Affirming for Real

(This is another of those
"deep" ideas I get while
taking a shower.)   

A thought about affirmative action --

If you want people to be productive, you want them to produce things of value. If you want people to produce things of value you have to believe that they can produce things of value.

If you want to believe that people can produce things of value, you must believe that they have value -- intrinsic value.

But if you don't show that belief in your actions, you are essentially refusing to believe the thing you want to believe.

But affirmative action seems to put unqualified people in positions they aren't qualified for.

Wait. I said "not qualified" twice. Let's take one of those away.

But affirmative action puts people in positions they are not qualified for.

You get why I made those changes, don't you?

How do we demonstrate our belief in people without putting them in positions they aren't yet qualified for?

"... aren't _yet_ qualified ..."

It's impossible to get qualified without experience, and it's impossible to get experience without being in a position you aren't qualified for.

So what do we do to reduce the damage unqualified people do while they are getting experience and getting qualified?

How about letting the people who are qualified stick around?

Not so close as to prevent the new guy on the job from learning things the hard way (which is the only way to get experience), but not so far away that when the inevitable troubles ensue they can't help.

This is what seems to me to be missing in our current efforts at affirmative action.

Wealth Caps?

(This is another of those
"deep" ideas I get while
taking a shower.) 

I consider myself conservative. 

I consider myself to respect the concept of natural stewardship. I understand how artificial restraints on wages can strangle creativity.

But there comes a point -- or two or three -- where ... 

If you've already amassed enough personal wealth to retire comfortably ten times over, it's time to do so, to move over and let someone fresh join the fight. No, those who have gotten wealthy shouldn't just go on vacation, there are plenty of service projects that have no way of generating monetary value that a person can get involved in, to keep a person competitive, sharp, and alive.  

And, really, service itself should be considered a higher value than money. 

Having enough money to retire a hundred times over gives an individual the sort of personal power that minor nobility have in nobility systems of government, and if the national government is involving itself in taxing personal income, if it fails to set some boundaries on that kind of wealth, it is effectively setting up a modern version of nobility.  

In the US, that should be a Constitutional issue -- and should be held up as evidence that the national income tax itself, amendment notwithstanding, is a breach of the Constitution.  

Somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times the amount of money that enables a comfortable retirement, there's a point where the government should have a right to step in and say that that much wealth is on the face of it evidence of business malpractice, and force early retirement. I mean, if the government can force retirement at 65 or 70, under whatever untested assumptions, surely the government can force retirement at, say, 650 MUSD or so, to borrow an arbitrary number.  

[JMR202411200736 note:] 

(I should emphasize that I am speaking strictly in the loose theoretical -- I haven't thought this through to the consequences, and I am confident that, like all other good ideas, there will likely be negative effects and more loopholes for the lawyers and the rich who can afford lawyers.)

[JMR202411200736 note end.] 

I'm sure that finding indirect holdings would become a problem for the regulatory agencies. I could guess that some of the very rich would find tricks like paying people to hold holdings for them -- but even that would require them to dilute the power they can exercise. 

Getting the national government out of the income tax business would definitely help reduce the special interest involvement at national level, and spread them out at the state level enough to dilute their power -- assuming that states would completely take over the individual income tax function.  

I suspect that simply pushing the income tax function down to the state level would pretty much force most national corporations to split up on state lines, and significantly limit monopolies and the insane levels of personal wealth.