The Dark of the Matinée

The weekend's come and gone, and it comes as something of a shock that the DC area has not melted into goo. Congress has already run for the hills, after accomplishing little more than a tax cut extension, a presidential $1 coin, and mangling student financial aid. This last week broke temperature records of 100 degrees, with the heat index at 110+. And the Sox are two games behind in the division, after Varitek, Lowell, Nixon, and Mirabelli all suffered freak injuries. Only half a game behind in the wildcard slot, though.
Catching the Nationals today from the upper bleachers; IEDC is treating us to a baseball game.

Intelligence and natural talent will always be in high demand; I don't think anyone with either should ever worry about making enough money to live comfortably. What, then, defines success for the gifted youth or the top-tier college student? What is a good life?
I've been grappling with this a lot lately, and with my own plans for the next few years. Across cultures, we're taught conflicting messages. Self-preservation, accomplishment, and (to an extent) greed are positive goals in themselves that propel human progress and teach us independence and self-identity. At the same time, a life devoted to service and the benefit of others is the ideal of civil society, as well as most religious doctrines. (Protestantism in the US mostly abandons this for the worship of individual success and righteousness, something for which I've never heard a satisfactory rationale.)
I think the gift and the curse of intelligence is that you know you are capable of doing a lot of good in the world, perhaps at your own expense. The problem is that most of us, myself notwithstanding, do not inherently derive the kind of satisfaction from joining the Peace Corps that would preclude a high-paying engineering or finance job. We're just not wired for it. And when you're trying to live a good life, one that upholds both leisure and productivity, and you're aware of your own capability for either, a certain sense of self-satisfaction needs to set in. Otherwise we'd always be second-guessing ourselves.
It's probably a balance, right? Hope that what I do for a living benefits society. Above all else, though, is this underlying fear that I'm not going to really enjoy what I do, and that ultimately someone else who does live only for himself will still end up doing more for the world, even as an afterthought.

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As a side thought, doesn't killing the estate tax run against conservative ideals? Pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, being a self-made man, these are the qualities that conservatives admire and want to instill in American society. How does ensuring that the children of rich families will never have to work for themselves even remotely agree with that ideal? If anything, the Paris Hiltons and Anna Nicole Smiths of the world have assured children that you can be a vulgar, spoiled, dim-witted bimbo and still be entitled to a more comfortable life than 99% of the populace. Because, well, her father/husband worked for that money, doggone it.

From the Atlantic Unbound:

Why tax the well-off? Because, two recent studies suggest, it's practically the only way to persuade them to spend money on anyone but themselves. Philanthropy isn't the answer: a survey from The Chronicle of Philanthropy reports that Americans making $70,000 or more dispensed a paltry 3.3 percent of their earnings to charitable cuases; in contrast, those making $50,000 to $69,999 gave 5.6 percent, and those making $30,000 to $49,999 gave 8.9 percent.