According to US case law. The power to tax is the power to destroy, so the state government cannot tax federal government.

There are several arguments for taxing church and I can’t help but think that soon we will be just having a closer relationship between church and state if the pastors start pandering for the current government.

Lead culinary water pipes (or lead soldier) is a problem, but lead shower pans (that affect the sewer water) are the preference in many USA cities.

Having retirement shares as the same shares as the company that one is working at seems to be a huge concentration of risk. If you go out of business, then people lose both current active income and future passive income. I hope that your staff diversify away that risk.

The concept of retirement for working class people is new (aristocrats retired all throughout time)

• invented in Germany by a priest in 1600s but died out
• independently invented in America when a soldier in the military (late 1700s) had both his arms blown off and a law was passed for him to collect an amount for his (and family’s) maintenance from the neighbors.

Before invention of retirement, the working class had the mentality that you work until you are dead with 99% of the working class in brown collar work. During the industrial revolution where most people transitioned from brown collar to blue collar work, retirement became much more common with social mobility.

During the great depression, USA legislators picked a number “65” to be the “age of retirement” with the reasoning that it would get more young people back to work. The average age of mortality at that time was ~67 years old. They did not index that age with the average age of mortality, so as life expectancy increased, there is now a period in people’s life to be “retired”.

Problems with how this developed:

• social security in the USA is not able to keep paying out at this rate, the age of retirement should be more closely aligned with an “indexed” age whether that is the current average age of mental incompetence or an actuarially determined “you did your time, so you can now get out and your contributions should fund the government support of you”. The political cycle will probably destroy any hard to understand actuarial index, so that leaves us with the first option.
• retired people are a political force (high voter turnout). It is easy to vote to get a raise and ignore issues that would bring actual long term growth when you have a short term mentality. I think that accepting 100% of the cost of your maintenance from the government may be the price of your vote (you cannot vote if you are retired). I am sure that this is another unpopular opinion.

With that perspective, I don’t know if corporations are entitled here, or the people are just doing what their ancestors did for 1,000s of years and are owning it in a positive way.

I cant wait for all circular saw blades to be diamond.

don’t forget the creativity like “deleted from the census” or “bought the farm” or “bit the dust”, etc. There is a poetry to avoiding a filter.

in number 3, did you mean “herbicides”

The thing is, I understand that some farmers were doing that, but some others were simply trying to grow soybeans, and they didn’t use herbicides, but Monsanto successfully sued them into never saving “soybean” seed ever again.

Different take: seed genome is like a MP3. Piracy (illegal copying) is enforced based on IP. Seeds doing it “naturally on a farm” just means that you have grounds to sue the farmer for not stopping illegal copying.

Step 1: protect the IP protected seed genomes

Step 2: sue the crap out of people growing those types of plants who arent paying you. Edit: these are all soy beans including “public seed”

Step 3: increase the price now that you have a monopoly on that kind of seeds

Source: Monsanto and soy beans