Church of Practical Truth
Catechism
What is the practical truth?
That a few people have stolen almost all the world.
How do we know this?
Pay per year ranges from 10,000th of global average to 100,000 times gl. av. 90% receive less than 100th of gl.av. 99% receive less than gl. av. Draw the graph, and you can see that 1% have well over 90% of world income.
How has this happened?
There is a natural range of acquisitiveness in human nature.
What has this theft done?
Money is the joker good, good for virtually everything , so it has stolen virtually everything, including social power. The theft of virtually everything causes near-maximal suffering. It has caused violence proportional to the extremity of the theft. Money is power, inequality of power is tyranny-slavery. The violence is ever-growing as both sides try to prevail, and they create ever-bigger weaponry to prevail. It has brought us to 60 times PDC [planet death capability].
Can anything be done to cure this situation?
No. The more acquisitive are always more acq. than the less acq. More alert, quick, cunning, resourceful, eager, energetic, desirous, ingenious, calculating, demanding, presumptuous, keen, brutal, indecent, senseless, shameless, self-righteous.
Will this situation lead to universal extinction soon?
Yes. The ever-growing violence is like a boiler with relief valve stuck and the pressure gauge well into the red and rising.
Would a cure have been possible if some parts of reality were different?
Yes. If people had been alive enough to grasp the maximal danger of the situation and the super-extreme benefits of change, the super-extreme inequality and violence could have been undone without social disturbance by making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased overfortunes and by making everyone equal beneficiaries of a 1%-a-month money supply increase. If everyone who heard these data had told just two people, every adult would have learned them in just 31 times the time to tell two people, by word of mouth alone.
Would this re-distribution have been just?
Yes. The private heir has done nothing to make that fortune, and everyone has done everything to make the goods which that fortune represents and buys.
Would this have required a great bureaucracy?
No. The first part required only the settling up of the estate and electronic distribution. The second part required only the electronic distribution.
Would the second part have caused inflation?
Yes. This would have reduced the overfortunes without needing to measure private fortunes. Both the 1% overpaid and the 99% underpaid would have received the equal share, only to save the enormous bureaucracy required to distinguish the two. The combination of the inflation effect and the equal share would have steadily, gently reduced overfortune and lifted underfortune. Inflation is not bad when the underpaid are fully compensated for it. Regular inflation is not troublesome, as irregular inflation is.
Is pay justice good?
Yes. It benefits overpaid and underpaid. If one person has the goods of 1000, he has merely 1000 times more than he can use, and has lost 1000 friends and gained 1000 enemies. A society in which everyone works and produces abundance can be made extremely unhappy by extreme misdistribution.
Does human society produce abundance?
Yes. The global average pay per hour is now [2007] US$40, paying housewives and students as well. All the work equals all the workproducts, equals all the money. The annual global income divided by the global number of hours worked is the world-average pay per hour, and that is the amount of wealth produced by one person in one hour. The effect of money on happiness declines to zero below US$100,000 per year per family, and the world-average pay per family per year is double that.
Why is there not enough sense to enjoy pay justice?
The power of imagination is not great enough to break through the spell cast by custom and convention. Overfortune fascinates and compels admiration instead of dismay. People do not have the distinction between self-earned fortune, which is always good, and other-earned fortune, which is always bad. Individual contribution is limited, so unlimited fortune is necessarily overpay, other-earned, theft. It is the love of other-earned fortune which is the root of all evils. When there is a range of fortune, there is no visible level of pay justice to aim for. The overpaid aim for more because of the demands of self-defence, which are proportional to overfortune. The underpaid aim for more to reduce their underpay. People ignore the connection of overpay-underpay and violence. The overpaid automatically and unconsciously generate and spread every misconception to support their overpay. People inherited limited mental vision from nature, which serves them ill in society, where technological connections run round the world. Global data is in its infancy. There is inherited deference to alpha males, and to father figures. People project their own level of acquisitiveness on others. The underpaid underestimate the acquisitiveness of the overpaid, the overpaid overestimate the acquisitiveness of the underpaid. Technology has raised the level of production above the level at which most people rest content, which leaves wealth free to be picked up by the highly acquisitive, and then that overpay gives overpower to steal ever-more. People assume that an idealistic idea must be unrealistic. People will not move from unreal happiness to real happiness via real misery. All of the people can be fooled most of the time. We are 98% identical to chimpanzees. The rational brain is a tiny fraction of the brain. Thinking is hard work. Pursuit of real happiness is totally dependent on pursuit of reality, reality is in the big picture, and people are in the very partial picture. People are paralysed by the inhumanity. There is aversion to the implication of learning: that we don't know everything.
Is war human nature?
No. War has increased over 1000s of years, human nature has remained the same. Noncorrelation proves noncausality. [Correlation doesn't prove causality.]
Are there religious and racial wars?
No. So-called religious and racial wars are pay-injustice wars, social power wars, along religious or racial lines. Wherever there are religious or racial differences without pay injustice, there are no wars. Noncorrelation again. Money is the joker good, so money is the practical issue.
Should people be paid the same per hour?
Yes. Provided students are paid, there are no reasons for higher-than-average hourly pay. All of the reasons given and received for higher-than-average pay per hour are false. The underpaid support them, because they hope to decrease their underpay by them, but people benefit by them in proportion to their pay, so allowing those false reasons increases overpay-underpay. There are thus many wide-open legal thefts in society, supported by everyone, destructive of everyone.
What are these legal thefts?
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, no pay for nonwork things, pay only for work, pay only for sacrifice of time and energy by the person receiving payment. There is payment for scarcity, for high demand relative to supply, as in new technology. There is underpayment of work wherever labour is in surplus. There is artificial creation of oversupply of labour by theft of land. There is payment for owning land, when others' work building a city or other infrastructure increases the value of the land. There is payment only to landowners and stockholders of all nature's bounty, which every living person has a birthright equal share of. There is the theft built in to every transaction. The two things in a transaction cannot have equal workvalue, so every transaction contains a drop of inequality, which grows with every transaction. Therefore those who engage in more transactions often accumulate the effect of many transactions. Society rewards natural gifts, which are work by nature, not by the person. People are paid for having studied, although there is no work in having studied. Students are paid for studying by parents, scholarships or the students, when it is society that benefits. Inflation subtracts wealth, and then this is lent back to people at excessive rates. Managers set their own rate of pay. Profits are in excess of owner's work. There is conquering and enslaving, which are not yet illegal. Power to extract wealth is proportional to wealth. The overpaid control governments, the legal system, the army and police, and are therefore free to warmonger and cannonfodder at will. War brings great profits because the products are quickly destroyed.
Who is more powerful, the overpaid or the underpaid?
The underpaid. Every empire, every plutocracy in history has been destroyed by the underpaid. The overpaid have proportional overpower, but the forces against them are proportional to the overpay. The greatest overpay is finite, and the erosive forces against them exist as long as the overpay exists. Every injury produces attack as long as the injury continues. Injury energises. The sense of justice in people is indestructible. The overpaid are attacked by underpaid and overpaid.
How much happier could we have been, if we had chosen pay justice?
Compared to the zero of extinction racing towards us, infinitely, for any finite is infinitely larger than zero. Apart from that, very conservatively, literally, 100 times happier. Inequality violence misery has been growing since trade began, with its built-in inequality, and since wealth became storable and nonperishable. Happiness has been declining imperceptibly slowly for about 3000 years. We cannot imagine the level of happiness we had 3000 years ago, although 3000 years of peace, and multiroom houses for everyone, in the Cretan empire gives a clue. If a government took 90% of income off 90% of people and gave it to 1%, violence misery would increase enormously. There would be the loss of 81% of happiness in the loss of 81% of national income, plus the enormous increase in violence, plus the loss of productivity in the violence and disorder, and in the severe weakening of productivity of the 90%, plus the waste of wealth in the destruction of property and people, plus the disinformation confusion caused by the war. The 1% would lose greatly, because means would merely exceed desires, they would lose fraternity, and gain intense danger. These additional factors would raise the loss of happiness from 81% to something like 99%. So such a state would be 100 times happier with an end to the policy. Yet this imaginary situation has an inequality violence misery factor of only 820. The real global inequality violence misery factor is 1,000,000,000, rising. Therefore we would be, very conservatively, literally, 100 times happier. As unbelievable as 100 times is to us, that number is very conservative, but we cannot imagine. For instance, technological progress would be 100 times faster, because now 90% of brains are tied up in the consequences of the super-extreme inequality violence misery, in government, business, military-industrial-prison complex, hospitals, legal system, and 90% of brains are too poor to become scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, etc. How happy can a body be with most blood in the brain? How well can a machine run with all the oil in one part? A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day, can hire 100,000 soldiers for 1000 days at $10 a day. With pay justice, one person would be hard-put to hire one soldier. Warmongering and cannonfoddering would be reduced to near zero.
Could all this be achieved without force or violence?
Yes, because such a high percentage would prefer life to death and 100fold happiness to the miseries of overpay and underpay, that the incorrigible among the overpaid would have no muscle to oppose it.
Is there hope?
Yes. There is one hope in a billion. An uprising of the will to survive, to be real, to be happy. If people found just the eagerness to learn and teach these overview points to just two friends, there would be, in just 31 times the time to teach two, a near-unanimous global human consciousness of how bad it is and how good it can be, and the simple changes would be made and would be sufficiently supported to prevail over the dumping of the whole human race.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
what i'd like to know is
what I'd like to know is how an entire nation [america] [and all of humanity] managed to ignore the simple point that money is power, and unlimited [and necessarily unjust] wealth concentration is unlimited power, is unlimited undemocracy unliberty unfreedom tyranny fascism totalitarianism gangsters-in-government
america was *founded* on the principle of prevention of wealth concentration - obviously the tyranny americans escaped and which americans wished to be eternally free from was totally dependent on unjust wealth concentration [wealth in excess of own contribution by own work]
vigilance is the price of liberty, and vigilance over prevention of wealth concentration was zero from the beginning, although in the 19th century prevention of wealth concentration was in all the rhetoric
the greeks had established that laws were spiders' webs, the 'great' break through
inequality, pay injustice had reached an inequality factor of one million in america in the 1880s - 10c a *day* for sew-ers, $10,000/*hr* for Jay Gould - globally today, the inequality factor is one billion -
whence the superblindness?
are people that stupid?
or is there a mighty masochism in humanity?
americans had just come from tyranny, limitless wealth and poverty, overpower and underpower - you would think they would have been passionately vigilant to prevent growth of limitless personal power - you would think the whole pride of people in their new nation would have centred on the fundamental, the sine qua non [the without-which-nothing], the essential
there doesn't seem to be an atom of a good theory to explain this utter ignoring of the whole point by americans for 200 years, by humanity for 3000 years
why was there not a whole intellectual industry in america to establish with exactitude the limits of just fortune, to draw a line in the sand: individual power shall go no farther than this?
