Taxation without salvation.

Call him Restless in Seattle. He phoned the "Rush Limbaugh Show" not long ago. Seems like the middle-aged guy from Washington State has been pulling in a regular six-figure salary over much of the past decade. He's saved enough to now be in a kind of semi-retirement, practicing a musical instrument daily without the need to go to work. Life in the pristine Northwest must be wonderful, this listener thinks.

But Restless is ticked off. He's scowling about school taxes, about taxes to pay for Seattle's mass transit so that less well-heeled office workers can get to their daily jobs downtown, and is complaining that he's been forced out of the economy because he can't keep enough of what he's earned. He's mad as hell and won't take it anymore.

His complaints echo through my car as I'm driving through the heart of East New York, Brooklyn, one of the bleakest portions of that often-blighted borough. The juxtaposition of the man's complaint, who describes his spacious acreage in the forest, with the mean streets I see around me is jarring.

Restless in Seattle reminds me of Binx Bolling, the title character in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. Binx is an affluent stockbroker in postwar suburban New Orleans, who has everything he needs materially but still feels a regular uneasiness. Binx knows there's something wrong existentially, but can't figure out what. Restless in Seattle has the tax man to blame for his woes, come April 15, short-circuiting his existential search.

More than seven years after the destruction of the Berlin Wall, we are still - U.S. liberals and conservatives alike - practical Marxists. For every social problem, there is a material answer. Restless in Seattle tells us that taxes are his problem, but one senses that he has enough money, whether that supply is taxed at 30, 40, or 50 percent. Rush, of course, tells him that he has a right to whine. But I wonder if the whining does any good. The fact is, most of us, who aren't living in the rough areas of places like East New York, are dealing with the problems wrought by affluence.

I've never made much money in my career. But I find, as my wife and I hold relatively decent professional jobs, that at age forty there is a little more left over after every paycheck, even with the demands of two teen-agers. A friend at my age, who has made and put away a lot more than I have, is ready to drop out of the whirl of the ad biz that consumed him in his twenties and thirties and rely on his wife's earnings and their stock portfolio. In some ways, I, my friend, and Restless in Seattle, are all baby-boomers enjoying the kind of opulence unheard of for most of the world's population. We are, measured in historical terms, a very privileged crew. But few of us will say it out loud.

Walking around New York this past December provided a stark reminder that there is a lot of wealth out there. It was nearly impossible to make it to the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center because of the hordes of shoppers who clogged the sidewalks in Midtown. Over at Madison Square Garden, where my wife had gotten me tickets to a Knicks game as a present (we sat in the $30-seats, far above the Woody Allen and Spike Lee section), I stood in amazement on a trip to the snack bar at seeing regular working folks slapping down $4 for a box of Cracker Jacks. There was no shortage of business.

Nor is there a shortage of concern about tax rates, inflation, and retirement benefits. A recent commission of economists said that inflation may well have been overestimated for decades. Panic immediately swept in among those whose Social Security or government salaries might not rise as much in the future as they had been led to anticipate. Then Richard Nixon's top economic adviser claimed that the taxes the average person pays today are not appreciably different than what the rates were in the 1950s. I tell people both nuggets of information and they stare incredulously. No way it's true, they tell me.

Both suppositions are difficult to accept. But both, if they are correct, strike at the heart of every bit of political posturing we've heard for the past few decades: instead of being in an inexorable economic decline, we may well be doing better than ever. Restless in Seattle may not only be far wealthier than his father and grandfather ever were, but he's probably paying less proportionately in taxes. So why is he so miserable? Why are we so unhappy?

Limbaugh doesn't have a clue, but Binx Bolling may provide an answer: Where your treasure is, there is your heart.

Peter Feuerherd is assistant editor of the Long Island Catholic and national affairs writer for the National Catholic Register.