Amazon made three quarters of a TRILLION dollars in 2019. So they are paying less than one percent tax. We should all be so lucky.

Freelance writers do not make anything like a middle class, white-collar wage. The average pay rate for a 1500 word article in Vox is(was) about 500 dollars, which is a very high rate for a freelance writing gig. Most online publications pay next to nothing, or nothing. And a writer cannot expect to write very many articles per month for a single publication. And much of what they write is on spec. Most freelance writers only write as a side gig, or have a a second job or understanding spouse. It is extremely difficult to make a living from any commercial creative arts discipline without supplemental income, and has been since the turn of the century. The rise of the internet destroyed most of the better paying freelance markets.

I am in agreement with a lot of this, but I think it would be wise to examine the assumption that wealthy people create enough jobs to justify the loss of revenue to the government. The government creates a LOT of jobs. A handful of very wealthy people can only employ so many butlers. I think there is probably an optimum middle ground in there, and I think we have moved away from that. I also do not believe the market is as tax sensitive as many people assume. Business owners obviously want to make money, but that is rarely their primary motivation for starting a business. Most people can make more money for doing something other than what they are doing right now, and entrepreneurship is a risky way to make a living. For the megarich, money is almost meaningless, and more of a way of keeping score than anything else. I don't advocate for excessive taxes, but they should at least be sufficient for the government to pay its bills, and they frequently seem to fall short of that. Some of that is wastage, but an enormous percentage of public money is being soaked up by interest on loans for all the times our government had to borrow money in the past (typically to feed the war machine, which is the origin of many unpopular taxes). The people who loan them this money are the very same people everyone keeps trying to shield from paying taxes. Do you smell a rat yet?

I think the law of supply and demand is true, but I think our ability to accurately and equitably assign value to supply and demand is questionable. What does money really represent? The more answers I hear to that question, the more I am certain everyone is talking out of their ass. Most people behave as if money is a finite resource, but banks and governments behave as if there is a bottomless supply...and they are the ones who create it. Sometimes everyone loses faith in the whole racket and it suddenly becomes valueless. The only tangible and unchanging property it seems to possess is the ability to make people argue.

It is a popular misconception that life was short in centuries past. This isn't true. The AVERAGE lifespan was shorter than today, primarily because infant mortality was very high. Human beings that managed to survive their childhood years lived what we would consider today to be a normal lifespan. The primary reason we are less vulnerable to early death these days is a combination of modern medicine (which gets a little TOO much credit) and clean water (which does not get enough).