Paradocracy

Most people in the United States long for a $150,000-per-year salary. This makes sense, as the nation's median personal income is roughly 80 percent below that mark. 

It's a lot of money. 

In fact, this income level qualifies for the top 4 percent of Americans and the top 0.1 percent of the world's population; it is 109 times the global average.

If this is true, how could an unemployed homeless person possibly make more money? Well, the federal, state and local governments: that's how!

Let's take a look at the numbers.

A single Bay-Area Californian earning $150,000 per year pays an effective income tax rate of 32.23 percent: this figure is inclusive of a 7.20-percent effective state income tax (and 9.30-percent marginal rate), an 18.27-percent effective federal income tax (and 24.00-percent marginal rate), and a 6.76-percent effective rate for Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) taxes. 



In addition to income taxes, the homeowner incurs an annual mortgage cost amou…

The fallout after Michael Richards' on-stage breakdown ironically showcases an extent of intolerance which miraculously stands beyond reproach: intolerance for honesty and expressed emotion in a solitary moment of vulnerability. 

Despite a decades-long career spectacularly devoid of any gaffes or blemishes, one isolated moment would ultimately define Richards' career and his legacy in the minds of many: that moment on stage when he shouted pejoratives at hecklers during his performance at Hollywood's Laugh Factory in 2006. 

Of course, those of the school of reason see it very differently. 



Every person is uniquely imperfect, and those imperfections are merely accentuated by one's placement under the spotlight. 

The average person lives out his entire existence outside the limelight, in the sanctuary of his home, the comforts of his selected social group, and the confines of his preferred echo-chamber. 

The average person, therefore, avoids the sharp scrutiny of being nakedl…

Social media has become the circus of lauded illogic. 

A post from a popular political page recently published a poster that reads, “Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we can’t satisfy the rich.” 



This assessment is clearly incorrect, but it is easy to understand why so many people might see it that way. 

There are scientific principles that have led a great number of people to false conclusions about the nature of wealth. In physics and chemistry, the law of conservation of energy states the the total energy of an isolated system remains constant. 

Likewise, the law of conservation of mass states that, for any system closed to all transfers of matter and energy, the mass of the system must remain constant over time. 

A great number of people, quasi-academics among them, have adopted the belief that wealth remains constant over time; they might label this their law of conservation of wealth. Of course, this principle is deeply flawed and, candidly, extremely ig…

In principle, higher prices don't always yield commensurate enhancements of product quality.

As such, the Mercedes-Benz AMG CLA45's $50,000 price tag doesn't necessarily mean that it's twice as good as an entry-level 2019 Chevy Camaro, just as the $500 wallet from Prada is hardly fifty times superior than the $10 counterpart from Amazon.

These price disparities, though shocking or even appalling to the average person, represent something about preferences. Though that price difference may not indicate that the product is any more functional, it means that the product is, indeed, that much more valuable to the buyer for some personal, even broadly unrelatable reason.

So long as enough buyers demand the product at the given price level, with the given features and specifications, there may be no need to make any adjustments, as the target customer expresses his or her preference by voluntarily assigning value to that product.

The product could even be a measly Mercedes-Benz …

Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time spent 10 weeks at number one on Billboard’s Top-100, the Plymouth Prowler was in its third year of production, John Elway just won his second Super Bowl ring, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and S&P 500 were both up over 300 percent on the decade, and Slide by the Goo Goo Dolls found its way to number ten on Billboard’s chart. 

It was 1999, and the Goo Goo Dolls just so happened to have the perfect adjective to describe the next two decades: an economic “slide” for the average American. 

Whereas Johnny Rzeznik contemplated the dilemma of abortion, he never could have predicted just how profoundly applicable the concept would prove over the ensuing 20 years, when America would ultimately abort the principles of freedom and the prospect of the American dream in pursuit of expedient political advantage. 



The transformation of the American economy is perhaps best characterized as one which originally operated to the benefit of each engaged indiv…

The word profit has remarkably become synonymous with greed, avarice and gluttony per the modern lexicon. Hatred for profits has become so widespread that attendees of the 2012 Democratic National Convention, as one particular video illustrates, even banded together in agreement around the notion of completely banning them.

While it is understandable that so many Americans have become so distressed by the state of affairs in the United States, they are ironically protesting for the advancement of forces that will serve only to make their lives even worse.

Profits and savings are two of the main benefactors that are so popularly maligned in political circles that any shrewd and politically-correct economist will desperately squirm around them when describing the concepts of basic economics in front of a general audience.

A profit basically represents a case in which an individual, or collectively a market of individuals, assigns a value to a good which exceeds the value assigned to it by …