanity?

I think we know - as Bellamy pointed out - that only 10% of what you have is the result of your own labor, the rest, the 90%, is a gift from all the billions who have worked and strove and studied and learned and such before you, and have left you all that as an inheritance that you did not earn, and hardly even recognize as a gift, let alone as a gift to be grateful for.

When you then see a man - or woman - who is disabled, or even simply claiming a disability whether you perceive it or not, whether they are faking it or not, who are you to deny them their portion of the wealth that we are all common heirs of?  Is your brother denied a share of your father's inheritance because he failed to meet your standards?  Is your sister to be left without any thing of her mother's as you do not believe that she is "really" ill?

Such an inheritance was theirs whether they met your standards or not, whether they worked or not. As an anarchist, I would advise a different and more peaceable way of apportioning their share to them, but you, with your belief in the morality of a government have left such to a government.  You cannot then complain and try to withhold from your fellow man that which is theirs by right.

And you cannot, as Bellamy pointed out, add "insult to the theft" by telling them that the "table scraps" you dole out to them grudgingly are an imposition.  The disabled are not imposing upon you by receiving such scraps, rather they are being insulted and robbed by those who were blessed with a health that they were simply given, and had no part in earning.

Nor is the possibility of some of them "faking it" any concern.  For one, the presumption of guilt before any trial is remarkably evil, and generally supposed to be against Anglo-American common law.  For two, if some were faking, would that not mean that their disability was just different than they claimed? That rather than they truly suffering from this or that ailment, that they instead suffered a condition that made them shy away from what you think of as productive work?

But for three, what if they were to be just purely lazy?  Would that be any different from those who have never served in the armed forces of their nation?

What's that, you ask?  What's that got to do with anything?

Ahh, but military service, or lack of it, has everything to do with this supposed "welfare".  As Bellamy pointed out, only a very few are called to defend a nation with their strength, and those who can't - or won't - are not deprived of their citizenship for not doing so.  Maybe they couldn't fight.  Maybe they found it immoral.  Maybe they were too busy with other concerns.  Maybe they were just cowards.  No one questions why a man did not serve, it's a choice left up to him.  He is still a citizen, he still receives - unearned - the protection of the very military he did not support.

Likewise, and industrially, if a man cannot - or will not - support the great industrial complex that is the American economy, why would that deprive him of his inheritance?  Or his benefiting from the industrial complex the same way a non-veteran benefits from the military complex?

So you see, "welfare" is not your taxes.  Your taxes are pretty much as filthy rags compared to the combined and collectivized might of any nation, let alone this one called the United States.  "Welfare" is but the odd name we assign to the pittance we dole out to those who have had their inheritance - in land and in cultural heritage - robbed of them by the elite.

That welfare deserves then to be re-named "Basic Income" and ramped up to be as fair as anything that the elite are already awarding themselves.  No, not so that everyone gets the same billion dollar bail out that a Wall Street CEO gets.  But that so that CEO then receives no more or less of a "bail out" then any other man, woman and child in America.

Minimum Wage

There seems to be some confusion about raising the minimum wage.  Even - perhaps especially - among those who advocate for it.

Consider.  In a world in which everyone is expected to raise rates to compensate for inflation, who are then left as the only victims of inflation?  Who then must make do with less purchasing power each quarter?

Those minimum wage workers.  Who alone in the United States have no right to seek more inflated dollars for their services without shrill screams of "Socialism!" coming from everyone else who's compensation goes up quarterly!

Now I can hear some on the Right crying out!  He can "just" educate himself more if he wants more money!  Or learn new and better skills!  Uh huh.  But how come no one else has to?  When the government's percent of our inflated wages means they get more dollars than before, this is not for them providing new services.  It's openly acknowledged that they simply need more of those dollars to get the exact same things they need!

"If I really wanted a decent wage, I'd have got a law degree."

Same with the corporations.  If a loaf of bread is a dollar now, where it was 50 cents 20 years ago, this is not for the bread being twice as good, but for the natural reason of "it costs more of those dollars to make it."  The price going up is only reflecting that each dollar does not buy as much!  Store costs go up - their prices go up!  Fair is fair, huh?

But why then must minimum wage workers need to offer a better product - their labor - in order to have their purchasing power remain the same?  Because when they ask for a "raise", what they're really asking for is that you stop cutting their purchasing power!

Not so that they can buy more, not so they can buy luxuries, but just so they can buy the same minimal amount of stuff they always bought!