you'd think americans would have had a school curriculum subject in pay justice, an academic industry in the thinking behind just limitation of fortune
you'd think all humans in every age and country would have pursued this essential - the purpose of government is justice, james madison - the state built on injustice cannot stand, roman saying - so it was essential to *patriotism* to pursue pay justice, to determine the most one person can contribute to wealth by his own work and can justly claim as his
as henry george wrote, obviously one person on his own cannot produce much more than anyone else in the same time, with the same materials, tools, data, etc
[pay justice is far and away the most important justice, since money buys almost all nonfree necessities and desirables, including political power, social standing]
now that we have 60 times PDC [planet death capability], and ratio of highest to lowest pay/yr of one billion, with violence-generation and growth proportional, the american freshstart chance to make tyranny [which is also corruption, warmongering and cannonfoddering] extinct was probably our last
the greeks had said equality breeds no strife - and humanity has watched inequality and strife grow for 1000s of years, [punctuated with revolutions that were only briefly and very partially effective in justly limiting individual power], without the slightest sign of alarm -
i see no sign of the slightest atom of an explanation for this stupendous utter blindness about the super-obvious
the gitmo trials are just one fruit among millions of evil fruits on the tree of unlimited-fortunes social systems which we have embraced for 1000s of years
the chance that we will wake up and get the point before violence grows to the point of using the 60 times PDC bombs [looks like in the next 30 years] seems to be infinitesimal
the goddess isis is supposed to have said: if they knew they were blind, they wouldnt be blind - we are unconscious of our blindness - because we see many things, we think we are not blind - forgetting that seeing jigsaw puzzle pieces is not seeing the picture ***at all***, although the pieces are part of the puzzle
we have great confidence in our seeing reality when we should have very little confidence in that - it seems the 'obvious' lesson of history is just too big to see - like ants confidently operating on their tiny level that can't interpret the shadow of the giant anteater, evergrowing unlimited wealth-power producing evergrowing weaponry, warmongering and cannonfoddering
- although there are plenty of warning quotes, from american presidents, presidents of national banks, us generals, and from the moneypower itself
the bankers own the earth. take it away from them but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it all back again. sir josiah stamp, president, bank of england, 1920s
it seems every assassinated american president has been assassinated by the moneypower - every assassination has followed some attempt by the president to interfere with the freedom of the moneypower - eg, jfk printed some u.s. money without borrowing it from the privately owned reserve bank
the credit of a country is backed by the natural bounty of the nation and by people's work - and the federal reserve steals this credit and makes the nation buy it!!!!!!!!
in 20 years i have not experienced one example of the slightest interest, enthusiasm, excitement as responses to the fact that the *world* average pay/yr is US$100,000, paying housewives and students too [making world av. family income US$200,000], in the fact that 99% are underpaid [and would therefore get more of their earnings if there was more pay justice - and would get more liberty and democracy and less war and crime].
legal thefts are wide open: a billion at 10% doubles every 7 years, multiplies by 1000 every 70 years - with no work at all
pay justice is pay for work, no pay for no work
are people really so dazzled mindless by limitless wealth that they cannot take in that limitless wealth for what must be limited work [which cannot be more than about 30% more than the average work] means overpay [theft] means underpay for most, means violence, evergrowing, as both sides try to prevail with ever-greater weaponry and terrorism?
are people really so dazzled by overwealth that they cannot take in that the intensity, power and persistence of attacks on overwealth are proportional to the size of the overwealth, so that overwealth is always under seige of many kinds, and must fall in time, as history shows they always have, so that overpay is no fun at all? - that if one person takes or by any means has the property of 1000, that person is vastly unhappier too, with merely 1000 times more than he can use, and loss of 1000 friends, fellows and protectors, and gain of 1000 enemies?
are people swarming to sam pizzigati's free online book greed and good, with its ten times america, or to carey's democratic capitalism? - no - the swarming is flat calm
the good news is that a species with great abundance [every working person, incl housewives and students, producing US$100,000 worth of workproducts per year] and yet knowingly calmly starving 50 million people to death every year, deserves the death sentence they are bringing to themselves with all speed with all technological brilliance
at least the nazis believed or kidded themselves the jews and other minorities were enemies or no good - we know the starving are innocent
but although we know these things factually, do we really know them? - do they penetrate our consciousness? - do they fire a central fire in the brain or mental core?
WHY are we technological giants and yet [in the crucial main point] ethical [pursuit of happiness] cretins?
are we programmed by nature to settle for enough, which in our present technological super-abundant society is underpay, which then releases overpay to grow limitlessly, growing underpay and violence limitlessly?
has nature not fitted us with consciousness of more than our patch, so that our technologically very much more connected world is beyond our natural mindset?
[a day away has grown from 50 miles to 12,500 miles in the last 200 years, shrinking the world by a factor of 250]
[weaponry has grown by a factor of 60,000 times in 50 years, from power to kill 100,000 in one day to power to kill 6 billion - have big parts of our consciousness just not caught up with this?]
[world income: $300 trillion - world working persons: 3 billion - world income is from sprout and weaver, international distribution of income, kyklos journal, v45, 1992, pp237-258, updated with global inflation since 1987]
america was *founded* on the principle of prevention of wealth concentration - obviously the tyranny americans escaped and which americans wished to be eternally free from was totally dependent on unjust wealth concentration [wealth in excess of own contribution by own work]
vigilance is the price of liberty, and vigilance over prevention of wealth concentration was zero from the beginning, although in the 19th century prevention of wealth concentration was in all the rhetoric
the greeks had established that laws were spiders' webs, the 'great' break through
inequality, pay injustice had reached an inequality factor of one million in america in the 1880s - 10c a *day* for sew-ers, $10,000/*hr* for Jay Gould - globally today, the inequality factor is one billion -
whence the superblindness?
are people that stupid?
or is there a mighty masochism in humanity?
americans had just come from tyranny, limitless wealth and poverty, overpower and underpower - you would think they would have been passionately vigilant to prevent growth of limitless personal power - you would think the whole pride of people in their new nation would have centred on the fundamental, the sine qua non [the without-which-nothing], the essential
there doesn't seem to be an atom of a good theory to explain this utter ignoring of the whole point by americans for 200 years, by humanity for 3000 years
why was there not a whole intellectual industry in america to establish with exactitude the limits of just fortune, to draw a line in the sand: individual power shall go no farther than this?
you'd think americans would have had a school curriculum subject in pay justice, an academic industry in the thinking behind just limitation of fortune
you'd think all humans in every age and country would have pursued this essential - the purpose of government is justice, james madison - the state built on injustice cannot stand, roman saying - so it was essential to *patriotism* to pursue pay justice, to determine the most one person can contribute to wealth by his own work and can justly claim as his
as henry george wrote, obviously one person on his own cannot produce much more than anyone else in the same time, with the same materials, tools, data, etc
[pay justice is far and away the most important justice, since money buys almost all nonfree necessities and desirables, including political power, social standing]
now that we have 60 times PDC [planet death capability], and ratio of highest to lowest pay/yr of one billion, with violence-generation and growth proportional, the american freshstart chance to make tyranny [which is also corruption, warmongering and cannonfoddering] extinct was probably our last
the greeks had said equality breeds no strife - and humanity has watched inequality and strife grow for 1000s of years, [punctuated with revolutions that were only briefly and very partially effective in justly limiting individual power], without the slightest sign of alarm -
i see no sign of the slightest atom of an explanation for this stupendous utter blindness about the super-obvious
the gitmo trials are just one fruit among millions of evil fruits on the tree of unlimited-fortunes social systems which we have embraced for 1000s of years
the chance that we will wake up and get the point before violence grows to the point of using the 60 times PDC bombs [looks like in the next 30 years] seems to be infinitesimal
the goddess isis is supposed to have said: if they knew they were blind, they wouldnt be blind - we are unconscious of our blindness - because we see many things, we think we are not blind - forgetting that seeing jigsaw puzzle pieces is not seeing the picture ***at all***, although the pieces are part of the puzzle
we have great confidence in our seeing reality when we should have very little confidence in that - it seems the 'obvious' lesson of history is just too big to see - like ants confidently operating on their tiny level that can't interpret the shadow of the giant anteater, evergrowing unlimited wealth-power producing evergrowing weaponry, warmongering and cannonfoddering
- although there are plenty of warning quotes, from american presidents, presidents of national banks, us generals, and from the moneypower itself
the bankers own the earth. take it away from them but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it all back again. sir josiah stamp, president, bank of england, 1920s
it seems every assassinated american president has been assassinated by the moneypower - every assassination has followed some attempt by the president to interfere with the freedom of the moneypower - eg, jfk printed some u.s. money without borrowing it from the privately owned reserve bank
the credit of a country is backed by the natural bounty of the nation and by people's work - and the federal reserve steals this credit and makes the nation buy it!!!!!!!!
in 20 years i have not experienced one example of the slightest interest, enthusiasm, excitement as responses to the fact that the *world* average pay/yr is US$100,000, paying housewives and students too [making world av. family income US$200,000], in the fact that 99% are underpaid [and would therefore get more of their earnings if there was more pay justice - and would get more liberty and democracy and less war and crime].
legal thefts are wide open: a billion at 10% doubles every 7 years, multiplies by 1000 every 70 years - with no work at all
pay justice is pay for work, no pay for no work
are people really so dazzled mindless by limitless wealth that they cannot take in that limitless wealth for what must be limited work [which cannot be more than about 30% more than the average work] means overpay [theft] means underpay for most, means violence, evergrowing, as both sides try to prevail with ever-greater weaponry and terrorism?
are people really so dazzled by overwealth that they cannot take in that the intensity, power and persistence of attacks on overwealth are proportional to the size of the overwealth, so that overwealth is always under seige of many kinds, and must fall in time, as history shows they always have, so that overpay is no fun at all? - that if one person takes or by any means has the property of 1000, that person is vastly unhappier too, with merely 1000 times more than he can use, and loss of 1000 friends, fellows and protectors, and gain of 1000 enemies?
are people swarming to sam pizzigati's free online book greed and good, with its ten times america, or to carey's democratic capitalism? - no - the swarming is flat calm
the good news is that a species with great abundance [every working person, incl housewives and students, producing US$100,000 worth of workproducts per year] and yet knowingly calmly starving 50 million people to death every year, deserves the death sentence they are bringing to themselves with all speed with all technological brilliance
at least the nazis believed or kidded themselves the jews and other minorities were enemies or no good - we know the starving are innocent
but although we know these things factually, do we really know them? - do they penetrate our consciousness? - do they fire a central fire in the brain or mental core?
WHY are we technological giants and yet [in the crucial main point] ethical [pursuit of happiness] cretins?
are we programmed by nature to settle for enough, which in our present technological super-abundant society is underpay, which then releases overpay to grow limitlessly, growing underpay and violence limitlessly?
has nature not fitted us with consciousness of more than our patch, so that our technologically very much more connected world is beyond our natural mindset?
[a day away has grown from 50 miles to 12,500 miles in the last 200 years, shrinking the world by a factor of 250]
[weaponry has grown by a factor of 60,000 times in 50 years, from power to kill 100,000 in one day to power to kill 6 billion - have big parts of our consciousness just not caught up with this?]
[world income: $300 trillion - world working persons: 3 billion - world income is from sprout and weaver, international distribution of income, kyklos journal, v45, 1992, pp237-258, updated with global inflation since 1987]
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Can you put what you are saying in 25 words or less?
In 25 words or less:
Commit pay justice and reap vast benefits: pull humanity out of the nosedive to selfextinction soon, and chop down the great tree of problems permanently.
In a few more words:
Imagine a community in which everyone works and plenty is produced. How can you make that community very unhappy without destroying the workproducts, the plenty? Just by extreme maldistribution. For instance, giving all the property to one, as in communism. Or giving 98% of income earnings to 1%, as in the world today.
Can we be literally 100 times happier? At first it seems not. We have been searching for happiness for 1000s of years and it is unlikely we have missed anything that big.
But consider these points. One, we routinely ignore problems, so we underestimate how unhappy we are. We get used to the level of happiness-unhappiness that is around, and consider it natural, normal and inevitable. And two, happiness could have declined, imperceptibly slowly, for 1000s of years, and we would not have any memory or record of happiness levels of 1000s of years ago to compare with our present state.
Inequality causes unhappiness. Inequality causes violence, which causes unhappiness. Inequality is higher and lower pay for equal work, which is unjust, which is injury. Inequality is the greatest injury, because money is the joker good, good for almost all things, including necessities and desires. So the theft of money, pay, is the theft of almost everything, causing the greatest violence. Inequality has been growing for 1000s of years. Inequality is now at the super-super-extreme level of an inequality factor of one billion: that is, the ratio of highest to lowest pay for equal work is one billion. Income for a year's work ranges from $10 to $10 billion. Super-extreme violence [relative to what we would ahve without the inequality].
Violence is not caused by human nature, because violence has increased and human nature hasn't changed, so there is no correlation between violence and human nature. So we can change violence.
