Fairness, myth, and reality

View 694 Monday, Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Sunday, October 2, at 3:15 PM at the West Hollywood Book Fair I’ll be discussing “Myth and Reality” in the world of writing. For reasons not known to me we’re in the “That’s Entertainment” pavilion, as opposed to fiction or mystery or something else. We’re following cast members from “The Waltons” and if there’s anything else about writing in that track I don’t know of it. We’re followed by werewolves.

If you’re in the LA area, they say the parking is free and it’s a good book fair. I have been to the big LA Times fair at UCLA, but never to this one, which is “small” in the sense that it’s perhaps 40,000 rather than the near 100,000 of the UCLA campus event. It may be fun. We’re up against Hector Tobar of the LA Times in the main pavilion, a panel on writing for the LGBT readership on another, and several panels with actresses in other pavilions, so I have no idea how large a crowd we’ll draw. They want us to talk about myth and reality in the publishing business and particularly whether you can make a living writing science fiction. I’ve done that panel about a hundred times at science fiction conventions, but never to a mainstream audience. It should be fun.

The campaign scene is pretty dull. President Obama has been in Los Angeles raising political money, and I suppose he was successful, but there hasn’t been a lot of stir from it. His speeches continue on the theme of “fairness”, but they don’t seem to be getting all that much traction.

I continue with the opinion that I have mixed feelings on “fairness” of taxes and taxing the rich, and particularly raising taxes on income from risk investment: it seems an odd way to encourage people to make risky investments and create jobs.

I also note that while Warren Buffet paid only a million or two in personal taxes, his investment company paid $5 billion last year, and he owns 30% of the company; which sort of raises the total tax burden he has assumed. As to Ms. Warren’s viral speech about how others paid for the roads and the schools and the police force, I would have thought those are mostly paid by local property taxes, and if the factory owner has got away with not paying those he’s pretty clever. I would have thought that factory owners paid a lot of property taxes. How much of that is fair is, I would presume, a matter for local communities. Raise them too much and the factory moves elsewhere, as Massachusetts has long ago discovered. Of course the remedy for that, according to liberals, is to eliminate competition – make the taxes national so they can’t be escaped. Oddly enough that was all debated as part of the Convention of 1787, but you’d never guess that from listening to this Harvard Professor, who doesn’t seem to have read The Federalist Papers or Tocqueville. But then that’s not too surprising.

In any event, what I don’t want is to continue to finance the 7% exponential rise in government spending, and any new income to the feds will have that result. I have more faith that Mr. Buffet will spend his money more wisely than the Department of Education can do so, or the Department of Agriculture for that matter (which has both Bunny Inspectors and a SWAT team).

That’s the campaign just now.