And that's the great secret about minimum wage, that even those on the Left don't know.  That in seeking a "raise", they're really just asking that they get paid the same consistently!  That they're really just asking that we STOP CUTTING THEIR PAY!

No one else sees their costs go up and then still sells their services at the same rate, waiting years before making an adjustment!

But the poor are required to.  Take the person who earns $7.25 in 2009 - that being the last time Federal minimum wage was raised.  $7.25 times 40 hours times four weeks - which he's unlikely to get but that's another story - adds up to $1,160.  Which after taxes is going to be - well, less than $1,000 per month, but let's go with the even number.

This minimum wage - in laughable theory - is to be the "minimum" that a citizen would need to live.  It is below the poverty line for a family of four, so not only is this to be the minimum to live off of, it is the minimum for just one solitary person to live off of.

I would enjoy seeing the budget that any reading this could come up with for how to spend that lavish $1,000 per month on all that most would regard as needful to live in this day and age.  Especially given that even in the over-sized cow town that I write from, in the relatively inexpensive heartland, an even semi-decent apartment is going to run $500 to $600.  Mostly not including utilities.

But yeah, get back to me sometime with how that $1,000 can cover that $500 a month apartment, the $100 in utilities, the $75 in auto insurance, $50 in phone, the $200 in food, the $75 in gasoline, the - oops, guess that's it.  Better never change the oil or get a flat or want to save or care to ever advance.

Okay, so that's 2009.  And according to the Social Security Administration that deals in cost of living adjustments, 2010 looked the same, so I guess Joe Minimum is safe that year, basking in the security of just the stuff I listed and nothing more.

But in the time period from 2009 to 2016, the cost of living has been adjusted here and there, now and then.  A percent here, three percent there, another percent or two elsewhere.  Roughly 9% worth total, and you'll forgive me if I round to 10% to keep it even - we had assumed $1,000 when we should have gone with $928, so what of it?

So that $1,000 per month, as pathetically inadequate as it was in 2009 is now only $900 per month.  In terms of purchasing power, that is.  It's not uniform across the board.  Things like gas and beef have gone up far more than 9%, his rent may possibly have stayed the same, assuming a rather lackadaisical landlord.  But on average, he now has $900 for all practical purposes, in a nation in which we had flat out declared that one needed at least $1,000 per month to live, and that as far back as two Presidential administrations ago.

The minimum wager is then asking for two things.  That at the least the numerical wage go up so he can simply stay even with such little purchasing power as he had when Barack Obama was the first African American President to be sworn in.  And that it go up a bit more, so as to reflect what "minimum wage" is supposed to be.  And as there is no world in which the "minimum" can be had on $1,000 per month, that means higher than even the rise in inflation.

But instead he is told to shut up and quit being greedy when he complains of this.  When he mentions that his rent, his bread, his utilities and everything else in his simple life are now to cost more, and so he must make do with less.

Can he find an even smaller apartment in an even worse neighborhood?  Can he eat less or swallow his pride and apply for Food Stamps?  Can he drive less - or go without a car?  He never had renter's insurance or life insurance or any private health insurance - but can he now skimp on the legally required auto insurance and just drive so carefully as to never get pulled over?  Has he got a second job, the lazy bum?  Does he need anything other than the bare minimum to get to walk to work and not collapse at the fry station?

Nope.  Or so too many conservatives who imagine they know and understand economic theory say.

And the saddest are those reading this who are now thinking, "Hey, it's not that bad, most of them have iPhones and a computer and an Xbox!  That's not that poor!"

Uh huh.  You who eat out at least 1/5th of the nights each month, who don't need Food Stamps, who can heat at 70 degrees instead of "55 and wear two sweaters", who don't know the sick fear of a flat tire that is beyond your ability to fix at even the comparatively low price of $40 used, really?  Really?

You want to go there?

Yeah.  They usually have an iPhone - kind of - as Walmart sells cheap knock offs and phone plans are pretty inexpensive nowadays - and without that phone there can be no calls for extra hours, which are essential if you hadn't noticed!  And they have some cheap TV and game box, more often than not gifts.  What else are they going to do for entertainment, take a cruise?  Fly to Rome?  Drive even to Chicago to see their folks once a year?

When they ask then for minimum wage to be raised, they are doing nothing more than everyone else in the nation.  They are noting that the same dollars they earned last year do not buy the same amount this year, and thus they wish more of those dollars.

