Bucky Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, BF Skinner. Three nasty assholes, cult figures in the 70s, direct ancestors of the tech tyrants.
Fuller was utterly worthless. His weird shit was impractical, dangerous, inefficient, contrary to science and engineering.
McLuhan had one big valid idea, but got the details wrong.
Skinner’s big idea of tabula rasa equality was genocidal but hardly new. This miserable “nation” was founded on the genocidal lie of tabula rasa equality.
Even so, Skinner gave us two helpful ways of thinking about human conduct. We know the rules from a different angle, but we don’t use the Skinner angle where we SHOULD be using it.
The rules SHOULD be useful to governments, teachers, salesmen, parents, anyone who is trying to affect human behavior.
1. A reward is whatever increases a desired behavior.
2. A punishment is whatever decreases an undesired behavior.
In more detail:
If you want to increase a desired behavior, you first need to figure out WHAT makes it increase. The answer is not always obvious, and it’s rarely what we’ve been doing with the fake intention of “rewarding”.
If you want to decrease an unwanted behavior, you first need to figure out WHAT makes it decrease. The answer is not always obvious, and it’s rarely what we’ve been doing with the fake intention of “punishing”.
I’ve ranted endlessly about the punishment side. Now I want to look more closely at the reward side, which I’ve missed or neglected. (I did apply it to the Soviet system but not to ours.)
Applied to taxation: If you want a government to do the right thing, you should arrange the tax structure so the government is REWARDED (gets more taxes) for doing the right thing.
We think about the punishment effect on the people who PAY the taxes. We NEVER think about the reward effect of RECEIVED taxes.
This “state” has no tax on wages. It does have a Business and Occupations tax, which hits entrepreneurs especially hard BECAUSE there’s no tax on wages.
THEREFORE the “state” doesn’t want factories with lots of wage jobs. It wants tech entrepreneurs who pay themselves billions and don’t employ anyone. And this is what we’ve got.
Now there’s a proposal for a ‘millionaire tax’, an extra surcharge on the B&O tax for higher incomes. As usual some of the entrepreneurs are threatening to leave.
GOOD! GET THEM OUT OF HERE! IMPOSE A REGULAR INCOME TAX SO WE’LL WANT MORE REGULAR JOBS FOR REGULAR MEN.
Polistra's Mill 