| HN Mirror

Your average poor person will get in a fist fight over $100, and potentially shoot someone over $1000. They shoot people for nothing anyway. Give your average middle-class citizen $10M to cheat on their wife, and they will. Sometimes they pay $100 to do it anyway. Maybe you won't, but I'll show you how it scales up. And, I'm not saying that in any way these businessmen are immoral, I'll touch on morality at the end, but about avoiding taxes, I can convey to you how it works. Coming as someone who was very, very, pro-Bernie. (Who, by the way, Bernie did not opt to tax himself according to his own laws. I was upset, I told myself that's exactly what I would do, but I understand now). It's, it's just because the orders of magnitude are too large, when all you deal with in a daily basis is $10-$20 purchases, you can easily stand on the moral high ground, it seems absurd to exchange morality for your $10 chicken parm, it just doesn't matter. But say, for $200, it seems difficult to swallow going up to the cashier and saying the kiosk made a mistake, I mean you can just keep it right - it's their fault, right? Well, the voters don't seem to be arguing to increase the capital gains tax, isn't that their fault? You might just pocket the $200.

For $1000 in a wallet, will you search for who dropped it if there's no ID but you know it wasn't there a minute ago? A few seconds pass and they're lost in the times square crowd. If you had shouted "wallet!", everyone would have touched their pocket, and a man would have said "fuck!" and then ran over to you. But you paused. Now he's gone. Why? Why did you pause? You find the wallet again tomorrow, you look around as you put $1000 in your pocket. It seems, it seems this is normal you say. He keeps leaving this wallet. You tour Macao with your gf before coming home, and finding that wallet one more time in times square. Do you take it? You're loved now more than ever by your family, and your unbelievable vacation experience. You take it, you slowly walk away.

It's too easy.

The accountant gives you your tax return, and you saved $1000. You end up being bored and scroll through it, and you see something that's pretty dubious, it's legal I guess you say to yourself but you know it's moving the money around in a weird way. You talk to the account, but he already submitted it to the IRS. What do you do now? I mean, I guess maybe I'll think about it next time. Next time comes, you know what'll happen, but you never open the pdf. That's the wallet. The wallet with $1000 in it. You only cost each American, what, pennies? micro-pennies? nano-pennies? There's not even anyone to return it to, no one who will thank you. The IRS will say "Uh, okay I guess", as the federal budget squanders the money away anyway.

The next year, it's $10000. What do you do now? You've been doing it for years. The IRS already audited and said you're good to go. Do you do something? There's always the gateway drug, each step is easier than the last.

I agree, it's horrible, it's evil, you can feel it. But, but do you, personally, say no?

The middle class is no better, money makes you evil once you get it, you have no choice. Power makes you evil, even the priests can't stop molesting. There's no choice, when you're 7 orders of magnitude away from what things actually cost in day-to-day life it becomes much harder to swallow paying $100M more in taxes than you could be paying, especially when you can get the IRS to audit you and they begrudgingly agree that it's completely legal, by the same laws that the people can protest for and control if they care enough about it.

The other valid option is to make middle class life so enjoyable that you don't have the motivation to accumulate wealth, working 9-5 commuting and eating dinner means you have only 2 hours left to actually do something, that life sucks, it's horrible. Weekends are just enough time to recover for the next Monday, that's why ads on YouTube business videos will show someone throwing money around saying "Are you ready to quit your 9-5?", it's a dream. Europe mastered the art of making middle class life good enough to quell the desire for business, so much PTO, so many vacations and weeks off, so many people working "80%" or "60%" schedules where they take days off or work fewer hours, college free no debt, Singapore gave everyone a house now no one has to pay rent. But did the 512 million people in the EU invent the smartphone? We'd be stuck in the 1960s if America didn't exist, Europe didn't invent anything or innovate in any way. No one wanted to. So in a way, the system works, it keeps innovation running, when communism created something horrible for the people and socialism keeps them stuck in time forever. The deep desire to live the businessman's life is why the economy continues to improve by 2% year over year as Trains and Model T's turn into 747's and SpaceX, there's an extreme need for that life that socialism quells and communism obliterates.

It sounds so stupid to you too, why do they protest for PTO? I'll just take that money out of their salary. They're too stupid to save the money themselves? I had to save so much money to get here, from the same 9-5 that they are in. The sympathy disappears. If you were forced to take vacations that you didn't even want, you know you could've never became rich. The fucking hour break I had to take lunch off for in California was abuse for 4 months, I NEEDED that hour! I NEEDED it to grow the businesses, the startups, the credentials to network with! I ask - Can I have lunch at 4pm, ie just leave early? No. It's illegal. It's fucking agony to be shoved around by the bureaucracy, each law making harder for you to accumulate wealth, to buy freedom. I NEED that hour. I can't even use the fucking computers because they "think that's work" when you have the terminal open and they're terrified of the government and bad PR. You NEEDED that hour. These socialists just want to squander away what they need to actually live the life they want to live. The sympathy runs to zero, businessmen grow up as kids loving Sanders and people like Yang, it disappears as they become Republicans later in life, holding abortion in front of them like a carrot on a stick as a way to sway an easily manipulable audience.

