Letter to a Right-Winger

Workers create value; employers organize a workplace, but only when there is demand for products/services: employers DO NOT CREATE JOBS. Governments create jobs more directly than most investors. And produce value, like census data, standard weights and measures, highways, civil peace, international stability. If you want to know what it's like without government, look at Somalia.

You need taxes to pay for collective values. People with wealth, and owners of businesses benefit more from these collective goods than those who live in ghettos, or under bridges. So, they should pay more. Currently, they don't pay their fair share.

The current tax system is more skewed in favor of the rich than it has been since the 1920's. The money created from economic growth should not all go to the investor, but 95% of all increased value since 2008 has gone to investors, not workers. Is that a fair distribution of value? When you tax, or even if you don't tax, you distribute wealth.

While employers may play some positive role in providing goods and services, investors are much less important, since there is an abundance of capital in the world. Why do you think interest rates can be kept so low? Investment should not be valued more highly than people's work, but that is exactly what our current tax system does. It's unjust (capital gains or "carried interest" at 15%, work: 20-35%). Our current system steals value from workers and transfers it to investors. That's Robin Hood in reverse, and that's what Obama proposes to undo.

If we continue along the same path of taxing investors lightly, then we'll end up like a Third World country with a small wealthy class and a poor, desperate class. Don't be surprised if we end up not with a moderate Obama, but with a revolutionary like Venezuela's Chavez, who gained political traction because of the extremes of wealth and poverty in Venezuela. My mother's family lives there behind doors that look like safe vaults!

In Sweden and Canada, people don't have to lock their doors even in Stockholm and Toronto, because those countries have fairer taxes and higher levels of equality.

Do you want people desperate, or relatively satisfied and willing to support the status quo? If you want stability and civil peace, you have to pay for it. If you have more, then you should pay more: you've benefited disproportionately. Does a black son of a waitress in a central city have your advantages? He struggles not because he's lazy, or stupid, but because our system intensifies his disadvantages; it should eliminate them.

Obama is no revolutionary Robin Hood; he's attempting to rectify a system that favors only a tiny proportion of the population. If that imbalance continues it will impoverish us all, not enrich us--except for the tiny few, like the Roman Senators of Fifth Century Rome prior to the Empire's collapse.