Taxes and Terrorists

I took the weekend off, but now I am back at it.

Before leaving off, I was writing about the financial decisions we make as a society—what we will fund, and how it will be paid for. Those decisions affect us on two levels. Perhaps you could call it external and internal. We get the society we pay for certainly, so that is the external, and whether we were in the majority or not, that affects us and has its own perils. There are also some internal perils though, in the person that we become as we make those decisions. We’ll start with the external.

Back on the topic of infrastructure, there are some things that we need to be able to rely on if society is going to function smoothly and support positive growth. Sadly a lot of the watchdog agencies are not doing their jobs, so you may have waste dumped into your water, or find that your electricity rates go up and it is generating profit for shareholders rather than improving service, but that’s a topic for another day.

The topic for today is whether we really want a system that widens the gulf between the rich and the poor? Money can buy you bottled water if the water supply becomes untrustworthy, and can move you into the country if the air becomes polluted, and if you have enough money maybe you can even have your own helicopter so that the state of the roads never matters. Most of us will not be able to take our private helicopter into the country, but we will be living in neighborhoods and traveling through civilization to a job, and humanity will be around all of the time. We shouldn’t want to avoid humanity, but we can’t anyway, so we need to think about how they are turning out.

Say schools struggle with funding. Wealthy people can send their children to private schools, and less financially secure but still dedicated people could try home schooling or maybe setting up a charter school, but the majority of children will be relying on public school. If the public school does not have adequate resources to prepare their students for a future of employment and social responsibility, enough of that can bleed over into the lives of the private school kids also.

First of all, you need an educated workforce. This goes beyond being able to attract economic investment to simply being able to support it, as well as having a population that will come up with its own innovations. If you have your own company and can put Junior in charge of running it one day, that is great, but it is a more meaningful gift if he can find good employees who know how to think and develop. Even if you have no children, it makes sense that as you age you will want there to be good doctors and city planners and safety inspectors, not to mention people continuing to pay into Social Security and Medicare once you are collecting. For that to work smoothly, you need success in the schools.

You could argue that you also need healthcare, living wages, and other things like that, and could argue about how much is really necessary, but there shouldn’t be an argument that you productive citizens for a smoothly-functioning society where pretty much any citizen can feel safe and accomplish what they need.

Yes, it was Afghanistan that sheltered Al-Quaeda, and there have been attacks against our troops in Lebanon and Yemen, but the great majority of terrorists come from Saudi Arabia, which is considered a close ally. Well, our government is allied with their government, and we like buying their oil, and they find perks in the relationship, so why the terrorists? There are a couple of things that make Saudi Arabia a fertile breeding ground.

First, you have an economy where there is great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, and great poverty in other places. You also have fairly high unemployment. This is getting better, and I could not find statistics for before September 11th, but two years later, in 2003, it was 25%. In addition, they practice polygamy, and assuming they have a fairly even birthrate, with the same number of men and women, and polygamy is common, there are not enough women to go around. Finally, although the government is friendly to us, and they do not have the same interest in freedom of the press and freedom of religion as us, they don’t interfere with a strongly anti-American press and clerics, because they would rather have the hate being spewed at America than them.

So, imagine a young man born poor, with limited opportunities. He can’t find a job. He is interested in girls, but with no money or job, or prospects of that changing, he will never have a girl either. With no job or girl, he has a lot of time on his hands, and the people who are really interested in him are the mullahs, who will preach to him for hours, and may even feed him, and they will teach him how corrupt and evil Western civilization is, and how glorious martyrdom is, and then you do get the women.

It may sound overly simplistic, but why don’t we get more terrorists from Jordan or Lebanon or Indonesia for that matter? You get a lot of Palestinians, even if they are not directed at us, but again, they are coming from horrible living conditions, with a lot of time to listen to the preaching of hate.

I first came across this theory in Psychology Today, and one point they made is that we just don’t get a lot of American suicide bombers, even in our lunatic fringe, and it’s a combination of those differences. There are people who will listen to a lot of hate speech, but they can still have families. There are people who are unemployed, but they have gotten a balanced education. Generally speaking, our conditions do not create the complete lack of hope for the future that is then coached into anger and hatred. Not yet.

This is a big reason why I worry so much about the lack of civil discourse. We have been moving into uglier times. I believe I expressed some anger towards Aaron Campbell for the choices he made, despite feeling compassion for him. I will also give him this credit in that I don’t believe he was trying to cause any destruction other than his own.

I cannot say that about Jeffrey Grahn. It wasn’t enough to shoot himself, and it wasn’t enough to shoot himself—he also needed to shoot two of her friends. I can’t say that about Joe Stack, who loaded his plane with an extra fuel tank before flying it into a building. I’m sure he was very disappointed to find out he had only taken one additional life. People call him a hero because it was the IRS—no way. And if you won’t get over your anti-government feelings to see the wrongness of that, how about him burning down the house where his wife and step-daughter still lived first? Okay, I guess it was nice of him not to shoot them, but leaving them homeless is still a pretty big “Screw you.” He just wanted to destroy.

Not everyone will turn hopelessness into hatred, but it does happen, and with prolonged hopelessness it’s a fairly easy step.

Life is difficult enough—we should not be setting things up to make it harder for anyone to progress a little and get somewhere. They say a rising tide raises all boats. Well, a little scuttling might end up sinking the whole fleet. We are connected. At best we have a society that gradually becomes less efficient and poorer; at worst life imitates Grand Theft Auto, We can do better than that, and we should want to. That will be the next piece.

On a side note, I can only imagine what kind of keyword flags this one is going to throw out. I guess its a good thing I don't have any trips planned.