Books and Reading

I recently finished reading "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville. I found it an easy book to read - clear plot, well-developed characters, short chapters, generally concise sentence structure. It's also a book you could read many times and get something new on each reading given the complexity and universal nature of the topics it touches on.

I just started reading "Middlemarch" by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). "Moby Dick" and "Middlemarch" were written in the mid to latter 19th century. "Moby Dick" in 1851 and "Middlemarch" in 1871. They also both cover topics that are complex and universal. Beyond that they are very different types of books.

I'm finding "Middlemarch" difficult to read partly because of the sentence structure, voice, punctuation and plethora of characters introduced at a fast pace. It seems to be a book about what we expect from life versus what life provides and how different people deal with that dichotomy. It's also pointing to all the unsung heroes throughout time who make the best of it. The people we don't see on TV or read about in books - the everyday people - mothers, fathers, doctors, nurses, workers, teachers who make a positive difference in the world.

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One of the reasons I wanted to read "Middlemarch" is this quote from the book...

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

I don't know what that might mean to anyone else. For myself it brings to mind times when I was losing contact with reality. Genius often borders on insanity. I'm familiar with the latter. I suppose that's true of most of us if we are at all interesting or honest. The people you might want to be leery of are the perfectly sane. If nothing else, they may bore you to death.

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That idea that sanity isn't all it's cracked up to be comes across in this quote from "On the Road" by one of my all-time favorite authors and characters Jack Kerouac -

"the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

I'm sort of hoping the beat generation ethos comes back in some form to popular culture. We are certainly living in a time where there is no shortage of beat down people. This video about the beat generation is one of the best and most concise summaries of that era I've run across. If you are at all interested in that time in U.S. history, I'd highly recommend spending half an hour watching it.

Tax Policy Impact on Charitable Giving

If you happen to be a Rip Van Winkle sort, and have spent decades asleep in the woods, it may come as a surprise that the U.S. Tax Code is highly skewed towards favorable treatment for the wealthiest members of the leisure class. For the rest of us the idea that we aren't playing on a level field is anything but news.

Two simple examples are (a) the IRS depreciation rules for racehorses which are giveaways to those tippy-top members of the horsey set. and (b) the detailed and onerous IRS rules for tipped workers to ensure every nickel and dime is extracted from these hard-working poor Americans.

As Warren Buffett, whose current net worth is 140.8 billion dollars, said, 

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." - Warren Buffett

To begin to understand what happened to the U.S. to give working people the shaft you could start with the infamous Powell Memo of the 1970's or at the Reagan/Thatcher regimes of the 1980's or the WTO/Clinton era of the 1990's or go back to the anti-New Dealers that came on the scene in the 1930's to oppose FDR's programs. Playing the game of Monopoly may illustrate the point - once all the wealth has been distributed the game becomes boring, pointless and not enjoyable for those without capital.

You could also gain a broad understanding of what happened by considering the history of humankind from any era.  You will conclude that absent any moral sentiment the strong will exploit the weak. With power as the only determining factor man becomes more beastlike red in tooth and claw participating in a war of all against all where life is solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short.

In other words, since money is power, the rich will exploit the poor unless checked by law, or a moral code adhered to voluntarily. In case you hadn't noticed we don't have either of those checks in our current society.

Back to tax policy...

The 2017 Tax act passed by the Republican-controlled Congress nearly doubled the amount of the standard deduction. What this did was to make itemization of deductibles an exercise that only makes sense for the wealthy. As this July 2024 report from the AEI, a right-wing corporate-captured think tank, says - the 2017 Tax law has made itemized charitable giving a luxury of the rich.

Crucially this law caused charitable giving to decrease by 20 billion dollars annually according to this study by a Notre Dame economist.

I don't know what the Republican (or Democratic) parties of today stand for or who they represent. Maybe they represent the 1% and the 10% respectively? The idea that a party would remove an incentive for working class people to donate to non-profits seems perverse and pointless. 

Living in a plutocracy means our political and economic policies and structures are subject to the whims of the .1% of rich people in accord with the old golden rule - those that got the gold - rule. Or as Karl Marx put it less succinctly,

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class, which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas."

We are left to hope that those who fate has been kind to and endowed with great wealth and power would have a sense of noblesse oblige. 

Unfortunately for us little people - the big money people have been overrun by immoral, self-interested twits - possibly and probably dangerous but twits just the same. 

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