1000s of years ago, such inequality was not possible. People mostly produced for themselves and consumed for themselves. That is, they were fully paid for their work. With job specialisation [division of labour] workproducts were in effect pooled, so people could throw the products of their specialised work into the pool, and take from the pool the great variety of things they wanted and needed. Ideally, everyone took out as much as they put in. That is, they got out goods that contained as much work in them as went into the goods they made. The purpose of trade was just to give everyone the mix of goods they needed. The market sprang up, so that things could be traded, that is, remixed after being separated by job specialisation.
But this pooling created the possibility of taking out more than one had put in, leaving others in the position of taking out less than they put in. Indeed, this was inevitable, because the exact workvalue of anything cannnot be determined. In every trade, the amount of work gone into the two things exchanged could hardly be equal. In general, there would be some difference in workvalue in the two things exchanged. That is, one person would go away from the exchange with something with an undetectably small bit less work in it than the thing they brought to the exchange, and the other would go away with a bit more. This is clear from the real stories of people trading up frrom a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. The accumulation of little gains in each trade would sometimes accumulate to something far more valuable. This is legal theft.
This was the seed of inequality. And this seed grew. This seed would inevitably grow, with every transaction. Slowly, imperceptibly, inequality would grow ceaselessly. When the inequality became noticeable, there would be resentment, and this resentment would grow as inequality grew. So, out of the necessity of trade, out of job specialisation, started growing inequality, which produced ever-growing anger and violence, which produced evergrowing weaponry and evergrowing unhappiness.
Money is a power, the second greatest, so inequality is inequality of power, which is tyranny and slavery. Tyranny extends its sway, gathers more wealth, more slaves, more power. This creates deeper poverty and slavery, which eventually bits hard enough for the poor to rebel, and there is a revolution or fall of empire, and then inequality starts building again. So violence gets to everyone, tyrant and slave. People escape to other shores, but inequality starts building again. The bigger the heap of wealth, the more the attacks and erosions on it. And so the costs of defending the heap grow with the heap. And the attacks are endless, so the fall of the heap is inevitable in time. And the heap is maintained, for a limited time, only with great effort. So it has been in every case in history. It happened to Rome, it happened to Holland, Spain, Britain, and it is happening now with America. And it will happen with every heap of wealth. Where today is Spanish Inca plunder? The wealth attracted thieves, other nations, and it was eaten away in plunder and the costs of protecting it. Every heap of wealth is finite, the attacks on it are endless, so fall is inevitable, and only after ceaseless endeavour to retain.
So it seems that unhappiness has grown imperceptibly slowly for 1000s of years. And we have got used to each new slightly lower level, since we have no way of remembering or recording the level of happiness of past times to compare it with our own level.
Misery exercises such a paralyzing effect over the nature of people, that no class is ever conscious of its own suffering, Leo Tolstoy.
This applies to the rich as well as to the poor. We ignore, as much as possible, the bad things in our lives. We ignore them so well we forget them. And we accept what seems inevitable, unavoidable. We do not often enquire whether the bad thing can in fact be removed. We do not often enquire deeply to find the cause of the bad thing. We jump to the conclusion that the bad thing is inevitable, unavoidable. Since we believe, too quickly, that we cannot change it, we put it out of mind. Since we do not look at the problem, we do not see a solution when it comes along. We had given up looking out for it, and so the bus goes past. As time passes, and we never catch the bus, we are more and more confirmed in our opinion that there is no bus, and so the more we ignore things that might in fact be solutions. Our opinion that there is no solution closes the door on solutions.
In fact, the solution has been sitting there forever.
Instead of acting to remove the inequality, we have worked within it, trying to reach the top, or trying to reach a comfortable spot within it, or bearing it, or walking away from it. Too few voices have said: let's get rid of the inequality, and too few have heard those voices.
America was founded on the principle of preventing limitless wealth concentration, and this was mostly ignored or unknown. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s. Sew-ers got 10c a day, Jay Gould got $10,000 an hour. An inequality factor of one million. Efforts to counter the evergrowing inequality and loss of quality of life were of slight effectiveness.
The full return to the equality of 1000s of years ago, before job specialisation and trade, with its drop of inequality which grew, where everyone was paid for all their work because they mostly consumed all they produced, was never in sight. Globally, the range of pay/year is $10 to $10 billion, an inequality factor of one billion. A violence, danger, unhappiness, disorder and problems factor of one billion.
There are 1000 [1,000,000,000] who hack at the branches of the tree of problems for every one who strikes at the root, Henry Thoreau.
We have been hacking at the million branches for 1000s of years, and the tree has grown faster than we have hacked. And it is approaching the time when the tree crashes down under its own weight, with us in it. But the tree of problems has a weak spot: it gathers itself in the trunk.
Consider what would happen if a government committed the super-extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of citizens and giving it to 1% of the people.
There would first be the loss of 81% of national happiness in the loss of 90% of income for 90% of people. 90% x 90% is 81%. Then, on top of that would be the super-extreme violence, which would affect the happiness of everyone, and the great destruction of property and people, and the great loss of productivity. These extra factors could well raise the loss of happiness from 81% to 99%. 99% of happiness would be destroyed. Everyone will readily agree with this.
Therefore the reversal of that mad policy will increase happiness 100-fold. The 81% will be restored, the violence will disappear, the productivity will rise again, the waste of property and lives will greatly decline.
And we have far greater inequality than this super-extreme, mad example. In the example, the 1% get 82 times. In reality, the 1% overpaid get up to 100,000 times. In the example, the 90% get 10th. In reality the 90% get 100th to 10,000th. In the example, the 9% in the middle get what they were getting before. In the real world, the 9% get between average and 100th of average.
So it seems that everyone with logic will readily agree that we can be, literally, conservatively, 100 times happier, with far less violence, danger, tragedies, horrors, fears, crises and unsafety, and far more liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness, community, social trust, amity, togetherness, goodfeeling, confidence in others].
It doesn't seem hard to understand. It only takes people being willing to put aside their opinions long enough to consider and study the facts without prejudice.
Many more points can be made, and have been made at happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com, which only strengthen the case.
And it is not hard to spread the word. If everyone who learns it tells just two people, every adult in the world will learn it in just 31 times the time to tell two. Just by word of mouth. You can light four billion candles from one candle in just 31 times the time to light two if everyone who gets their candle lit lights just two candles. There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their energies and resources. It just needs people to allow their supreme confidence that there is no solution to be eroded, and replaced with a realistic assessment of reality. We are standing on the brink of self-extinction and of a golden age.
The underpaid are certainly unhappier, and the overpaid are miserable too, trapped in a boxing ring, forced into fighting off all comers endlessly till they fall with exhaustion, and isolated from the human tribe, perpetually at bay. Like Hitler, Ceausescu, Caesar, Stalin, every empire, and today, America. And overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, 1000 rooms for one body. So inequality is lose-lose, equality is win-win.
We just have to dig out a deeply rooted erroneous mindset. We have to open our minds. We have to step back from our struggling, desperate position in the mad heap and see the heap for what it is, hell [compared to what we could have]. The bus is waiting.
It is easy to conclude you are happy by ignoring all the bad stuff, by not comparing it with possibility. Free from pride, people would eagerly compare the happiness of other countries, and compete in happiness-pursuit. So what is pride, friend or foe?
Equality can be attained easily, in two generations, without making destructive waves in the economy, by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to make that superwealth, and everyone has done everything to make the things that moeny represents and buys, so such an act is just. Or [or and] by giving everyone in the world equal shares in a 1%-a-month increase in the money supply. Inflation is not bad when everyone gets the added money. These methods do not require a large suffocating bureaucracy, they allow us greatly to reduce bureaucracy and increase freedom from being buried in petty regulation and its vast costs.
But we are 98% genetically identical to chimpanzees, and we are loaded by nature with powerful instincts which are good in nature but disastrous in dealing with the complications of society.
It is only by heroic mental effort that we can hope to get free from our natural mental limitations and correctly 'read' our social reality. Only the people who see the big picture are awake, Heraclitus. It is easier for people to see small things than big things, Plato. Good things are hard, Plato.
Test everything, Bible. Like the railway engineer, who regularly tests the wheels. If your ideas are sound, testing them will increase your confidence in them. If they are not, testing them will save you a crash. So testing has no downside. We come closest to truth when we hear all opinions. And happiness is totally dependent on realism. And happiness is your everything. The human tendency to hold hard onto opinions without testing them honestly against other opinions is selfdestructive.
Reality is merciless, it won't even flinch in sympathy when you bark your shins against the coffee table you thought wasn't there. And part of the picture is nothing like the picture. Compare a jigsaw puzzle piece with the complete picture.
Restrained by custom, and the ridiculous prejudices of the world, we go with the crowd, and it is late in life before we dare to think, Frances Brookes. Economic truth emerges only when things are considered whole, John Galbraith ['Dean of economists'].
The plane of human being is in a nosedive, close to crashing. Weaponry at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and a violence factor of one billion, rising. And reality won't even flinch when we culminate our big mistake.
A 500-page book in bitesize sections is free at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org], and the globalhappiness site will soon have a new, somewhat annoyingly-written but invaluable book. People say it [or at least the first chapter] is 'teachy'. Putting up with its annoyances can be your penance for hurting yourselves unnecessarily, enormously, for 1000s of years. As mothers say: Serves you right.
Commit pay justice and reap vast benefits: pull humanity out of the nosedive to selfextinction soon, and chop down the great tree of problems permanently.
In a few more words:
Imagine a community in which everyone works and plenty is produced. How can you make that community very unhappy without destroying the workproducts, the plenty? Just by extreme maldistribution. For instance, giving all the property to one, as in communism. Or giving 98% of income earnings to 1%, as in the world today.
Can we be literally 100 times happier? At first it seems not. We have been searching for happiness for 1000s of years and it is unlikely we have missed anything that big.
But consider these points. One, we routinely ignore problems, so we underestimate how unhappy we are. We get used to the level of happiness-unhappiness that is around, and consider it natural, normal and inevitable. And two, happiness could have declined, imperceptibly slowly, for 1000s of years, and we would not have any memory or record of happiness levels of 1000s of years ago to compare with our present state.
Inequality causes unhappiness. Inequality causes violence, which causes unhappiness. Inequality is higher and lower pay for equal work, which is unjust, which is injury. Inequality is the greatest injury, because money is the joker good, good for almost all things, including necessities and desires. So the theft of money, pay, is the theft of almost everything, causing the greatest violence. Inequality has been growing for 1000s of years. Inequality is now at the super-super-extreme level of an inequality factor of one billion: that is, the ratio of highest to lowest pay for equal work is one billion. Income for a year's work ranges from $10 to $10 billion. Super-extreme violence [relative to what we would ahve without the inequality].
Violence is not caused by human nature, because violence has increased and human nature hasn't changed, so there is no correlation between violence and human nature. So we can change violence.
1000s of years ago, such inequality was not possible. People mostly produced for themselves and consumed for themselves. That is, they were fully paid for their work. With job specialisation [division of labour] workproducts were in effect pooled, so people could throw the products of their specialised work into the pool, and take from the pool the great variety of things they wanted and needed. Ideally, everyone took out as much as they put in. That is, they got out goods that contained as much work in them as went into the goods they made. The purpose of trade was just to give everyone the mix of goods they needed. The market sprang up, so that things could be traded, that is, remixed after being separated by job specialisation.
But this pooling created the possibility of taking out more than one had put in, leaving others in the position of taking out less than they put in. Indeed, this was inevitable, because the exact workvalue of anything cannnot be determined. In every trade, the amount of work gone into the two things exchanged could hardly be equal. In general, there would be some difference in workvalue in the two things exchanged. That is, one person would go away from the exchange with something with an undetectably small bit less work in it than the thing they brought to the exchange, and the other would go away with a bit more. This is clear from the real stories of people trading up frrom a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. The accumulation of little gains in each trade would sometimes accumulate to something far more valuable. This is legal theft.
