Bill Moyers, Dean Baker, Yves Smith
There are people I like to pay, like Asano, the Japanese gentleman who cuts my hair every third week. Asano can go a whole haircut without saying anything and I don't feel the need to say anything either which is a comfortable transaction all by itself. Asano's a master and I can just be myself and sit in the leather barber chair and let him do to me what he's been doing for 50 years. I always feel good when it's time to step down out of the leather chair and give him the money for cutting my hair.
Then there are people I don't mind paying which include most but not all restauranteurs, theatre ticket-takers, booksellers and other entertainments, or as Arnold Schwarzenegger used to say, "things of this nature."
I take necessities out of the equation, not minding to pay for some of them and disliking to pay for the others but having to pay nonetheless.
I don't like to pay for things in which the value for the thing I am paying is of abstract or vague value or things in which value has been mis-represented to the degree that the mis-representation is worth more than the money paid. I'm enough of a capitalist to know the difference between a risk and a swindle.
That the social contract between the government and the people is strained is beyond question, and that it always has been and always will be is missing the point.
The point is that since the Greeks saw, as Werner Jaeger puts it in Paideia (v.2), that the central question is, what is the best state, and that virtue is knowledge, then all our energies must be expended on reconstructioning society upon that principle through education.
If you have a few minutes the piece with Bill Moyers, Dean Baker, and Yves Smith below is worth watching.