Hasn’t economics reached a dead end? Seriously, has there been a new idea about how we collectively share the spoils of our success since Marx? A grand, sweeping analysis of the human condition…

What do political professors in China teach? Just wondering.

No, we need a new Karl. A singular genius with a radical re-imagining of human civilization. A post-capitalist, post-marxist, post-youtube thinker. Probably she is out there. (pardon my gratuitous feminism).

Sweep out the universities. To hell with them. I’m shocked! my BA in Philosophy is now worthless! How did this come to pass? Calamity.

Of course this new thinker will have to be Chinese. Brush up on your mandarin if you want to get in on the ground floor.

Neo-confucionism anyone?

(I remain firmly committed to advancing at whatever glacial pace possible, the goal of the destruction of a coercive political system in whatever form it may take).

I have seen the future.

Long have I agonized as to how an anarchist society might obtain.

In the future there will be no privacy. Everything you do, night or day, will be visible to whoever is interested. Billions of people connected night and day by technology we can scarcely imagine now.

Privacy will be a “right” that we will gradually dispense with. Our desire to be observed, to be known, by others, and our diminished sense of shame will conspire to eliminate separateness.

And in a world with no privacy, where everyone is potentially exposed to everyone else, power will be dispersed.

A world of potentially perfect communication will undermine the secrecy required to consolidate power among an elite.

Don’t worry. This world will take generation upon generation to come to pass. We couldn’t live there, but our great-great-great-great grandchildren won’t have a problem with it.

Our tolerance for inequality, as a species, seems fairly high. We are capable of accepting at a fairly early age differences in intelligence, physical ability and even wealth without much difficulty. The brute facts of one’s biological circumstances seem no more remarkable than any other accidents of birth. That is not to say that we are not prone to envy in the face of inequality. But we are liable to accept it as a feature of the world rather than as an injustice.

Our sense of what is fair is more situational. It is, shall we say, the beginning of ethics to make a judgment about the fairness of a particular situation. Inequality is ethically neutral, however those actions or consequences that flow from inequality may be deemed to be fair or unfair depending upon ones perspective, which is determined to a great extent by personality.

The fact that you have more than me is ethically irrelevant unless your gain was unfairly accumulated. Now we get to the crux of the matter. Excluding outright criminality (such as blatant theft), what types of wealth accumulation are unfair? We can’t simply say that because there is so much wealth concentrated among so few people that the wealth of the wealthy was unfairly accumulated.

This necessarily becomes a political problem. Obama’s appeals to “fairness” via the “Buffett Rule” are not related to reality. He presumes, rightly, that most people will instinctively feel that it is unfair to tax the rich at a rate that is lower than the average guy. But if this principle is correct–that fairness entails proportional sacrifice–then taxing the middle-class at the same rate as the super-wealthy comes nowhere near fairness. 35% of $150,000 per year is a greater sacrifice than 35% of $250,000,000. That’s not to mention the increased burden of all the other forms of taxation that fall upon the $150,000 household.

We need a language of fairness. It’s not a part of our cultural heritage. One could argue that religion has been civilization’s answer to the question of unfairness from the beginning. Whether it is the will of God or the circle of Samsara, life is difficult and there’s not much you can do about it.

Perhaps a future civilization based on a common language of fairness will fare better than the latter day civilizations that have used a system of ritual legalism to protect the phantasm of human rights.

“Abram put his faith in the LORD, who reckoned it to him as righteousness, and said , ‘I am the LORD who brought you out from Ur of the Chaldees to give you this land as your possession.” Genesis 15:6-7

This is the moment, according to the Bible, where everything begins. This is the moment when Yahweh makes contact with a human being on a human level. What follows is Yahweh’s promise to give Abram the promised land and descendants too numerous to count.

The amazing moment is the bit about his faith being “reckoned to him as righteousness”.

Abram was not a spotless person. He was not without sin. But in virtue of his “faith” he is treated as if he was without sin. There doesn’t seem to be anything about him that makes him special. There must have been thousands of wandering refugees of that time that had been displaced from the cities that had sprang up in Mesopotamia. The crops were failing. The good times were over between the Tigris and Euphrates. Time to find better pastures.

Even if Abram/Abraham is mythological, the context seems to have a ring of truth.

This passage is critical to Christian theology. This is the first expression of grace, after the fall. A substitution is taking place. Abram’s faith in this God is more important than his fidelity to law (this is before Moses, of course). Faith is the most important feature of the relationship between man and the deity. Faith in the power (which is not so hard), and faith in his goodness (which is more difficult).

From my atheist perspective, I see man seeking, desperately, for benevolence in the cosmos. We are mere humans. There is some greater power that oversees us. This is a moment where the real test is changed from one of absolute obedience to one of faith. The man is willing to risk everything, to be a fool, to suffer for the ultimate purpose that this other, greater, absolute power has in store.

I find this part of Genesis utterly believable. I can imagine this actually happening to an ancient Abram–even the strange part in verse 17. The Garden of Eden and Noah’s arc are obviously myths, but this is where the Bible gets serious and strikes me as compelling.

Who is programming the Robo-Romney? They need to get it back into the lab and figure out why it keeps uttering these alarming sound-bites.

I’d like to start a bible study for atheists. And I think it should be serious and thoughtful and not some smug attempt to find every silly reason the bible doesn’t make sense.

A good topic to start with is the evolution of the concept of sin. How encumbered is our culture with the biblical concept of sin? I don’t know. I’m curious about it.

As I have mentioned, my brother is dying of alcoholism. If you have ever seen someone die of alcoholism, you know that this is one of the most gruesome ways to go. My family is on a death watch. They seem eager for it to end. And I can understand that. It’s excruciating. One wonders how this can continue… The man has overdosed on combinations of pills and booze that ought to kill a much larger mammal. And yet he persists.