Your President does.  Congress does.  Every CEO, stockholder, middle manager and skilled craftsman does.  Certainly every utility company, landlord and grocer does.

They want more and they get more - by "right", so they calmly say.  And true enough.  It's right to not want less pay for the same work.  Unless you're poor, then some idiot radio talk show host will bugle, "Hur dur, hows about we jest raise it to fifty then?  Huh?  Huh?" as if he's made any kind of insightful point.

But never - and I do mean never - is anyone, even on the farthest Left, asking for fifty or anything close to being above this hypothetical "market rate".  A market rate that is itself influenced by the artificially LOW minimum wage, and that would be higher if it hadn't been set so low!

Want to end this issue?  The right thing - the fair thing - the "not socialist but just common sense" thing, would be to raise it up to a given amount yet again.  But for a hoot, it should be raised to what it really takes to live a minimal life, yes, even for just one person.  A budget should be done listing out everything our nation believes a single citizen needs, and what that cost is, and then the actual wage based on that.  And yeah, I'm good with it varying by region to reflect that it costs more to live in Brooklyn than Peoria.

And having done that decent thing, to finally tie that real minimum wage to the cost of living so that each quarter as inflation goes up, so does their minimum wage.

Then it really is a minimum wage, as it never drops below that minimum that we say they have to have to live.  Look at it from their perspective.  We flat out lied in 2009 and said that $7.25 was the minimum it took to live - then we let it go down even more each year, for years, and we've still done nothing about it!

Let minimum wage stay at what the real minimum level is found to be by it going up as the cost of staying alive goes up!  Trust me, I swear that no poor person will get to buy a yacht (or a car less than seven years old) with this plan, it just means that they can buy the same amount of Top Ramen this year as they did last year!

Is it too much to ask?  Really?

Starting with "Nothing"

The problem with the 1% is that they are so far up, they cannot see down. For instance, there is hardly a one of them but does not think that they have "earned" their money, and so they think that instead of any of us complaining, we should do that too.

The problem with that is that while yes, many of them have worked, and yes, some have even worked "hard", that they are taking for granted some pretty important ingredients to success that have nothing to do with their "work".

They are correct in only one thing. A person who works hard is going to be better off than another person, who in the same situation, does not work hard.

They are wrong in forgetting that there are a great many situations out there, though.

If we were to take identical twins and place one in Somalia and one in the United States, none of us have much trouble realizing that one twin is going to do far better than the other, even with them both working just as hard.

And even within a given nation, if we took identical triplets, and one was raised in a poor trailer court, another in a middle class suburb and another in Donald Trump's childhood neighborhood, then those three - in spite of each working equally hard - are going to have very different results.

The 1% are thus people who born within 10 feet of the mountain top have climbed that 10 feet and are now looking at those of us half way down the mountain - or even in the valley - and yelling, "We climbed up on our own, so that proves that anyone can!"

And yet some of us have climbed a good deal more than ten feet, and are thus a bit peeved to hear that. I mean, gee, we're glad they climbed that ten feet, that's great, some of them don't climb or even drop back down, so that's all cool. But it's just ten feet.

And when many of us have had to climb 1,000 feet just to get to the level of where an evening with a bag of McDonald's and renting a movie are a "treat", we don't need to hear from the 1% about how it was their hard work that made them what they are!
 

Worse than that, though, is those who so far up in the clouds, have forgot there is even such a thing as a valley, and thus equate wherever they started as "the bottom". Such a blind one recently like the son of Donald Trump, Eric, who assured us that his father started out with virtually "nothing".

You know, because Donald "only" had four years of college and a million dollar loan from his father Fred.

In some ways, I can place myself in Eric's $500 shoes and "get it". Eric probably knows plenty who were gave a cushy job where they could draw a large salary for no real work, or just gave control in an up and running company, or were gave some seventy plus million dollar loan to play with! And there's then his poor dad who "only" got that college education and a million bucks!

Yet, in truth, I could only "get" where Eric was coming from if that was the case - and I'd still think he was a bit naive for not realizing that most don't count college (at Wharton!) and a million bucks as "nothing".

But funny thing, Donald Trump actually did have a cushy job at his dad's company while going to college, and it paid him enough to have $200,000 by the time he graduated in 1968. He then was gave control of his dad's up and running company.

And ten years later, when he claims he started to do it on his own? Oh, he got a million dollar loan from his dad all right, but what Eric forgot to mention was that his dad then arranged for him to get an additional SEVENTY million dollar loan from a bank that Fred had a relationship with.

