The Daily Show recently aired a segment about Russia's crackdown on antiwar protesters. Apparently, 14,000 people have been arrested for protesting the war. These protesters' offenses can be as minor as holding up a sign that's literally blank, with Russian authorities interpreting the display of the blank sign as an attack on government policy. The whole thing seems crazy and tyrannical. And yet, even in the midst of such crazy tyranny, Russia incarcerates far fewer of its people than the US does.
According to world population review, Russia has an incarceration rate of 326 per 100,000, which translates into an incarcerated population of 471,490. The US, with an incarceration rate of about 629 per 100,000, imprisons over 2,000,000 people. More than half a million of these prisoners haven't been convicted of any crime. Instead, they're locked up awaiting trial.
So the American system incarcerates more potentially innocent people than Russia incarcerates in total. The US then subjects criminal defendants to rigged proceedings wherein crooked cops and prosecutors partner with unaccountable judges to ensure unfair and often nakedly racist verdicts. And nothing ever gets better. Politicians need to be perceived by their constituents as being tough on crime, so they parrot talking points written by incarceration industry lobbyists while perpetuating mass incarceration at the policy level. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Based solely on this issue, the US is pure tyranny. Of course, I can say that here without fear of government reprisals. In fact, I can say anything I want in the US and nobody cares, because what we say in this country is irrelevant to the control regime. When the US invaded Iraq, toppling that country's government and precipitating a civil war that manufactured a new generation of terrorists, record numbers of Americans protested, and it made zero difference.
I've been thinking about all of this recently because I've been preparing my taxes. After getting together all of my income and expense data, I electronically filed and paid my taxes yesterday. Today, I completed the final step in this process, which was to physically mail a list of all of my 2021 crypto trades to the IRS. Because they find summary data insufficient and want to know all of the details.
My tax bill this year wasn't too high, but it's totally nuts that someone who makes as little as I do has to pay anything at all. Having done my civic duty, I feel like I just paid off a mobster running a protection racket. A protection racket under such poor leadership that it must pay half a trillion a year just in interest on the insane debt it keeps accumulating. Is this better than the Russian system? I don't know.
A system I'd favor would operate very differently. Instead of taxing income and capital gains, it would collect a 5% wealth tax from everyone, distribute a Universal Basic Income to everyone, provide universal healthcare to everyone, and would otherwise retire state paternalism, both domestically and in an international military sense. Sadly, for a variety of reasons, such a system probably won't come into being until after the next catastrophic crisis.
Also sadly, that next catastrophic crisis might unfold sooner than we think. Global supply chains are having a seizure. Nation-state level cyberwar may be imminent. The poor and oppressed all over the world have taken just about as much punishment as they're capable of taking thanks to covid policies, and now food prices are rising sharply. US monetary policy alone might produce major social upheaval by increasing the international price of cereal grains. That's the kind of stuff that drives revolutions. And the US is not immune to such destabilizing forces.
(Feature image from Pixabay.)
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