This was the seed of inequality. And this seed grew. This seed would inevitably grow, with every transaction. Slowly, imperceptibly, inequality would grow ceaselessly. When the inequality became noticeable, there would be resentment, and this resentment would grow as inequality grew. So, out of the necessity of trade, out of job specialisation, started growing inequality, which produced ever-growing anger and violence, which produced evergrowing weaponry and evergrowing unhappiness.
Money is a power, the second greatest, so inequality is inequality of power, which is tyranny and slavery. Tyranny extends its sway, gathers more wealth, more slaves, more power. This creates deeper poverty and slavery, which eventually bits hard enough for the poor to rebel, and there is a revolution or fall of empire, and then inequality starts building again. So violence gets to everyone, tyrant and slave. People escape to other shores, but inequality starts building again. The bigger the heap of wealth, the more the attacks and erosions on it. And so the costs of defending the heap grow with the heap. And the attacks are endless, so the fall of the heap is inevitable in time. And the heap is maintained, for a limited time, only with great effort. So it has been in every case in history. It happened to Rome, it happened to Holland, Spain, Britain, and it is happening now with America. And it will happen with every heap of wealth. Where today is Spanish Inca plunder? The wealth attracted thieves, other nations, and it was eaten away in plunder and the costs of protecting it. Every heap of wealth is finite, the attacks on it are endless, so fall is inevitable, and only after ceaseless endeavour to retain.
So it seems that unhappiness has grown imperceptibly slowly for 1000s of years. And we have got used to each new slightly lower level, since we have no way of remembering or recording the level of happiness of past times to compare it with our own level.
Misery exercises such a paralyzing effect over the nature of people, that no class is ever conscious of its own suffering, Leo Tolstoy.
This applies to the rich as well as to the poor. We ignore, as much as possible, the bad things in our lives. We ignore them so well we forget them. And we accept what seems inevitable, unavoidable. We do not often enquire whether the bad thing can in fact be removed. We do not often enquire deeply to find the cause of the bad thing. We jump to the conclusion that the bad thing is inevitable, unavoidable. Since we believe, too quickly, that we cannot change it, we put it out of mind. Since we do not look at the problem, we do not see a solution when it comes along. We had given up looking out for it, and so the bus goes past. As time passes, and we never catch the bus, we are more and more confirmed in our opinion that there is no bus, and so the more we ignore things that might in fact be solutions. Our opinion that there is no solution closes the door on solutions.
In fact, the solution has been sitting there forever.
Instead of acting to remove the inequality, we have worked within it, trying to reach the top, or trying to reach a comfortable spot within it, or bearing it, or walking away from it. Too few voices have said: let's get rid of the inequality, and too few have heard those voices.
America was founded on the principle of preventing limitless wealth concentration, and this was mostly ignored or unknown. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s. Sew-ers got 10c a day, Jay Gould got $10,000 an hour. An inequality factor of one million. Efforts to counter the evergrowing inequality and loss of quality of life were of slight effectiveness.
The full return to the equality of 1000s of years ago, before job specialisation and trade, with its drop of inequality which grew, where everyone was paid for all their work because they mostly consumed all they produced, was never in sight. Globally, the range of pay/year is $10 to $10 billion, an inequality factor of one billion. A violence, danger, unhappiness, disorder and problems factor of one billion.
There are 1000 [1,000,000,000] who hack at the branches of the tree of problems for every one who strikes at the root, Henry Thoreau.
We have been hacking at the million branches for 1000s of years, and the tree has grown faster than we have hacked. And it is approaching the time when the tree crashes down under its own weight, with us in it. But the tree of problems has a weak spot: it gathers itself in the trunk.
Consider what would happen if a government committed the super-extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of citizens and giving it to 1% of the people.
There would first be the loss of 81% of national happiness in the loss of 90% of income for 90% of people. 90% x 90% is 81%. Then, on top of that would be the super-extreme violence, which would affect the happiness of everyone, and the great destruction of property and people, and the great loss of productivity. These extra factors could well raise the loss of happiness from 81% to 99%. 99% of happiness would be destroyed. Everyone will readily agree with this.
Therefore the reversal of that mad policy will increase happiness 100-fold. The 81% will be restored, the violence will disappear, the productivity will rise again, the waste of property and lives will greatly decline.
And we have far greater inequality than this super-extreme, mad example. In the example, the 1% get 82 times. In reality, the 1% overpaid get up to 100,000 times. In the example, the 90% get 10th. In reality the 90% get 100th to 10,000th. In the example, the 9% in the middle get what they were getting before. In the real world, the 9% get between average and 100th of average.
So it seems that everyone with logic will readily agree that we can be, literally, conservatively, 100 times happier, with far less violence, danger, tragedies, horrors, fears, crises and unsafety, and far more liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness, community, social trust, amity, togetherness, goodfeeling, confidence in others].
It doesn't seem hard to understand. It only takes people being willing to put aside their opinions long enough to consider and study the facts without prejudice.
Many more points can be made, and have been made at happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com, which only strengthen the case.
And it is not hard to spread the word. If everyone who learns it tells just two people, every adult in the world will learn it in just 31 times the time to tell two. Just by word of mouth. You can light four billion candles from one candle in just 31 times the time to light two if everyone who gets their candle lit lights just two candles. There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their energies and resources. It just needs people to allow their supreme confidence that there is no solution to be eroded, and replaced with a realistic assessment of reality. We are standing on the brink of self-extinction and of a golden age.
The underpaid are certainly unhappier, and the overpaid are miserable too, trapped in a boxing ring, forced into fighting off all comers endlessly till they fall with exhaustion, and isolated from the human tribe, perpetually at bay. Like Hitler, Ceausescu, Caesar, Stalin, every empire, and today, America. And overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, 1000 rooms for one body. So inequality is lose-lose, equality is win-win.
We just have to dig out a deeply rooted erroneous mindset. We have to open our minds. We have to step back from our struggling, desperate position in the mad heap and see the heap for what it is, hell [compared to what we could have]. The bus is waiting.
It is easy to conclude you are happy by ignoring all the bad stuff, by not comparing it with possibility. Free from pride, people would eagerly compare the happiness of other countries, and compete in happiness-pursuit. So what is pride, friend or foe?
Equality can be attained easily, in two generations, without making destructive waves in the economy, by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to make that superwealth, and everyone has done everything to make the things that moeny represents and buys, so such an act is just. Or [or and] by giving everyone in the world equal shares in a 1%-a-month increase in the money supply. Inflation is not bad when everyone gets the added money. These methods do not require a large suffocating bureaucracy, they allow us greatly to reduce bureaucracy and increase freedom from being buried in petty regulation and its vast costs.
But we are 98% genetically identical to chimpanzees, and we are loaded by nature with powerful instincts which are good in nature but disastrous in dealing with the complications of society.
It is only by heroic mental effort that we can hope to get free from our natural mental limitations and correctly 'read' our social reality. Only the people who see the big picture are awake, Heraclitus. It is easier for people to see small things than big things, Plato. Good things are hard, Plato.
Test everything, Bible. Like the railway engineer, who regularly tests the wheels. If your ideas are sound, testing them will increase your confidence in them. If they are not, testing them will save you a crash. So testing has no downside. We come closest to truth when we hear all opinions. And happiness is totally dependent on realism. And happiness is your everything. The human tendency to hold hard onto opinions without testing them honestly against other opinions is selfdestructive.
Reality is merciless, it won't even flinch in sympathy when you bark your shins against the coffee table you thought wasn't there. And part of the picture is nothing like the picture. Compare a jigsaw puzzle piece with the complete picture.
Restrained by custom, and the ridiculous prejudices of the world, we go with the crowd, and it is late in life before we dare to think, Frances Brookes. Economic truth emerges only when things are considered whole, John Galbraith ['Dean of economists'].
The plane of human being is in a nosedive, close to crashing. Weaponry at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and a violence factor of one billion, rising. And reality won't even flinch when we culminate our big mistake.
A 500-page book in bitesize sections is free at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org], and the globalhappiness site will soon have a new, somewhat annoyingly-written but invaluable book. People say it [or at least the first chapter] is 'teachy'. Putting up with its annoyances can be your penance for hurting yourselves unnecessarily, enormously, for 1000s of years. As mothers say: Serves you right.
Yes, socialism doesn't work
If you are talking about hard socialism, no-private-property, central-planning socialism, then, yes, it hasn't worked. The state owning everything means the government leaders owning everything, which is the most extreme pay injustice, since everyone works, and creates the wealth. It is extreme wealth concentration, unjustly, and people's sense of justice opposes it, and then there is war between the govt and the people, which absorbs a lot of wealth and productivity, and destroys the nation.
As for soft socialism, govt trying to prevent the extremes of wealth and poverty caused by pure capitalism, all first-world states are soft socialist states, including USA. Which has led to fat bureaucracies suffocating productivity, and shovelling wealth, mostly to the lower middle class, not to the poor.
Capitalism is good for the invisible hand, automatically and sensitively adjusting supply and demand, far better than central planning can, but pure capitalism, as practised in the 19th century, led to extreme wealth and poverty, because of the many wideopen LEGAL THEFTS in the system [as well as the successful illegal thefts, like the Mafia]. In pure capitalism, there are many wideopen legal thefts, like pay for scarcity, which in one century, the 19th, caused such poverty that the market, the buyers, was drying up. Money had been sucked up into few hands, and there was little money in the markets for people to buy things. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s in America. And America and every country in the first world took steps, and labour took steps, to reduce the extreme inequality, by unions, to give workers more power, by eg Henry Ford giving high wages, so workers could afford the cars, by govt interference in inequality, by graduated tax, social security, old age pensions, minimum wages etc. But these methods involve bureaucracy, which is ever-growing, and which now absorbs 40% of USA national wealth, and suffocates productivity with rules and regulations.
What I suggest is capitalism with a simple non-bureacratic way of preventing endlessly more extreme wealth and poverty, which obviously generates violence [endless growth of war, crime and weaponry]. That way we have the advantages of capitalism without the disadvantages of extreme inequality, evergrowing violence, suffocating bureaucracy, and everincreasing warmongering by the superrich and cannonfoddering of the underpaid. Call it democratic capitalism, call it justice capitalism, call it survival capitalism. Every empire has fallen due to ever-increasing inequality. Money is power, so extreme inequality of wealth is extreme inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, unliberty, which is what we had in Europe and what Americans were fleeing.
Liberty and justice for all. The most important justice is pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no pay for no work, no overpay and no underpay, everyone taking out of the social pool of wealth as much as they put in by their work. Because money is the joker good, good for just about everything, including power and social standing. We have many wideopen pays for no work [overpay, overpower, corruption, welldressed theft], which means work for no pay [underpay, wageslavery, slavery, powerlessness] for others. Which means evergrowing inequality, violence, brutality, war and weaponry. Murder is proportional to inequality.
The state built on injustice cannot stand, Roman saying. Every state and empire in history has fallen because of extreme inequality. In the world today, we have pay from 10,000th of average to 100,000 times average. 99% are underpaid.
The purpose of government is justice, James Madison.
When our fathers prevented entail [and primogeniture, and when they fixed clergy salaries], they though they had erected a bulwark [safety wall] against the money power that had killed Britain [and every other state and empire in history]. They forgot that money can combine, that a moneyed corporation is like the papacy, it never dies. Wendell Phillips.
Both Lincoln and Jefferson warned against the corporation.
We are free today [early 19th century] substantially, but the day will come when our Republic [the American nation] will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth [and political power, and govt, and the military] will be concentrated in the hands of the few. James Madison, founding father.
A US Senate committee in the 1950s reported that big business was more powerful than the US Govt. Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both, Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court judge.
The working people have been expoited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody, Henry Ford.
When we resist concentration of power, we are resisting the pwoers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties, Woodrow Wilson.
