Taxes Or Pitchforks?

So check out this op-ed piece in The Guardian, Millionaires like me should pay more taxes. Giving to charity is a fig leaf, by Chuck Collins. Collins is a big money guy. The article identifies him as “the great-grandson of the US meatpacker Oscar Mayer.”

But he is also very concerned about growing economic inequality in the west. He thinks that it is, in fact, actually destroying us. He writes, “This process of pulling apart, both within countries and between nations, will all but guarantee that the global community will further polarize and fail to adequately respond to the looming climate catastrophe. This will be disastrous for everyone, including the planet’s billionaires and millionaires.”

So, in the op-ed, he encourages the wealthy among his readers to pay their fair share -- that is, pay more taxes, and stop fighting so hard for some kind of libertarian society where any regulation of the economy (i.e., of their own wants) is anathema.

Honestly, it is a very compelling piece, and if I were a billionaire, I’d take it very seriously, particularly as Colins notes, “The choice is stark: do we want pitchforks or a working tax system?”

But there’s the rub. I’m not a billionaire. And neither are most of his readers.

So, will they...the 1%...heed his warning? Or will they just keep on doing what they’re doing, increasing their profits at the cost of everyone else, until one day they meet...

That pitchfork? 

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Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.