We are living in the Ancien Regime of the USA.  The parallels to the Ancien Regime before the French Revolution are very close.  The basic situation in both cases is that all the wealth and power be concentrated at the top, and the gap of wealth and power be steadily increasing.  As I read the news day by day, I read endless commentaries about how unimaginable it is that the wealthy and powerful of this country go on pressing for greater and greater tax cuts for the super rich at the same time they are trying to shred all government spending that benefits all the rest of the 99 %, “the little people” (‘οι πολλοι).

     Just as in old France, the favored elite, high on their wine, seem to have no idea that there is anything fundamentally wrong with this picture.  They go on enjoying their high flying lifestyle (quite literally in the case of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who can’t wait to get high above the earth and its groveling millions below), without any idea that the end of the ride may be closer than they think.  

     The problem is that this process is just the inevitable working out of a natural law (the sharpening of the free market experience ~ the longer any process goes on, the more it tends to widen the gap between the extremes), and it is the function of Government (or it should be) to counteract this process with a balancing leveling process to maintain the optimum functioning of the society as a whole.  In other words, the function of Government should be to siphon off the wealth and power off the top and redistribute it all along the line, as needed, to correct imbalances.  This is not the same as the Communist goal of reducing everyone to a uniform penury while a very tiny elite at the top enjoy all the wealth and power for themselves (notice that the Natural Law process in Russia works itself out along the same lines as we see happening in the United States; no wonder Putin and Trump are chums).  No, it is not necessary that everyone be reduced to some uniform level of penury ~ of course, there must be allowance for the distribution of wealth and power in order to maintain a vibrant and healthy state.  What is required, however, is to trim off the extremes of wealth and shake it down the line to benefit those lower down who are being disadvantaged by the system.  

     To implement this idea would be simple enough ~ a very progressive wealth tax could replace both the income tax and the sales tax, and most other taxes as well.  The only reason for the proliferation of taxes everywhere is to further the intention of the shell game which is intended to obscure what is really going on.  All of these taxes cost so much to administer and regulate that the actual income derived from them is greatly reduced.  A simple wealth tax, on the other hand, could restore a healthy financial balance far more efficiently.  

     Under the plan of a wealth tax, most people would pay no taxes at all.  Perhaps as much as 90 % of the entire population might pay nothing at all in tax, while the wealthy would have their wealth taxed at higher and higher rates as they go up to the levels of their unimaginable billions.  A very modest tax assessment might be made for persons with a mere million dollars of wealth, but every higher wealth level would be subject to higher and higher rates.  That is, a multi-billionaire would pay the same rate as everyone else for his first million, and for his next five million, and for the next ten million after that, and so on, so only the higher levels of his wealth would be taxed at the ultimately confiscatory levels for mega billions and beyond.  Since the playing field would be equalized for all players, the relative standing of wealth would remain the same ~ only the actual amounts would be reduced to more reasonable levels.  The super rich would remain super rich, relatively speaking, but instead of driving the nation into astronomical levels of debt (as is the current practice ~ piling on trillions of dollars onto some imaginary “National Debt,” which will never be repaid, as everyone knows, is just a way of disguising the Ponzi scheme so that the poor taxpayers don’t really understand the extent to which they are being shafted), the Nation would obtain the benefit of the excess capital siphoned off the top ~ eventually the National Debt could even be paid off (don’t bet the farm on it, though . . . ).  

     The States could receive some percentage of the tax, based on their population, so the whole tax code could be greatly simplified for much greater efficiency.  The problem, of course, is that pesky “Natural Law” which drives all similar processes towards the extremes, and no one “up there” has much interest in changing anything at a fundamental level.  Of course, there are some courageous billionaires who suggest that they would be happy to pay a higher tax, but their sweet, gentle voices are lost in the great crush of the top-heavy to maximize their wealth at any cost to the rest of the world.  So the planet is dying off, biologically, snuffed and gassed by the commotion of all those billionaires working their hustle ~ so what else is new ?  The mega rich can always go to wherever the grass be greener, and the planet be not, at the moment, burning up.  If the poor people are dying off, and desperately trying to relocate to some better land, we can just build higher and thicker walls to keep them out of our lifeboat (yacht).  

     Okay ~ utopian schemes are a dime a dozen, but what chance is there to achieve any kind of revolution along these lines?  Well, there are basically two options.  We could bring back the guillotine from retirement ~ apropos, I just read about Elon Musk’s new AI toy, Grok.  It was designed to be uncensored, to tell it like it is.  Then when people asked, “If you could execute one person in the world, whom would you choose to execute?”  Sometimes the choice was Donald Trump, but apparently the most common choice of the Grok AI was to execute Elon Musk.  Oh, yes; they revised their “uncensored” algorithm in a hurry; you bet !

     Bringing back the guillotine could be an excellent choice (I have to clarify that I am joking here, or I might find myself in serious trouble), but the other choice is a somewhat gentler option ~ implement Ranked Choice Voting, so that little by little we can introduce an alternative to the major political parties, both of which are solidly owned by the Big Business interests.