If there were but one person in the world, it is manifest that he could have no more wealth than he was able to make and to save. That is the natural order. Henry George, founder of the Single Tax societies in the early 20th century, author of Progress and poverty.
I needed the good will of the legislature of four states. I formed the legislature bodies with my own money. Jay Gould, getting $1,000,000 a day in the 1880s.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, Stanley Kubrick.
Now we have discovered war to be derived from the unlimited accumulation of wealth which is also the cause of almost all the evils in states, Plato.
When individuals get a lot of wealth, they often go a-warmongering, fomenting wars, and selling to both sides, making huge profits, because the products get blown up, and also cannonfoddering millions of people [soldiers and civilians] in the process. The League of Nations was founded to try to prevent warmongerers fomenting wars. When people find themselves working very hard and getting very little, they sometimes get mad, and turn to war or crime. For the poor, being in the army, risking being shot, but being fed and clothed, is often the best option. So both wealth and poverty, overpay and underpay, contribute to war.
Governments can do nothing, because they are held hostage by the superwealthy. Only the people are strong enough to oppose the superwealthy. The people have always been stronger than the superwealthy. Every empire, every plutocracy has fallen to the people, the underpaid. But the people are relying on government, and are doing nothing, are not taking responsibility. Democracy is rule by the people, but the people have abdicated responsibility to the governments, who are in the hands of the warmongering superwealthy. So overpay-underpay violence and weaponry will continue growing, till the atomic bombs are used. The superwealthy will use the bombs on the people attacking them, and then it will be all over for everyone.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and growing rapidly in wealth and population. The superrich are selling weaponry to both sides. Conquering is a mug's game, because the plunderers get plundered by the plundered and the enslaved. This forces the superwealthy to raid the national wealth to defend themselves, and so increase the rage of the people against them. This is how every overwealth has fallen. And this time it will happen, over the next two or three decades, with bombs capable of killing everyone, putting up enough smoke to block out the sun, lower the temperature 25 degrees, three times colder than an iceage.
Unless the people move for pay justice.
Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. This is just, because the private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the workproducts that that money buys. This will gently, over two generations, make the super-overpay rain down on everyone, bring the 99% underpaid up towards $100,000 a year, and the overpaid down towards $100,000 a year.
This is simple, and doesn't need a big bureaucracy, just a small department to settle the estates and distribute the overpay electronically.
There is an even simpler method. But it is very unlikely that people will act responsibly, and think their way through to the reality of the present human situation, to the necessity and the enormous positive value for everyone of doing this. People will not grasp the danger till too late. We will be extinct. Already NATO are asking for the right to make pre-emptive nuclear strikes. First-world share of popluation is shrinking fast, to 2% of world population by 2100. Already depleted uranium has been used. Already, South America is starting to oppose the tyranny of USA.
As long as there are rich and poor, there will be growing war, as both sides throw everbigger weaponry. Pay up to 100,000 times the world average of $100,000 is absurd, madness. And against the sane principles of the founding fathers.
1% get 98% of world income, while doing 1% of the work.
A billion makes $100 million every year at 10%. A billion doubles at 10% every 7 years, multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. With no work at all by the owner. Therefore there is clearly extreme legal theft, pay for no work.
But since people cannot see even this super-extreme injustice, how can they see anything? People see superwealth, and instead of bringing it back down to justice, they try to climb up to it, or they settle for what they can get. Obviously wealth is power, and extreme overpay-underpay is overpower-underpower, tyranny-slavery, not democracy freedom peace survival order intelligence happiness safety friendliness, the good life.
Obviously individual contribution by own work is limited, not unlimited, so unlimited fortunes are unjust, which means the decline and fall of states and planets. No one wants fortunes to be limited, but they forget that unlimited fortunes means underpay for 99%.
Opening the gates to unlimited wealth for self is opening the gates to unlimited fortunes for others.
Unlimited overpay means unlimited underpay, because no one contributes unlimited amounts of wealth by their work. New technology has built-in scarcity, high demand and low supply, prices way above costs, till factories meet demand in maybe two decades.
People trust that common sense will prevail, and that they don't have to do anything. But has common sense prevailed for 3000 years? Tyranny, slavery, conquering, being conquered, every empire falling, ceaseless growth of war, crime and weaponry?
The golden rule is ironhard: don't hit people, they hit back! As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
Pay justice is the only escape hatch for homo sapiens, and after 3000 years of following pay injustice to super-super-extreme pay injustice, pay justice seems very strange, very foreign, very unlikely to be true or necessary.
People cannot believe in extinction, because it has never happened before.
We humans are sorcerer's apprentices, smart enough to get ourselves into giant technological trouble, unable to get ourselves out by common sense.
Head-in-the-sand we have lived and head-in-the-sand we will die.
Yet the way out is easy.
As for soft socialism, govt trying to prevent the extremes of wealth and poverty caused by pure capitalism, all first-world states are soft socialist states, including USA. Which has led to fat bureaucracies suffocating productivity, and shovelling wealth, mostly to the lower middle class, not to the poor.
Capitalism is good for the invisible hand, automatically and sensitively adjusting supply and demand, far better than central planning can, but pure capitalism, as practised in the 19th century, led to extreme wealth and poverty, because of the many wideopen LEGAL THEFTS in the system [as well as the successful illegal thefts, like the Mafia]. In pure capitalism, there are many wideopen legal thefts, like pay for scarcity, which in one century, the 19th, caused such poverty that the market, the buyers, was drying up. Money had been sucked up into few hands, and there was little money in the markets for people to buy things. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s in America. And America and every country in the first world took steps, and labour took steps, to reduce the extreme inequality, by unions, to give workers more power, by eg Henry Ford giving high wages, so workers could afford the cars, by govt interference in inequality, by graduated tax, social security, old age pensions, minimum wages etc. But these methods involve bureaucracy, which is ever-growing, and which now absorbs 40% of USA national wealth, and suffocates productivity with rules and regulations.
What I suggest is capitalism with a simple non-bureacratic way of preventing endlessly more extreme wealth and poverty, which obviously generates violence [endless growth of war, crime and weaponry]. That way we have the advantages of capitalism without the disadvantages of extreme inequality, evergrowing violence, suffocating bureaucracy, and everincreasing warmongering by the superrich and cannonfoddering of the underpaid. Call it democratic capitalism, call it justice capitalism, call it survival capitalism. Every empire has fallen due to ever-increasing inequality. Money is power, so extreme inequality of wealth is extreme inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, unliberty, which is what we had in Europe and what Americans were fleeing.
Liberty and justice for all. The most important justice is pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no pay for no work, no overpay and no underpay, everyone taking out of the social pool of wealth as much as they put in by their work. Because money is the joker good, good for just about everything, including power and social standing. We have many wideopen pays for no work [overpay, overpower, corruption, welldressed theft], which means work for no pay [underpay, wageslavery, slavery, powerlessness] for others. Which means evergrowing inequality, violence, brutality, war and weaponry. Murder is proportional to inequality.
The state built on injustice cannot stand, Roman saying. Every state and empire in history has fallen because of extreme inequality. In the world today, we have pay from 10,000th of average to 100,000 times average. 99% are underpaid.
The purpose of government is justice, James Madison.
When our fathers prevented entail [and primogeniture, and when they fixed clergy salaries], they though they had erected a bulwark [safety wall] against the money power that had killed Britain [and every other state and empire in history]. They forgot that money can combine, that a moneyed corporation is like the papacy, it never dies. Wendell Phillips.
Both Lincoln and Jefferson warned against the corporation.
We are free today [early 19th century] substantially, but the day will come when our Republic [the American nation] will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth [and political power, and govt, and the military] will be concentrated in the hands of the few. James Madison, founding father.
A US Senate committee in the 1950s reported that big business was more powerful than the US Govt. Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both, Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court judge.
The working people have been expoited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody, Henry Ford.
When we resist concentration of power, we are resisting the pwoers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties, Woodrow Wilson.
If there were but one person in the world, it is manifest that he could have no more wealth than he was able to make and to save. That is the natural order. Henry George, founder of the Single Tax societies in the early 20th century, author of Progress and poverty.
I needed the good will of the legislature of four states. I formed the legislature bodies with my own money. Jay Gould, getting $1,000,000 a day in the 1880s.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, Stanley Kubrick.
Now we have discovered war to be derived from the unlimited accumulation of wealth which is also the cause of almost all the evils in states, Plato.
When individuals get a lot of wealth, they often go a-warmongering, fomenting wars, and selling to both sides, making huge profits, because the products get blown up, and also cannonfoddering millions of people [soldiers and civilians] in the process. The League of Nations was founded to try to prevent warmongerers fomenting wars. When people find themselves working very hard and getting very little, they sometimes get mad, and turn to war or crime. For the poor, being in the army, risking being shot, but being fed and clothed, is often the best option. So both wealth and poverty, overpay and underpay, contribute to war.
Governments can do nothing, because they are held hostage by the superwealthy. Only the people are strong enough to oppose the superwealthy. The people have always been stronger than the superwealthy. Every empire, every plutocracy has fallen to the people, the underpaid. But the people are relying on government, and are doing nothing, are not taking responsibility. Democracy is rule by the people, but the people have abdicated responsibility to the governments, who are in the hands of the warmongering superwealthy. So overpay-underpay violence and weaponry will continue growing, till the atomic bombs are used. The superwealthy will use the bombs on the people attacking them, and then it will be all over for everyone.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and growing rapidly in wealth and population. The superrich are selling weaponry to both sides. Conquering is a mug's game, because the plunderers get plundered by the plundered and the enslaved. This forces the superwealthy to raid the national wealth to defend themselves, and so increase the rage of the people against them. This is how every overwealth has fallen. And this time it will happen, over the next two or three decades, with bombs capable of killing everyone, putting up enough smoke to block out the sun, lower the temperature 25 degrees, three times colder than an iceage.
Unless the people move for pay justice.
Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. This is just, because the private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the workproducts that that money buys. This will gently, over two generations, make the super-overpay rain down on everyone, bring the 99% underpaid up towards $100,000 a year, and the overpaid down towards $100,000 a year.
This is simple, and doesn't need a big bureaucracy, just a small department to settle the estates and distribute the overpay electronically.
There is an even simpler method. But it is very unlikely that people will act responsibly, and think their way through to the reality of the present human situation, to the necessity and the enormous positive value for everyone of doing this. People will not grasp the danger till too late. We will be extinct. Already NATO are asking for the right to make pre-emptive nuclear strikes. First-world share of popluation is shrinking fast, to 2% of world population by 2100. Already depleted uranium has been used. Already, South America is starting to oppose the tyranny of USA.
As long as there are rich and poor, there will be growing war, as both sides throw everbigger weaponry. Pay up to 100,000 times the world average of $100,000 is absurd, madness. And against the sane principles of the founding fathers.
1% get 98% of world income, while doing 1% of the work.
A billion makes $100 million every year at 10%. A billion doubles at 10% every 7 years, multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. With no work at all by the owner. Therefore there is clearly extreme legal theft, pay for no work.
But since people cannot see even this super-extreme injustice, how can they see anything? People see superwealth, and instead of bringing it back down to justice, they try to climb up to it, or they settle for what they can get. Obviously wealth is power, and extreme overpay-underpay is overpower-underpower, tyranny-slavery, not democracy freedom peace survival order intelligence happiness safety friendliness, the good life.
Obviously individual contribution by own work is limited, not unlimited, so unlimited fortunes are unjust, which means the decline and fall of states and planets. No one wants fortunes to be limited, but they forget that unlimited fortunes means underpay for 99%.
Opening the gates to unlimited wealth for self is opening the gates to unlimited fortunes for others.
Unlimited overpay means unlimited underpay, because no one contributes unlimited amounts of wealth by their work. New technology has built-in scarcity, high demand and low supply, prices way above costs, till factories meet demand in maybe two decades.
People trust that common sense will prevail, and that they don't have to do anything. But has common sense prevailed for 3000 years? Tyranny, slavery, conquering, being conquered, every empire falling, ceaseless growth of war, crime and weaponry?
