A recent story about a $400 pineapple has added fuel to the burning resentment against the kind of people who can pay $400 for a pineapple. While such resentment is fully justified, and such casual luxury indicates a sickness in economic philosophy, the disparity exists. We are ruled by a wealthy elite bent on maintaining their position at the top of the pyramid. They fund our elections and bribe our Supreme Court justices to make sure that money keeps flowing to them. They pay their staff handsomely to insure loyalty in the accounting and legal departments. So how do we extract funds from them to disburse to our own little causes? Find out what they're willing to pay stupid amounts of money for.
The process is more complicated than tax policy. With tax policy you decide what the needs of government are. Ideally the needs are based on the needs of the citizens, for functioning infrastructure, safe and sufficient food supplies, fair distribution of proceeds from whatever is produced, and equal justice, to name a few.
The power of money has distorted the system so that we have to fall back to the tactics of the servant classes in the Gilded Age, to flatter and bamboozle the wealthy into forking out cash for things that they take a fancy to. It's far from efficient. Any industry that does it well achieves so much wealth that it becomes part of the problem, lobbying for subsidies, contracts, and tax exemptions that add to the deficit that we have to fill by selling $400 pineapples, $18,000 bicycles, luxury automobiles, and attractively sited houses that fill the prettiest landscapes, occupied for a couple of weeks a year as the wealthy make the rounds of their domain. Tantalize them with handmade furniture, commissioned artwork, offerings from just the right size business. You'll never get rich, but you might get by.
A $400 pineapple is an act of desperation as much as a shameful display of decadence. Yes, it's shamefully decadent to consider such a purchase, but if rich idiots are forking out for $400 pineapples, take their damn money. Then spend those proceeds where they will do some good. I have no idea whether the luxury fruit purveyors are doing that. And no one will ever sell enough $400 pineapples to fill the holes left by tax cuts that have set us up for decades of deficits. Trickle down economics does not work. You have to find the right bait to get the rich to spend some of their money. It changes all the time, and varies from group to group. With the system constructed in their favor, the wealthy get to sit back and let the commoners guess what will attract a trickle. Most of the time, we grunts only have our lives to trade, expressing proper gratitude for the opportunity to be property caretakers and service providers, on call and cheerful.
Attempts to take a larger chunk of money and make a point, in the form of civil suits, turn out to be less successful. The bigger the settlement, the more tireless the defense. Has Alex Jones paid anything yet? Has Rudy Giuliani? Trump? Anyone? You can win a massive settlement and still have to live on food stamps and endure decades of death threats while you wait for the legal challenges to fade into the outright refusal to pay. While the legal precedents are important, the cash amounts are basically irrelevant. At best they are symbolic. Worse yet, they just put a price tag on immorality. Can you really ruin any of these people financially? It appears not. No one is kicking in doors and dragging any of them away over the refusal to pay out millions in damages, or even fines. The lawyers just keep the ball in the air, back and forth over the net, never landing.
All we have left is $400 pineapples.
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