So not only did Trump not start from "nothing" as we among the Top Ramen class would reckon it, he did not even start from "nothing" as the over-privileged would reckon it.

This isn't just a Republican thing, don't get me wrong. There's not a Presidential candidate out there that doesn't love to pretend that he was born in a log cabin that he (or she) built with their own hands!

The Clintons have long loved to pretend about their down home roots, as if all the poor folk in Arkansas are Rhodes Scholars. And Chelsea - well, we all are aware of just how valuable Chelsea is to a network wishing to curry favor with a Secretary of State.

Here's the thing that Donald and Eric and Hillary and Chelsea and all the other children and grandchildren of privilege need to stop doing. Stop claiming in any sense that they started with "nothing".

The kid who joins the military because there are no better options - he starts with nothing. The kid who goes to community college on loans and then can only get a McJob upon graduation - he starts with nothing. The kid who starts at the factory his dad works at, and it closes and moves to Mexico five years later - he starts with nothing.

(And heck, even those people aren't truly starting with "nothing" as some over in Somalia could tell us!)

So whether a guy is a billionaire, a millionaire, or "just" some upper-middle class doctor, dentist or lawyer, the whole "started from nothing" thing probably needs to be put away. Because it doesn't fly. And just annoys those who really are far closer to "nothing" then they were.

Privatize the Public Schools

Privatize the public schools. At an average of $8,000 spent per pupil per year, those taxes could as easily pay each poor parent to hire a tutor for their kids!

The Goose and the Gander

Do you support the policy of the United States in drone bombing various "targets" around the world, even though we are not at war with those nations, nor have any trials been gave to those targeted?  Do you find movies like "Eye in Sky" a great portrayal of how so long as we wrestle with it a bit, it's okay to do what we got mad at the Japanese for doing in 1941?  

Here then for your review is a special treat.  I, your humble and amicable anarchist, have gone into the future, so I can bring back a news blurb from that time, and you can see if you find it to your taste. 

Here you go:

The Bruces.  Bringing the total drone bombed this year to 822.

5 AUG 2072 (Springfield, MwAD) - The latest in the ramped up series of drone bombings by the People's Republic of China killed four and injured five early this morning in Rochester, a poorer suburb of Springfield, the capitol of the Midwest Administrative District.  Beijing has released a statement saying that Tibetan Nationalist Choden Ho was discovered to be hiding in the suburban home only after months of intensive tracking of him.  "We take reports of collateral damage seriously, and regret the unfortunate loss of life.  Yet the assessment was made, at the highest levels, that this would be the only opportunity for bringing justice to the man most responsible for the Hong Kong Blinder Bomb last year."

The virus bomb was believed to be responsible for the deaths of 2,284 people in Hong Kong last May, and an additional 35,000 plus permanently disabled, in what is believed to be the largest single terrorist attack (using a virus) to date.  Significant parts of Hong Kong are yet quarantined, and 98% of the survivors of the deadly plague are blind and/or mentally impaired. 

A U.S. State Department spokesperson from the Arlington Capitol Zone released a statement saying, "We continue to deplore these unwarranted and unprovoked attacks upon our soil.  Since the Tehran Accords of '58, the United States as refrained from drone bombing any nation that we are not formally at war with.  It is high time that that the PRC signed that Accord."

Officials in Beijing have consistently maintained that they will never sign any accord or treaty that is in any way binding upon them when it comes to their national security.  That they "reserve the right to use any and all means to guard their interests at home and abroad".  

James Bruce, a robocar programmer, his wife Trisha Bruce, and their infant daughter Madison (six months old) were among those killed.  Several neighbors were also treated for minor injuries sustained from the blast damages done to their own unreinforced old-style homes.  Choden Ho was believed to have secured a position as a cook/gardener with the family.

Keynes and the Art of Stealing

John Maynard Keynes did understand economics in a sense. At least a very specific, though large, branch of it concerned with "force and fraud". "Government", for short.

See, there is an art to robbery. Yes, it's evil, but there's an art to it all the same. Like anything else, it can be done well or done poorly.

And it's a quite in-depth art, even a science, and it's been perfected - and is still being perfected - since the first supertribes called "cities".

Take the first person to desire practicing it as an art, and not just random hitting people with a club and taking their food. Or otherwise tricking them, which you can really only do once with a nomad.

What if you initially aid them in coming together to practice agriculture? It'll be a tough sell, as the average nomad ate better and for less work than farming.