The golden rule is ironhard: don't hit people, they hit back! As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
Pay justice is the only escape hatch for homo sapiens, and after 3000 years of following pay injustice to super-super-extreme pay injustice, pay justice seems very strange, very foreign, very unlikely to be true or necessary.
People cannot believe in extinction, because it has never happened before.
We humans are sorcerer's apprentices, smart enough to get ourselves into giant technological trouble, unable to get ourselves out by common sense.
Head-in-the-sand we have lived and head-in-the-sand we will die.
Yet the way out is easy.
Thinking about losers
Thinking about losers. If you have a running race with ten people, you have nine losers. By having a race, you *create* nine losers.
America seems to be *very* hierarchical. I applied for a job with Encyclopedia Britannica [despite the name, American] and the pay *doubled* at every rise in level. Which looks good while you are imagining yourself rising, but of course most cannot rise. Thus loser means an enormous amount in America.
Richard Semler of Semco, Brazil wrote a book Maverick, in which he describes greatly lowering the hierarchy. His company made huge profits at a time when Brazilian profits were very poor.
I have read that mental illness is high in competitive societies, low in cooperative societies.
I think of Hitler, loser. 40% or 60% [I can't remember] of Nazis were primary school teachers, ie 'losers'. The Nazi thing was anti-intellectual, because the intellectuals had collared the winnings. Same thing in China, with the 'cultural revolution', in which the powergrab of the mandarins [the brainier, the winners, and the more aggressive, pushy] was broken up. What happened to liberty, equality and fraternity? The more unequal the 'rewards', the deeper the 'loserness' is, and the deeper the hell, hopelessness and humiliation.
An old Readers Digest article praised Sweden for having learned that: **None enjoy unless all enjoy**. People are too dangerous to annoy. Witness putting the Palestinians in refugee camps for 50 years, stealing their land, giving them no opportunity even to start again from scratch. Poverty, underpay, underpower, is the mother of explosives.
I was surprised to find that most American universities have fewer than a million volumes in the library, while Harvard has 90 million.
Society puts up a ladder, and everyone thoughtlessly eagerly tries to climb the ladder. No one thinks about not climbing the ladder, thinks about making the ladder horizontal, a seat for everyone. Never thinks about whether it is unjust, unliberty, undemocratic, tyrannous to have the ladder. Everyone hanging onto the ladder, struggling to get past others, kicking down at others trying to get up, till the ladder breaks under the weight.
America was based on prevention of wealth concentration. Wealth is power, inequality of wealth is inequality of power, is tyranny-slavery, nondemocracy. 'Liberty and justice for all'. Pay justice. But where are the philosophers of pay justice? Who is asking what precisely, numerically, is pay justice? Our economic systems contain many wideopen legal thefts, pay for no work [overpay], causing work for no pay [underpay] for others. The ladder system was okay as long as there was mobility. [Although mobility is a poor substitute for pay justice.] But now mobility has gridlocked, immobility has hardened.
Inequality has triumphed, and unliberty and unfraternity. Americans don't look globally, but hey, after 200 years of transport technology reducing distance so that a day away has gone from 50 miles to 12,500 miles, it's a global reality. Just look at your shop shelves. And what do we have globally, that is, what do we have in the real picture? Pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of *one billion*. Which means violence, weaponry, terrorism, chaos, misery, torture, genocide, disinformation factor of one billion.
The war between winners and losers, first casualty of war is truth. The dumbing down of America, keeping you ignorant of the world. The more inequality, the more power to steal, and the more money needed to fight all the wars of offence and defence. America $9 trillion in debt.
Where is Britain's empire? Spain's Inca plunder? Wealth concentration means everyone attacks the wealth heap. Everyone in the world is on the ladder. And this time, with 60 times PDC [planet death capability].
Time to move away from plunder, towards cooperation, recognition that people are too dangerous to annoy?
At any time, there are Hitlers gathering the losers in a reverse push against plunder. Unfortunately, the mindset of losers is to revenge the humiliation by becoming plunderers. Hitler plundered Europe, and Europe plundered back. The humiliation made a pride that doomed itself.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and climbing 10% every 30 years. And heading for 98% of population by 2100. The 500 years of first-world plundering is heading for a big reverse plunder. Like Rome. With atomic weapons.
Reality check is: liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness] now, or nuclear extinction very soon, say, 30 years. Pay/year from $10 to $10,000,000,000. That is, pay/year from 10,000th to 100,000 times world average of $40/hour, $100,000/yr, for every worker including housewives and students. That is, family pay/year of $200,000 without student. For every family in the world.
Which will mean 100 times faster progress, with 90% of scientists not tied up in inequality-violence, in military-industrial complex, universities, government, hospitals, business, and 90% of potential scientists not too poor to become scientists [innovators, etc]. If we had had equality instead of the ladder, we would have been among the stars by now.
And global average life expectancy would be over 100, maybe over 120 or 150. [Since the legal definition of murder means shortening the life of anyone alive, we are murdering everyone, including ourselves.]
Is liberty, equality, fraternity beginning to look like worth a look?
The ancient Israelites [ideally, anyway] cancelled all debt every 7 years, to prevent inequality growing monstrous. Six years of ratracing, one year of everyone re-equalised. [Handicaps for 'losers' removed.] 99% of people are underpaid, are paid less than the world average, of $40 an hour [2007 dollars, which I better mention, before the US dollar takes a nosedive.]
Globally, we have had 3000 years of inequality growing monstrous. And the violence gets to everyone, richest to poorest. Common sense, anyone? Doing yourself the biggest favour in history, anyone?
The change can be achieved gently in two generations by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. [The private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the goods that money buys, so this is just. A tiny bureaucracy to settle the estates and distribute electronically.]
Or making everyone equal receivers of a 1% per month increase in the money supply. [An even smaller bureaucracy. A computer could do it.]
Justice, equal pay for equal work, means peace, order, democracy, freedom, friendliness, safety, noncorruption, truth, etc - everything good. Inequality, of which we have giga amounts, means warmongering and cannonfoddering, disorder, distress, disinformation, brutality, global disaster, and, soon, nuclear extinction.
Make Daddy proud and choose inequality, as I know you will, and blow yourselves to fook! Pursuit of happiness, pah!
[No, son, equality doesn't mean paying slackers, it means adjusting for the many pays-for-no-work, overpays, in commerce.]
America seems to be *very* hierarchical. I applied for a job with Encyclopedia Britannica [despite the name, American] and the pay *doubled* at every rise in level. Which looks good while you are imagining yourself rising, but of course most cannot rise. Thus loser means an enormous amount in America.
Richard Semler of Semco, Brazil wrote a book Maverick, in which he describes greatly lowering the hierarchy. His company made huge profits at a time when Brazilian profits were very poor.
I have read that mental illness is high in competitive societies, low in cooperative societies.
I think of Hitler, loser. 40% or 60% [I can't remember] of Nazis were primary school teachers, ie 'losers'. The Nazi thing was anti-intellectual, because the intellectuals had collared the winnings. Same thing in China, with the 'cultural revolution', in which the powergrab of the mandarins [the brainier, the winners, and the more aggressive, pushy] was broken up. What happened to liberty, equality and fraternity? The more unequal the 'rewards', the deeper the 'loserness' is, and the deeper the hell, hopelessness and humiliation.
An old Readers Digest article praised Sweden for having learned that: **None enjoy unless all enjoy**. People are too dangerous to annoy. Witness putting the Palestinians in refugee camps for 50 years, stealing their land, giving them no opportunity even to start again from scratch. Poverty, underpay, underpower, is the mother of explosives.
I was surprised to find that most American universities have fewer than a million volumes in the library, while Harvard has 90 million.
Society puts up a ladder, and everyone thoughtlessly eagerly tries to climb the ladder. No one thinks about not climbing the ladder, thinks about making the ladder horizontal, a seat for everyone. Never thinks about whether it is unjust, unliberty, undemocratic, tyrannous to have the ladder. Everyone hanging onto the ladder, struggling to get past others, kicking down at others trying to get up, till the ladder breaks under the weight.
America was based on prevention of wealth concentration. Wealth is power, inequality of wealth is inequality of power, is tyranny-slavery, nondemocracy. 'Liberty and justice for all'. Pay justice. But where are the philosophers of pay justice? Who is asking what precisely, numerically, is pay justice? Our economic systems contain many wideopen legal thefts, pay for no work [overpay], causing work for no pay [underpay] for others. The ladder system was okay as long as there was mobility. [Although mobility is a poor substitute for pay justice.] But now mobility has gridlocked, immobility has hardened.
Inequality has triumphed, and unliberty and unfraternity. Americans don't look globally, but hey, after 200 years of transport technology reducing distance so that a day away has gone from 50 miles to 12,500 miles, it's a global reality. Just look at your shop shelves. And what do we have globally, that is, what do we have in the real picture? Pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of *one billion*. Which means violence, weaponry, terrorism, chaos, misery, torture, genocide, disinformation factor of one billion.
The war between winners and losers, first casualty of war is truth. The dumbing down of America, keeping you ignorant of the world. The more inequality, the more power to steal, and the more money needed to fight all the wars of offence and defence. America $9 trillion in debt.
Where is Britain's empire? Spain's Inca plunder? Wealth concentration means everyone attacks the wealth heap. Everyone in the world is on the ladder. And this time, with 60 times PDC [planet death capability].
Time to move away from plunder, towards cooperation, recognition that people are too dangerous to annoy?
At any time, there are Hitlers gathering the losers in a reverse push against plunder. Unfortunately, the mindset of losers is to revenge the humiliation by becoming plunderers. Hitler plundered Europe, and Europe plundered back. The humiliation made a pride that doomed itself.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and climbing 10% every 30 years. And heading for 98% of population by 2100. The 500 years of first-world plundering is heading for a big reverse plunder. Like Rome. With atomic weapons.
Reality check is: liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness] now, or nuclear extinction very soon, say, 30 years. Pay/year from $10 to $10,000,000,000. That is, pay/year from 10,000th to 100,000 times world average of $40/hour, $100,000/yr, for every worker including housewives and students. That is, family pay/year of $200,000 without student. For every family in the world.
Which will mean 100 times faster progress, with 90% of scientists not tied up in inequality-violence, in military-industrial complex, universities, government, hospitals, business, and 90% of potential scientists not too poor to become scientists [innovators, etc]. If we had had equality instead of the ladder, we would have been among the stars by now.
And global average life expectancy would be over 100, maybe over 120 or 150. [Since the legal definition of murder means shortening the life of anyone alive, we are murdering everyone, including ourselves.]
Is liberty, equality, fraternity beginning to look like worth a look?
The ancient Israelites [ideally, anyway] cancelled all debt every 7 years, to prevent inequality growing monstrous. Six years of ratracing, one year of everyone re-equalised. [Handicaps for 'losers' removed.] 99% of people are underpaid, are paid less than the world average, of $40 an hour [2007 dollars, which I better mention, before the US dollar takes a nosedive.]
Globally, we have had 3000 years of inequality growing monstrous. And the violence gets to everyone, richest to poorest. Common sense, anyone? Doing yourself the biggest favour in history, anyone?
The change can be achieved gently in two generations by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. [The private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the goods that money buys, so this is just. A tiny bureaucracy to settle the estates and distribute electronically.]
Or making everyone equal receivers of a 1% per month increase in the money supply. [An even smaller bureaucracy. A computer could do it.]
Justice, equal pay for equal work, means peace, order, democracy, freedom, friendliness, safety, noncorruption, truth, etc - everything good. Inequality, of which we have giga amounts, means warmongering and cannonfoddering, disorder, distress, disinformation, brutality, global disaster, and, soon, nuclear extinction.
Make Daddy proud and choose inequality, as I know you will, and blow yourselves to fook! Pursuit of happiness, pah!
