Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)

Adam Thornton · 20 May 2009, 00:52 · from 2009-May.txt.gz

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From: adam at io.com (Adam Thornton)
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 19:52:23 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe Fans Talk Politics (Again)
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Message-ID: <9ABE7B53-68B6-4796-8C59-D8E081A69FF7 at io.com>

On May 19, 2009, at 7:30 PM, James Wynn wrote:
> We don't have to consider those things. Neither does Moe. We are  
> more numerous than Moe. We're not negotiating with Moe. If Moe  
> complains we'll denounce him as greedy and do what we want anyway.  
> Moe can bend over and take the shaft.

...Except that Moe can afford better things than we can.  Including  
weapons.

>>> It assumes that a guy making $25K a year is exactly like the guy   
>>> making $250K a year except that one happens to make less.
>>
>> Yes and no.  I mean, sure, there is a reason I eventually started   
>> getting paid more money: I was doing jobs that required skills  
>> that  were rarer, or at least more valued by the people willing to  
>> employ  me, and I had acquired those skills through experience and  
>> training.   But on the other hand, I'm still in some important  
>> sense the me I was  twenty years ago.
>
> You are not the same person at $60K that you were when you made  
> $15K.  You have skills that you were motivated to develop in order  
> to earn more. You have a history of steady, reliable work that you  
> were motivated to create out of a desire for money (not a desire for  
> a better "public space").

If you view me-as-a-person purely as me-as-a-device-for-earning-money,  
you may have a point.  Though not, even then, a particularly good  
one.  To start with, that's not really been my motivation for learning  
my skills.  Sure, "to make enough money that I can have a comfortable  
and pleasant lifestyle" is a strpmg motivator, and I did not have that  
thing at $15K.  I pretty much *did* have it at $30K.  Much more of the  
motivation is that whatever-it-is-I-have-to-do-to-maintain-that- 
minimally-pleasant-lifestyle be as non-onerous as possible.

The interesting thing is that jobs that require I *think* more and  
better seem to pay more than ones where I don't have to.  Despite the  
fact that sitting on my ass in front of a computer screen and thinking  
is much less strenuous work than digging ditches, waiting tables, or  
even shelving books.

> Stop and consider that you are currently making more than the mean  
> salary in this country. That didn't just fall in your lap. What if  
> society were engineered so you could depend on making  say...$25K  
> per year from the get go, and start taxing you more as you progress.  
> There's a good chance your work history would be vastly different.

It would depend on how much I liked the life of doing nothing and  
living in mild poverty.  So, yeah, it might.  On the other hand:  
getting paid to find ways you could do the same IT tasks with much  
less expensive software is pretty fun, and shelving books isn't.   
(Yeah, I never had a *truly* menial job, and my only foodservice jobs  
were semipro bartending (that is, tending bar for private functions-- 
it's an excellent source of beer money (and, uh, beer) in grad school,  
especially since you're being paid a pittance but you also generally  
get to keep any tips, and there's no inventory control, so where's  
your incentive to not give proper damn pours (which, of course,  
influence tips)?), which was actually pretty fun too.)

> Your claim that your 25% of $60K is less than 15% of $15K suggests  
> you think you're being over-paid.

Actually, I specifically said that I didn't think I was being overpaid  
a bit farther down.  I'm saying that a dollar means a lot more at  
$12750 than it does at $45000.

And certainly my current job, which largely consists of helping  
already rich entities get even richer by saving them money they pay in  
license fees to various software vendors to license the tools they  
need to perform their IT tasks, by finding them lower-cost  
alternatives and supplying glue to enable those alternatives to  
perform equivalent jobs, is worth much more to those rich entities  
than me-shelving-books is.  Much more than 4 times as much, I'm sure.

> But consider that you perspective might be colored by the fact that  
> you paid no income tax when you made $15K, and now that you make  
> $60K, depending on your situation, you probably pay little or none  
> as well. Someone else is making up that difference for you. Are you  
> proud of that?

How do I pay little or none now, and who's making up the difference?   
I lost the thread of your argument.

> On the other hand, from then til now you almost certainly paid a  
> significant Social Security **flat tax**. What is not readily  
> apparent is that your employer pays it as well. Making the cost of  
> just hiring you and your fellow employees to be the largest expense  
> they've taken on--which is passed on you as a consumer.  Your  
> welfare state is a self-justifying system, since it makes it more  
> expensive just to get started in life and makes jobs harder to find.

On the other hand, it means if I don't find a job, I don't starve in  
the street, right?  That's a trade I'll take.  And as a business  
owner--yeah, been one of those too; not much fun--it's also a trade  
I'll take.  As you say, I get to pass on my costs, and if I fire  
someone, well, I'm probably not actually condemning them to starve.   
I'll pay a bit for that conscience-salve.

Adam

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