But say you convince them. After a generation is raised knowing nothing else, they are wedded to the land. A nomad that you seek to rob may run - but a farmer cannot leave behind his invested labor.

It's still not just a case of "let the robbing begin!", though. If you went to each farmer and said, "I'm strong, you're weak, give me a tenth or I'll kill you and take it anyway!" then that might work briefly, but they'd nurse grudges, meet in private, and conspire to kill you.

You have to give them a face saving reason for letting themselves be put upon. So you do not flat out say that you'll kill them, but you speak extensively on the dangers of "random nomads". And you give them a reason for passing over the food - good reasons, of course.

That you'll save it for times of famine. That you will use it to raise up a group of special protectors called "warriors" that will do nothing but keep the peace and keep the nomads at bay.

You offer what can be a real value, and as the person overseeing it, the portion you take would be modest.

Some may honestly find it to be a good deal - and in various times and places, it may even have been a good deal.

Yet even then, you are easing it over into a "required", not a "voluntary" payment. You do this by the simple act of pointing out to those who do contribute voluntarily, that one is not. They find that unfair, and agree to your proposal that all who in any way benefit "must" pay.

For them, that is no hardship, they are paying anyway. And by the time they have a crop failure, and you still expect the same amount, the rule will already have been established, and they will not wish to look a hypocrite, and so will, grudgingly - and somewhat for seeing what your warriors did to the hold out - pay.

A loved cow gives more milk.  Don't beat your cow - too hard.

Now you've a government. Now you've "perfected", for that time, the Art of Stealing.
 

For now all know they must pay, they each tell themselves the soothing story to settle their outraged manhood, and they will of themselves enforce against others with persuasion - or force - because misery loves company, and if they must pay, then all must.

Fast forward six thousand years. An industrialized democracy is not the same as an agricultural village. And we've money now, which along the way, other Artists of Theft learned how to inflate.

Yet still, sometimes the game goes too far. Sometimes rulers of old took too much, and the people rose up, or ran off, or simply starved. Other times, like in Roman times, a partial inflation went well, but then they got greedy and inflated too much, and all collapsed.

The point of the Art of Stealing is to be able to get as much as you can, for as little effort, and for as long as possible.

There is such a thing as a "social surplus", though Ayn Rand (author of "Atlas Shrugged") would disagree. And such does not really belong in a Lockean sense to any one specific individual, even a Hank Reardon*. That surplus, above and beyond the group of individuals efforts, has always gone to the elite. The thieves.

Yet explanations must still be gave. Why a pyramid with that social surplus instead of another irrigation canal? Why does Lucius who is cousin to the Emperor always get the aquaduct contract instead of Gaius who has proved time and again that he is better at it, and cheaper? Why the social programs advocated by the President's wife instead of the more constructive aid - with less graft - that others have proposed?

These questions need answering appropriately. If the theft is to continue. And new ways of theft, unfamiliar to those robbed, must also be sought. Because greed is insatiable, and while you can squeeze a bit more taxes, or give a bit less services, or even inflate a bit more, it all must come to a final maximum point at some time, unless you find a new way.

Inflation, by the way, was such a new way of old. Later, in the middle ages, there are things you can do with banking - like the fractional reserve system - that allows more looting. In each case, the deficit is made up with the people working a bit harder, and for a bit less, that the few might have a lot more. Even the concept of "private property" can be manipulated so that social surpluses can be drained off. Disparities of property ownership allowed the great Lords of England to dispossess many of their tennant farmers, driving them to the cities to work the new factories or starve. This may have been better for such who survived in the end...but was a crap deal all the same, and some died from it.

The elite thieves of the mid-20th century had seen the result of the Federal Reserve system in the market crash of '29 and the following depression. Seen and not particularly minded, since that was the specific plan, it worked perfectly, and they were better off than ever.

But they'd seen that plan gone awry, too, in Czarist Russia and the Weimer Republic of Germany. Which while Ayn attributed those to ideologies, had a lot more to do with the game going too far, and the people starting to starve. Andrei Taganov did not rebel against the Czar because he was a Communist. He was a Communist for wishing to rebel against the Czar.

The trick then, the real art, was spoke of by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. How much do the people need to be content tax-slaves? They had wildly different answers, one based upon raw force and fear, the other on providing mindless hedonistic pleasures. Both were extremes to make a point, the real answer of how to steal, how the art works, is of course, in the middle. Where much may be debated, of course. And is debated. By those far above us who own us.