[No, son, equality doesn't mean paying slackers, it means adjusting for the many pays-for-no-work, overpays, in commerce.]
The cause of all our miseries and danger: the stupefying love of inequality
The amazing thing that the egalitarian discovers is that no one wants equality.
Some people, sometimes, to some degree, want less inequality, but the passion for pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no overpay and no underpay, is very rare.
99% are paid less than the world average, so 99% would be paid more if overpay was reduced, but this generates no enthusiasm, no interest, no support.
Everyone assures the egalitarian that people are too greedy for equality, as if equality would make everyone poorer. The egalitarian is regarded as an opponent of society, an outsider, a dreamer, a danger. Apparently people identify with wealth. The fact that they don't have the wealth doesn't seem to bother them. They are defensive towards the rich. Apparently they think that an attack on wealth is an attack on them, as though they thought: If wealth is taken away, we will be poor. The notions of overpay and underpay are non-existent. The superrich are not quite liked, but they are far from being thought of as just plain thieves, with money that belongs to others. Yet pay per workhour now goes up to 100,000 times world average, and down to 10,000th of average. And still there is no general idea of overpay and underpay.
The people I am talking about are the people in the middle, the less underpaid. The more underpaid people are, the stronger their feelings for a better share can be. And yet even most of the severely underpaid are not certain that they deserve more, that they have been robbed.
Reading history of efforts to reduce inequality, one is struck by the great weakness of the efforts. In times of war, the attitude is: If people are going to be asked to risk their lives, the least the rich can do is give some money. No one thinks of making the rich do the most they can do. Here people are risking their lives, giving their lives, and the extent of their will against the rich is to expect them to do the least they can do. Their valuation of the rich is far greater than their valuation of themselves, and they see nothing odd in this.
People seem to participate in the idea that wealth proves the wealthy are better and more deserving than themselves. Is this just ignorance of the ways that money is stolen [transferred from earners to non-earners of it] legally? Even when ways of legal theft are pointed out to people, the people do not become clear that the wealthy have money that belongs to the people.
People build a city, and land values go up, and landowners get the added value of the city, produced by others' labour. A person can buy land before the city is built, wait till the city is built, and be rich for no work. The rich are buying up wherever infrastraucture growith is greatest and getting a freebie in proportion to their fortune. Henry George pointed this out, and indeed groups sprang up in support of the correction of this theft. But then they faded away.
Twice in the 20th century, in America, the rich have been able to quell pushes to equality by raising the 'spectre' of communism. And yet the concept people had of communism was egalitarian. In fact egalitarian communism had been hijacked by thugs, and was totalitarian, and the idealistic pro-worker communists agitating among workers for greater equality were dupes of the thugs who had stolen the communist egalitarian dream, but this does not come into the matter here. The rich were easily able to make people fear and loathe communism, although communists were agitating on behalf of the workers. It was easy to make people feel that communism would destroy the nation, and to make the people close ranks with the rich against the enemy, the foreigners. People have always inclined to fear outsiders far more than their 'upsiders'. When the people were gathering their wits against the rich, the rich were able, in the two Red scares, to shout: Look, the bogeyman! and slip away.
The realism of Anatole France's You think you die for your country, you die for some industrialists, has never penetrated the general mind. The US General, Smedley Butler, said that the only way to stop war is to send the rich to war, but this has never found support among the people, although the people have made some grumblings about the rich avoiding military service, and the people approve of politicians who have been to war. D H Lawrence said the people are the eternal dupe. Is it just ignorance, falling easily for tricks?
It seems to be inconceivable to people that an hour's work by a rich man is the same amount of work as an hour's work by a poor person, deserving the same compensation. There seems to be a circular argument: The rich man deserves more because he is better, is more productive. How do we know he is better? Because he is paid more.
And there is the assumption that if something is legal, it is just. This ignores the obvious fact that the rich have written the laws.
Money is the joker good. It is good for just about everything. So the theft of it is the theft of just about everything, including democracy and social status. So inequality causes violence: war, crime and weaponry. Violence and inequality have been growing for 3000 years. Violence grows, as both sides try to prevail, and throw ever bigger weaponry at each other. Money is power, power to make money, power to warmonger and to cannonfodder the people. The League of Nations was founded to try to stop arms manufacturers fomenting wars. As Ambrose Bierce put it: An arms dealer sells you rifles to protect yourself against someone to whom he has sold cannon. Jefferson, another realist, said: Merchants have no country. And he talked of the preying by the rich on the poor.
America was founded by people who had fled tyrannies. And it is surely obvious that money is power and so overpay is tyranny. The warning that laws can stop the poor but not the rich goes back to the Greeks. And yet the resistance to overpay, to limitless, unjust concentrations of wealth is not yet strong, is still very weak. During the 19th century in America, the idea that freedom depended on prevention of wealth concentration was dominant, but ineffective.
All through history, there have been cries for liberty, and obviously this is against tyranny, and obviously tyranny cannot exist without unjust concentration of wealth, and yet the identificaton of tyranny and extreme wealth is very weak.
People who grumble about being wageslaves still think they are in a democracy. At the very least, if the superrich were to be tolerated, they should have been forbidden to go anywhere near the government. But this idea has never been suggested. Instead, the rich are all over the government, and people just look at things that are happening and maybe say they aren't right.
Even if the rich had earned the money they have [which they haven't, couldn't possibly], there should have been a strong will to prevent wealth, which is tyranny.
Part of the problem is that everyone is greedy, everyone wants to be rich. No one wants to be restricted to taking out no more than they put in. Clearly it doesn't occur to people that freedom to be limitlessly rich, to take out more than you put in, without limit, opens the door to getting out less than you put in, without limit. Freedom for self to be limitlessly rich is freedom for others to be limitlessly rich.
All the money equals all the owrk equals all the workproducts. So if someone gets out more money than they put in work, others have to get out less money [workproducts]. And violence is proportional to the overpay-underpay. People still see prevention of overwealth as restriction of freedom, although 99% are underpaid. The net effect of everyone having free grabs on the social pool of wealth is that 99% are underpaid, 90% are paid between 100th and 10,000th of world-average pay per hour.
People really believe that riches come out of thin air, or out of the productivity of the rich, although the bulk of the money comes over the counter from people's pockets. People really believe that rich people make money, create wealth, although wealth is created only by mother nature and by work. And they think that the rich provide jobs, and investment capital. People feel dependent on the rich. They think they need the rich. The only thing that provides jobs is demand for goods and the ability to pay for them, nature's bounty and human work.
And the only thing that provides capital is savings, excess of income over outgoes. There is no need for savings to be concentrated with the rich. Savings can be with the people who earned them.
People think that if the rich go, the wealth goes. Back into thin air. People believe more in concentration of wealth than in pay justice. Wealth cannot disappear. Wealth exists by nature's bounty and people's work. Pay justice would not reduce wealth, it would spread it. Justly. Pay justice would undo theft. The rich would come down to just pay, and the underpaid would come up to just pay. And the vast costs of violence would disappear. A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day. Warmongering and cannonfoddering. War yields high profits because the products are being destroyed. Along with many people.
Even with progressive taxation, there still seems to be a feeling that this is stealing from the rich. In war-necessity, it is okay to steal from the rich, but not at other times. The people have found the will to take something from the rich in time of war, and after war this will has weakened. And all the time, the wars are caused by the power of the rich, in their pursuit of profits or in their wars with other rich people trying to steal from each other. Concentrations of wealth attract thieves. And the rich raid the public treasury to fight their wars. And raid the populace for cannonfodder. And rake vast profits from the war. And are hailed as great patriots for mobilising the war effort.
People prefer wealth to be visible. They prefer wealth amassed than in their own pockets. One is reminded of the golden calf. People reveled in it. And could not see their now empty pockets. The Israelites had got the jewellery and gold of the Egyptians, and had given them up to make the golden calf, and they felt richer with the golden calf. With emptier pockets. No wonder Moses was so frustrated with them. [I'm not saying the story is true or false, just an illustration.]
Even when people go for taking from the rich, they let the money go to the government, and are not vigilant to see that the government gives it all to them. And the government is in the hands of the rich.
It is obvious that if a person was alone in the world, he could amass nothing more than by nature's bounty and his own work. In society, nature's bounty belongs equally to all living humans, as nature's bounty does to all living animals. There is no reason that nature's bounty should belong to anyone more than another. In society, there is also the efficiency of job specialisation, but this factor, whatever it is, belongs equally to all who participate in the job specialisation. So there is nothing in society that justifies anyone having more than arises from his equal share of nature's bounty, his own work, and the efficiency of job specialisation factor.
As it is, all of nature's bounty goes to landowners, and in proportion to their holdings. Although everyone has birthright to equal share of nature's bounty, landowners get it all, and as unequally as their holdings. No one notices this. Most people don't suffer from greed, they suffer from the opposite vice, uncontrollable senseless dangerous selfharming impulse to let others have wealth and power.
It is extraordinary that the community allows a landowner to take all of nature's bounty on his property, when that bounty may be billions of dollars of oil or diamonds. Even if the land is nationalised, the people allow the government to have it all. People have no notion of justice for themselves. And yet the oil has no value except by the community's demand for it. That is, the community makes the oil valuable. People seem to have no self-esteem: It can't belong to me.
And an investment at 10% doubles every seven years and multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. That is a huge sucking straw at national and global wealth, a straw which grows with every suck. The size of the straw is proportional to the size of the fortune. Basically, the rich are sitting sucking the wealth. 1% get 98% of world income. There is enough income for every working person, including housewives and students, to have US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. That is, every working person, including housewives and students, is producing US$100,000 worth of wealth by a fulltime year's work. And 99% are underpaid, are stolen from, and 90% get between 100th and 10,000th of the wealth they make, by their own work. And the violence is proportional.
Interest or usury used to be regarded as bad. Interest is based on profits, and there is nothing to stop profits being in excess of work, being 'pure profit'. Somehow people don't have the power to realise this reality, although it is mad as mad.
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, and we have pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of one billion. There is the unhappiness of not having one's earnings, and one's fair share of political power, and there is the unhappiness of the violence, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. We have had inequality growing, and war, crime and weaponry growing, for 3000 years, since commerce began.
People let their earnings slip away, and then get mad when they are really poor and go to a lot of trouble and danger getting it back.
Everyone loves profit when they are making it. People don't realise that opening that gate to getting something for nothing is not egalitarian: the gate is as large as the fortune, very unequal. Money makes money sounds great, and so everyone supports it, not realising that the net effect, since the money made by money has to come from others, is super-super-extreme inequality and violence. Little money makes little money for nothing, big money makes big money for nothing. Underpay for 99% and super-super-underpay for 90%. And violence for everyone. And money is power, so it also means inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, undemocracy, unfreedom, state terrorism.
The richest are murdering millions at will, quite above the law. And people can see this as evil only in leaders of other countries. Russians in the 1970s were even nostalgic for the Stalin era. Wealthpower is an umbrella for people, even though that wealthpower preys on them too. The more other nations have wealthpower concentrated, the more they want their wealthpower concentrated, which is understandable. But it is the wealthpower that is causing the wars. And the wealthpower concentration makes the nation weak, underproductive. Inequality violence destroys the nation from inside and outside. Governments grow fat and stupid from all the money they get to try to solve the problems caused by the inequality, and the bigger the government, the smaller the production. And the rich feed on the government.
Even the 'radical' measures of the Huey Long movement were far from justice. No fortune was to be more than 100 times the average. But most people are below the average, most fortunes go well below average. And how is anyone supposed to truly earn, by own work, 100 times the average? We seem to have quite lost sight of equal pay for equal work. The average person works over 50 hours a week, no one can work more than 100 hours a week longterm, and the working rich probably work less than 100 hours a week, more like 70 hours a week. Give people the same tools, materials, time, data, etc, and how different will the production be?