My family is religious. Evangelical. I find it unfathomable.

My brother is a heathen through and through. A kind-hearted, but deeply flawed, narcissistic heathen. He has caused untold suffering to countless friends, lovers and worst of all forever damaged his one and only child who I know he loves deeply, but to whom he has given nothing but hurt. But people love him.

I am less enthusiastic about his dying, and less inclined to believe it is imminent. The sad fact of the matter is that the dismal state he is in could continue for years. Earlier today he made contact again from a local hospital (how many trips to the hospital have there been this year?). Apparently he was assaulted, again. His back has been broken. His spleen has been kicked in. His lungs have been perforated by broken ribs from beatings on the street.

You may ask why I am not caring for him here in my little suburban house with my two young children… He has been welcomed here from time to time, but extreme, blind, insane drunkenness does not a tolerable roommate make. Nothing is safe. He is a thief and liar. Above all, a liar.

The first time I took him in was when I was 17. After my mother booted him out he landed with me. In and out of my life he went over the past thirty years. The state was kind enough to care for him for a few years.

Despite all that I love him. There but for the grace of Tyche go I.

So back to the topic at hand. Existentialism. I kind of adopted this point of view a while back, with some Nietzsche under my belt, and huge doses of Dostoevsky. I cling to the ideal of existence precedes essence (Sartre’s formulation) and insist that I am responsible for whatever my life is. But I know down deep in my heart that this is just a psychological ploy. I want to believe it, but in my heart of hearts I’m a fatalist. I don’t see any hope for my brother. There’s no meaning to what has become of him.

From a relational perspective, however, it makes more sense. Whether I have the ability, or will to make more of myself than I am at this moment is beside the point. What matters is that I respond to others as if that were the case. And as hard as it is in my brother’s case, I give him the right to live the life he has chosen, even though the idea of “choice” in his case seems wildly out of place with the current facts.

I added the blog From Wine to Water to the blogroll today. I haven’t read everything on it, yet, but I’m guessing I will with time. He really touched a nerve for me. From what I’ve seen so far he has an excellent Christian pedigree… a lifetime of bible study and understanding of faith from the inside. But he’s out there talking about this strange experience of becoming an atheist. I can relate. It encourages me to write more about my non-faith which is kind of what got me going on this blogging thing in the first place.

***Can’t believe I did this, but an earlier version of this called Ivan’s blog “From Water to Wine” which kind of misses the whole point of the title of his blog. I guess that’s some old, deep-rooted bible reading coming through on my part…

A week ago, after the South Carolina primary, I wanted to write a little piece called “Anarchists for Newt.” Too late, sadly.

I can’t take this race seriously, although I follow it compulsively.

I wish Gingrich could have held on. A general election between Obama and Romney will be like being trapped in a focus group for six months. What do you want to hear? OK. How about this. Can you rate the following statement on a scale of one to ten…

The proles are up in arms (I wish literally) over Romney’s effective tax rate of 13.9%. Let’s review the facts:

Romney benefits from being taxed at the current capital gains rate of 15%. That’s a sweet rate compared to the highest rate paid on earned income of 35%. The conservative argument is that low rates on capital gains spur investment. This argument has some validity for those who would benefit from a one-off or infrequent return on a significant gain, such as the sale of a business. A high rate of tax on the sale of a business asset reduces the likelihood that an investor would be willing to sell if the tax rate diminishes the potential return of the transaction (especially when the transaction eliminates future material gains through ordinary profit from the business). That’s a pretty good argument, but it doesn’t mean anything to the likes of Romney and his cohort.

Sales of business income-producing assets that will produce a short-term gain are major decisions for a small business owner that has invested years of his or her life building up the business. Say you own a moderately successful coffee shop and one of the big corporate entities want to buy you out. If you can cash in and pay a nominal rate on the gain, it might make sense. If you have to pay a third of the gain on your lifetime investment, you might just hold on to your inefficient little neighborhood store and keep working 80 hours a week to keep it in business instead.

What does that have to do with the likes of Romney? Not a thing. Since he received “fees” from other rich people and re-invested the gains from the private capital that he “managed” he never had any of the risk of loss of income that the average small business owner must consider when making this decision.

The argument that without a low rate of tax on capital gains money would no longer be invested is just wrong. What the hell else are rich people going to do with their money? Stuff it in giant mattresses? Small business owners would need a break though if the rate were to get jacked up.

Earlier I argued that corporate income tax should be eliminated. I still stand by that argument. Recently I saw that some were claiming that Romney’s real rate was more like 50% since his income was from corporations (taxed at a fixed rate of 35%) plus his capital gains rate of 15%. That’s just pure bullshit. Although corporations do pay a current rate of 35%, few of them pay any dividends anyway, so what difference does it make? I doubt that the bulk of Romney’s earnings were from dividends (although there might be a few insignificant millions of dollars of dividends in the mix). Corporations have innumerable ways to avoid generating taxable profits, not least of which is off-shoring their most profitable divisions in low-tax countries such as Ireland.

Here’s a good trade-off: Eliminate corporate income tax altogether, but require that all profits be distributed (less prudent reserves) and be taxed as ordinary income.

(As an aside, whatever the rate on corporations, I don’t feel sorry for them. There are a wide variety of benefits available to both shareholders and employees of C-Corps that are not available to sole proprietors or even S-Corps. Not to mention the fact that even medium-sized corporations are usually at a huge advantage (vis a vis regulations and taxation) over their start-up rivals.)

Finally, from a moral perspective, is the sweat of one’s brow worth less than that pile of cash your daddy gave you? Just wondering.

Oh, and by the way, I’m still an anarchist and think all taxes are bullshit and serve only to sustain a governing elite, but that’s beside the point.