But, you never feel bad. In Tech, they never keep it (The old money and traditional businessmen are the scumbags, fucking Waltons). After you retire, you're done working, you turn back into your old self, the way you were when you were 12 years old begging for people to vote for redistributing the wealth, begging to tax the rich, begging to close the loopholes. You calm down. The passion slows. You donate your money, you build universities, you create foundations and charities. Gates was ruthless for most of his life, but what does he do now? You obviously can't spend it. What the fuck do you even buy. There's nothing that costs that much! You just give it away, your friends, your family, most of it back to the people.

And, when you think about it, what do you have now? Paper? Paper means nothing. You created millions of dollars in value for all these people - the money is right there, you can see the value you generated. And you never actually made them work. They never had to work for it, at all. You gave them value, they gave you paper. You innovate the economy, you move it forward, you created jobs, and the people never had to pay for it. The people have a fake dream that redistributing paper will make them work less. No, who's going to spend the paper more? The businessmen who was addicted to accumulating it, or the middle class themselves. Overall, they just make themselves work more when you move the paper around. You can end your life burning the billions away. Well, it's on a computer, so that's more boring. But still, if it disappears into a black hole, the middle class never actually had to work for me. I worked for them. The economy runs because businessmen play the clicker game of their life, addicted to the number rising like its cocaine.

Just, imagine you were in a simple tribe. You used sea shells to trade. You make a hat, give him a seashell, and he gives it back to you only if you make him a table. But, this one guy seems obsessive, he'll collect all of them. He gives you technology in return. The man, never actually seem to do anything in response? You 'print' seashells, give it to him, and he tells people what exactly they have to do to optimize building houses, farming food, building computers hardware software, he positions the pawns to run optimally and most efficiently. The government fucks up and wastes $80M building a fucking elevator shaft. And, you, the tribe member, wait for the businessman to use the seashells in return, just like how everyone else makes a table for seashells, and you make food when people give you the seashells. You expect to have to work for him, you know you could end up working for life if he gave you enough seashells. But that never happens. The man just, keeps them. He loves them. He looks at how shiny they are. But mostly just keeps to himself. And then at the end, he uses the seashells to tell people how to build extravagant libraries, universities, charities, foundations, helping the needy. And, that's it, that's all that ever happens. You, make food for your fellow middle class'ers. You eat your food for 1/100th the cost it would take to pay a 1700s farmer, because the man told the farmer how to farm really well. But, you never actually need to give the mysterious man anything. He never spends his seashells.

The intellectuals are interesting, they invent circuits, they invent the internet. But nothing happens. A decade passes, and nothing. No one uses it. A few universities use it, a few nerds, but that's it. The USSR obviously does fuck nothing with it even though their nerds did the same thing. No, you brought it to the people. Now everyone has it. They have high bandwidth, low latency, billions of people have it, they have every type of website they could ask for. Before it was just a few nerds in a university, stuck for a decade doing nothing to get it into the masses. They'd be suck forever if Europe was the only country. Making flat-screen monitors was grueling research, it took millions of hours, none of it was fun like how playing with circuits was fun for Turing or Von Neumann, and it took another 50 years to get the research into public hands through the funding by for-profit AT&T into Bell Labs. Europe? They did nothing. No one would have ever invented the flat screen monitor if it wasn't for you - I'm talking to you - feel it -, no one would ever have put so much effort to improve the smartphone's screen so that it's at the quality that it is today. That research was not fun, no one in universities ever helped. If the world was Europe and the USSR, after a thousand years, no one would have ever invented and innovated these items. China might have came around, they're just copycats but that's our fault we were here first, China could've invented it themselves. But maybe, if they didn't see us, they never would've pivoted to capitalism. America's legal system is why we're in the modern world, no one else did it, and no one else was even making progress.

You end up, not really feeling bad about it. You did what you had to do. You give each kid connections, networks, not money. You know money is worth nothing in business, only credentials. So you have no reason to pass the money down. You just give it away to the people. You give it away, you don't spend it, don't give it to your kids, give it to the people! The morals feel great. (The people who setup trust funds for their children and descendants are bastards, the kids generate no value, they make the people work for them like slaves as the kids give the people useless seashells in return, and you miss out on the value that they could have generated if they were also businessmen, though that ends up reducing the average IQ of businessmen overtime which fucks everything up, there's a balancing act there)