See, you want your slaves educated enough to provide real goods and services for you. But then they too often see through the game. And want some of that social surplus to come back their way. Or even just want less taxes. Taxes, you handle purely by fear and the dodge that it's everyone's duty for that social good that does exist. From the dawn of agriculture, that has never got old! But the social surplus created by that very social good you just told them about? Ahh, that has always been more delicate.

Because they'll notice that most large surpluses do not go to social service programs. Taxes pay those. And they'll see through inflation nowadays, with our education and knowledge of history. So how to drain the surplus without them getting uppity?

Here's where Keynes came in. He was the codifier of the rules of how to attack and whittle away at that surplus in a dozen more ways than previously known of. Or if known of, not systematized. And he knew how to squeak more out the social machine of a nation than before, building off of the old tricks of inflation and fractional reserves and his baby, "deficit spending". That was his talant, that was his, sad to say, "genius". In learning of, discovering and writing of those ways.

And bear in mind strongly the dark brilliance of it - he had to write it not as a "Guide for the Despot to Milk his People", but as a work of goodness in how a nation as a whole could be better! And for most, who are not economists, thinkers or philosophers, the work has enough sophistries and such to utterly baffle them at best, and at worst, even convince them of the justness of their own robbery!

All the rises and falls, the bubbles bursting, the crises - these are not for the criminal elite being stupid, this is them being smart. Evil, sure, but smart. Has everyone been tricked into stashing their retirement funds in a 401k? Great - time to arrange for a stock market crash so that we can scoop all that surplus up at once, while telling them to stop whining, "You win some and lose some, not our fault!". Has everyone been tricked into thinking that housing and real estate never loses value, but only increases? Yes? And they've all their surplus in there? Great! Time for that bubble to burst, and since we're the ones bursting it, they'll be hurt, but we won't be!

Has the game been played a bit much, and now it's time to get things back on track - for us? Sure, no problem! The social surplus does not exist as grains or gold any more, but by calculations on what a given population can afford, productivity-wise. The figures say several tens of billions? Then we will "quantitatively ease" ourselves, with money printed up which the workers of the nation will have to be good for! And will be good for! True, it inflates things, but calculations show that they'll still be able to keep their refrigerators powered and their internet access current, and the sociological boys assure us that there'll be no armed uprising while those two things hold true! But we'll keep militarizing the police just to be sure!

The Conservatives of America love to preach a "hands off" approach, such that helping no poor person, in theory ushers in capitalism and that famous - and utopic - "rising tide" that "lifts all boats". The reality is that when you stop helping the poor with government money, or don't grant raises in the minimum wage, you may be 100% sure that the rich thieving elite are STILL skimming that social surplus off, and so while the poor see none of it, the thieves still see all of it! And the "rising tide" only raises them up, as with the enormous anchor of regulations, taxations, inflations and burst bubbles tied firmly to the middle classes, the middle and lower class boats are held under by the weight of all that, and rise not at all!

Thus the increasingly large distance between the 1% and the rest. Which under real capitalism could not happen.

Keynes, you can see now, was a genius. Just a really mean one. He's why each generation is not now better off than the previous, except perhaps in access to technological toys. Which are really only allowed because they have not invented Soma yet, or the other fun stuff of Huxley's "Brave New World". But iPhones serve as well as Soma. And we're allowed them for the same reasons. Focus on the tiny screen, and forget the big picture.

This is why, by the way, that while I am a "capitalist" in the sense that Ayn Rand described, I am also as practical as Fred Kinnan* was. I know these thefts are the norm, I know they will continue. Thus I advocate that while they do that - and they always will - that yes, some "come back" in the form of welfare programs and minimum wages. Not for being a "socialist", but for pragmatically recognizing that while they steal trillions for themselves, that tossing some hundreds of billions to the least is appropriate. The CEOs have their billion dollar bailouts and yachts. They can afford to drip some of that down to the singe mother who wants food stamps and Top Ramen.

"Oh, no, that's socialism, end it all!"? Uh huh. If "ending it all" is an option, I choose that, of course. But that option has NEVER existed, and is never going to exist as long as some wish to steal. They are stealing. They always will. I'm simply then up for negotiating the terms of our captivity, and for me, I'd as soon see a more comfortable slave cabin, instead of everyone in tents while they build a third wing to the Plantation house.

* Hank Reardon was a capitalist creator in the novel "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Fred Kinnan was an amoral, but wise and practical Labor Leader in the same novel.