Look, this isn’t rocket science here.

Money is power. Everyone knows this, although for some strange reason, a lot of people get uncomfortable when you talk about it.

Money is power, and power corrupts, ergo money corrupts. That explains practically all class struggle right there.The more money someone has, the more corrupt they become, and there you have the scientifically proven fact that wealth and power – even if they are ill-gotten and the person did nothing to earn it and very blatantly had a huge unfair advantage to start with – money and power lead to worse moral behaviour.

Ergo, the concentration of wealth leads to people simultaneously gaining more power while becoming less worthy of wielding it.

For that reason alone, any sane civilization would ban the accumulation of wealth.

But wait, there’s more. The biggest threat to individual freedom is individual power. Freedom requires equality. If any citizen becomes far more powerful than the others, they can use that power to force the others to do what they want, and that, you may recognize, is the opposite of freedom.

Another reason any sane civilization would ban the accumulation of wealth.

Then there’s the effect it has on the rule of law. Everybody knows that rich people have fancy lawyers that can get them out of almost anything. So not only does the wealth make them more likely to do immoral things, it makes them less likely to suffer any legal consequences from their evil acts.

Reason enough to ban the accumulation of wealth.

The only alternative is to divorce money from power as much as possible. That requires laws to keep money out of politics, and those laws require enforcers who can resist the power of money to corrupt them.

Easier to just keep people from getting the money in the first place.

Rewinding a bit, I think the reason people get uncomfortable when you talk about money being power is that with power comes responsibility and we don’t like thinking of our own money that way.

We think of our own wealth as being exclusively for our own pleasure and not as something we should worry about using “right”. It’s a lesson all of consumer society reinforces and for the most part, there’s little harm in it.

And if you do start to worry about how you should be spending your money, consumer society also provides charities you can donate to make yourself feel better.

I feel acutely uncomfortable talking about money being power and I am the one who brought it up in the first place.

Discomfort, however, is a poor excuse for letting the rich destroy freedom. To sit by and do nothing while the one percent steal our money and then use that money to pay politicians to suppress the vote just because we do not like how admitting money is power makes you feel would be a moral failure of the highest degree.

So let’s get together and do this : raise the top tax rate to 98 percent. Prevent the private accumulation of wealth.

Because money is power.

And power corrupts.

More after the break,

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On being naturally gifted

Most people are generalists. That means they have no one talent in which they excel but instead have a few minor areas of specialization that suit their personality and that, in turn, guide their career choices, but do not define them.

This may not make them superstars but it does make them ready for life.

Some of us, however, are freaks. We have a crazy huge amount of one thing or another (beauty, charm, intelligence, and so on) and next to nothing anywhere else.

This is a very poor setup for basic survival. A person like that is going to need to trade what they have in surfeit for all the other things they have in deficit.

In other words, they have to trade what they’ve got for what they do not.

Luckily, in modern society, our robust interrelationships make such trades possible. Us hothouse flowers can find partners of various forms to make up for what our extreme specialization denies us.

A singer with a golden voice can find a manager, a naturally beautiful person can work as a model, the intellectually gifted can work for the NSA, and so on.

This is, in fact, our only viable survival strategy. It comes, however, with a subtle but powerful error contained within its assumptions.

There is a very strong tendency in gifted mutants like myself to want to believe that whatever we have plenty of should be the only thing we need to have in order to get everything they want.

So if it’s beauty, the person might feel like the world owes them unlimited indulgence just for being nice to look at. Or if it’;s technical skill, the person might chafe at the very notion that any other skill should ever matter in technical workplaces.

Like, say, interpersonal skills, or social skills, or communication skills.

And if you are a major Professor McSmartypants like myself, you dream of a world where you are paid to just sit around being brilliant all day.

As far as I can tell, the closest thing to that is being part of a “think tank”. And even then, you presumably need to actually contribute to the solution of a problem.

Still sounds good to me, though. Sign me the fuck up.

The tendency, then, for us mutant savants, is to believe our talent(s) should act as a kind of universal currency that we can trade for whatever we desire, and when that turns out not to be the case, we rail against the injustice of the world.

This is understandable. But it only makes things worse by sheltering our one trick pony mindsets instead of making us realize that we need more than out outsized abilities to get through life and that there is nothing unfair about a world where certain abilities get certain things but not other things.

For example, I have always had way more brains than I know what to do with. And many in my situation develop a world view that says everything should come to us because we are so gosh darn special.

But big brains only get you certain things. Like high marks in school. A greater grasp of issues than the average person. The mental strength to overcome certain obstacles.

And so forth.

But it does not get you love. It cannot effectively compensate for being socially awkward due to bad socialization in one’s formative years. It can’t be traded for groceries or used to get yourself the intercourse of your dreams.

You’re going to have to actually do things to get those. Being ever so special isn’t worth jack shit if it doesn’t lead to ability and performance.

Because why should someone trade what they have for your worthless specialness? People trade to profit. A good trade profits everyone.

But if you aren’t willing to produce something someone wants, you can’t go around whining about how unfair the world is.

It’s perfectly fair to expect you to do what everyone else is doing : producing.

And the sooner you accept this, the sooner you can get on with living.

Nobody owes you an easy path made entirely of steps you find easy and fun and not scary at all.

It’s up to you to decide whether the path is worth traveling or not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.