There is no magic in accumulation of wealth with leaders of companies. The merchant buys cheap and sells dear, as the Greeks said. It is the easiest thing in the world to make prices 10% above costs, including cost of leaders' work. All that surplus funnels from many transactions onto the table of the leaders. A company is a funnel. Sell millions of 4c and 8c items for 5c and 10c, and you get Woolworth millions. Who can tell the exact cost of anything? How can the customer tell that he is overpaying 10%?
If demand is high relative to supply, prices can be well above costs. In new technology, there is built-in scarcity. We won't know how much computers actually cost until competition finishes forcing the price down. It takes only a 36% annual average personal profit rate to turn Bill Gates's $5,000,000 start-up money into $50 billion in 30 years. And he wasn't the only Microsoft multi-millionaire. New technology simply taxes people for their demand. Demand is not work by Bill Gates.
And the first in the field gets a head start, and so builds up financial muscle to lean on competitors, preserving the monopoly longer. And patents are monopolies. The ones who profit by the situation aren't complaining, and the ones who actually pay for this free money hardly know they are robbed, and are greatly uninterested in the fact. The poor man pays for all, Ambrose Bierce. Inequality grows, and violence, till we all fall down.
The immaturity of believing in this hocuspocus is beyond belief.
The two things in a trade can hardly be of equal workvalue. What is invisible in one trade is clear in the real stories of trading up from a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. So there is a tiny drop of inequality in every trade, which, with trillions of trades, grows an ocean of inequality. A very stormy ocean, in which all drown.
The state: that fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else, Frederic Bastiat.
One can imagine a small community in which, if someone managed by some means to amass a fortune significantly larger than others, the leader or the group of leaders would go to that person and say: Look, I don't know how it happened, but there is no way you could have earned that much more than everyone else, you'll have to give it up, spread it around everyone.
A sane community would have no trouble seeing that person as having too much, as having somehow got more than his rightful wealth. The moral force of that clear idea in the community would be overwhelming. The person would have no choice but to agree. The moral force of that idea in the community would incline his own attitude towards agreement, if he was inclined to disagree. It is obvious the person hasn't worked significantly harder than anyone else. There would be this clear idea in the community even if they didn't know how the accumulation happened. If they had the explanation, say, that the overpay came from being a merchant, and making a little on a lot of transactions, their opinion would only be stronger.
In ancient Israel, the idea was to cancel all debt every seven years. Clearly the community saw the obvious.
Somehow this sanity has been lost in our communities. Even with the explanations.
We pay people for their natural gifts. Yet these are no work of the person, but of nature. We should pay Pablo Casals for every bit of practice he did, but not for having a gift. By paying for gifts, not work, we have to work for no pay. We see nothing wrong in paying Paul McCartney half a billion for 'his' lovely songs. How many people can we pay for no work before running out of money? We allow superfortune to Bill Gates for his genius. But who assessed his genius? We merely assume it from 'his' money. And who provided the genius? Not Bill Gates.
The person being paid $10 an hour is giving, or allowing to be taken from him or her, $30 an hour. Each person is producing $40 worth of workproducts an hour. It has to be so. All the annual world income divided by all the annual workhours has to be the wealth production of each hour. Annual income $300 trillion, 3 billion workers, is $100,000 a year, or $40 an hour.
But the tendency of most people is to oppose pay justice, to support the status quo. I suspect they think pursuit of justice is naughty. Is there a psychological hangover from the family dynamic, the rich are Daddy, and we want to please Daddy, and the child who is against Daddy is way out of line? [Think Sugar Daddy, Daddy Warbucks.]
We allow higher pay per hour for having studied. But there is no work in having studied. [There is work in studying, and so that should be paid for by the whole community, which benefits, not parents or scholarships or loans.] And we never enquire who pays for this unjust largesse of paying for the no-work of having studied. And we go on overpaying for health services, lawyers, government, etc.
And that theory explains why we trust 'Daddy' with the money. The trouble is, it isn't Daddy, it is some fellow who crawled in the window. In USA, Britain, and most other countries, we have given private citizens the license to print money. The American Federal Reserve Bank is privately owned. The government has to *borrow* money from this bank.
This is tear-your-hair-out stupidity.
Even when people notice, the word doesn't spread. Apparently, most adults aren't even adolescent. They are innocents. It looks as though we should educate our children from a young age in the family finances.
Some people, sometimes, to some degree, want less inequality, but the passion for pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no overpay and no underpay, is very rare.
99% are paid less than the world average, so 99% would be paid more if overpay was reduced, but this generates no enthusiasm, no interest, no support.
Everyone assures the egalitarian that people are too greedy for equality, as if equality would make everyone poorer. The egalitarian is regarded as an opponent of society, an outsider, a dreamer, a danger. Apparently people identify with wealth. The fact that they don't have the wealth doesn't seem to bother them. They are defensive towards the rich. Apparently they think that an attack on wealth is an attack on them, as though they thought: If wealth is taken away, we will be poor. The notions of overpay and underpay are non-existent. The superrich are not quite liked, but they are far from being thought of as just plain thieves, with money that belongs to others. Yet pay per workhour now goes up to 100,000 times world average, and down to 10,000th of average. And still there is no general idea of overpay and underpay.
The people I am talking about are the people in the middle, the less underpaid. The more underpaid people are, the stronger their feelings for a better share can be. And yet even most of the severely underpaid are not certain that they deserve more, that they have been robbed.
Reading history of efforts to reduce inequality, one is struck by the great weakness of the efforts. In times of war, the attitude is: If people are going to be asked to risk their lives, the least the rich can do is give some money. No one thinks of making the rich do the most they can do. Here people are risking their lives, giving their lives, and the extent of their will against the rich is to expect them to do the least they can do. Their valuation of the rich is far greater than their valuation of themselves, and they see nothing odd in this.
People seem to participate in the idea that wealth proves the wealthy are better and more deserving than themselves. Is this just ignorance of the ways that money is stolen [transferred from earners to non-earners of it] legally? Even when ways of legal theft are pointed out to people, the people do not become clear that the wealthy have money that belongs to the people.
People build a city, and land values go up, and landowners get the added value of the city, produced by others' labour. A person can buy land before the city is built, wait till the city is built, and be rich for no work. The rich are buying up wherever infrastraucture growith is greatest and getting a freebie in proportion to their fortune. Henry George pointed this out, and indeed groups sprang up in support of the correction of this theft. But then they faded away.
Twice in the 20th century, in America, the rich have been able to quell pushes to equality by raising the 'spectre' of communism. And yet the concept people had of communism was egalitarian. In fact egalitarian communism had been hijacked by thugs, and was totalitarian, and the idealistic pro-worker communists agitating among workers for greater equality were dupes of the thugs who had stolen the communist egalitarian dream, but this does not come into the matter here. The rich were easily able to make people fear and loathe communism, although communists were agitating on behalf of the workers. It was easy to make people feel that communism would destroy the nation, and to make the people close ranks with the rich against the enemy, the foreigners. People have always inclined to fear outsiders far more than their 'upsiders'. When the people were gathering their wits against the rich, the rich were able, in the two Red scares, to shout: Look, the bogeyman! and slip away.
The realism of Anatole France's You think you die for your country, you die for some industrialists, has never penetrated the general mind. The US General, Smedley Butler, said that the only way to stop war is to send the rich to war, but this has never found support among the people, although the people have made some grumblings about the rich avoiding military service, and the people approve of politicians who have been to war. D H Lawrence said the people are the eternal dupe. Is it just ignorance, falling easily for tricks?
It seems to be inconceivable to people that an hour's work by a rich man is the same amount of work as an hour's work by a poor person, deserving the same compensation. There seems to be a circular argument: The rich man deserves more because he is better, is more productive. How do we know he is better? Because he is paid more.
And there is the assumption that if something is legal, it is just. This ignores the obvious fact that the rich have written the laws.
Money is the joker good. It is good for just about everything. So the theft of it is the theft of just about everything, including democracy and social status. So inequality causes violence: war, crime and weaponry. Violence and inequality have been growing for 3000 years. Violence grows, as both sides try to prevail, and throw ever bigger weaponry at each other. Money is power, power to make money, power to warmonger and to cannonfodder the people. The League of Nations was founded to try to stop arms manufacturers fomenting wars. As Ambrose Bierce put it: An arms dealer sells you rifles to protect yourself against someone to whom he has sold cannon. Jefferson, another realist, said: Merchants have no country. And he talked of the preying by the rich on the poor.
America was founded by people who had fled tyrannies. And it is surely obvious that money is power and so overpay is tyranny. The warning that laws can stop the poor but not the rich goes back to the Greeks. And yet the resistance to overpay, to limitless, unjust concentrations of wealth is not yet strong, is still very weak. During the 19th century in America, the idea that freedom depended on prevention of wealth concentration was dominant, but ineffective.
All through history, there have been cries for liberty, and obviously this is against tyranny, and obviously tyranny cannot exist without unjust concentration of wealth, and yet the identificaton of tyranny and extreme wealth is very weak.
People who grumble about being wageslaves still think they are in a democracy. At the very least, if the superrich were to be tolerated, they should have been forbidden to go anywhere near the government. But this idea has never been suggested. Instead, the rich are all over the government, and people just look at things that are happening and maybe say they aren't right.
Even if the rich had earned the money they have [which they haven't, couldn't possibly], there should have been a strong will to prevent wealth, which is tyranny.
Part of the problem is that everyone is greedy, everyone wants to be rich. No one wants to be restricted to taking out no more than they put in. Clearly it doesn't occur to people that freedom to be limitlessly rich, to take out more than you put in, without limit, opens the door to getting out less than you put in, without limit. Freedom for self to be limitlessly rich is freedom for others to be limitlessly rich.
All the money equals all the owrk equals all the workproducts. So if someone gets out more money than they put in work, others have to get out less money [workproducts]. And violence is proportional to the overpay-underpay. People still see prevention of overwealth as restriction of freedom, although 99% are underpaid. The net effect of everyone having free grabs on the social pool of wealth is that 99% are underpaid, 90% are paid between 100th and 10,000th of world-average pay per hour.
People really believe that riches come out of thin air, or out of the productivity of the rich, although the bulk of the money comes over the counter from people's pockets. People really believe that rich people make money, create wealth, although wealth is created only by mother nature and by work. And they think that the rich provide jobs, and investment capital. People feel dependent on the rich. They think they need the rich. The only thing that provides jobs is demand for goods and the ability to pay for them, nature's bounty and human work.
And the only thing that provides capital is savings, excess of income over outgoes. There is no need for savings to be concentrated with the rich. Savings can be with the people who earned them.
People think that if the rich go, the wealth goes. Back into thin air. People believe more in concentration of wealth than in pay justice. Wealth cannot disappear. Wealth exists by nature's bounty and people's work. Pay justice would not reduce wealth, it would spread it. Justly. Pay justice would undo theft. The rich would come down to just pay, and the underpaid would come up to just pay. And the vast costs of violence would disappear. A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day. Warmongering and cannonfoddering. War yields high profits because the products are being destroyed. Along with many people.
Even with progressive taxation, there still seems to be a feeling that this is stealing from the rich. In war-necessity, it is okay to steal from the rich, but not at other times. The people have found the will to take something from the rich in time of war, and after war this will has weakened. And all the time, the wars are caused by the power of the rich, in their pursuit of profits or in their wars with other rich people trying to steal from each other. Concentrations of wealth attract thieves. And the rich raid the public treasury to fight their wars. And raid the populace for cannonfodder. And rake vast profits from the war. And are hailed as great patriots for mobilising the war effort.
People prefer wealth to be visible. They prefer wealth amassed than in their own pockets. One is reminded of the golden calf. People reveled in it. And could not see their now empty pockets. The Israelites had got the jewellery and gold of the Egyptians, and had given them up to make the golden calf, and they felt richer with the golden calf. With emptier pockets. No wonder Moses was so frustrated with them. [I'm not saying the story is true or false, just an illustration.]
Even when people go for taking from the rich, they let the money go to the government, and are not vigilant to see that the government gives it all to them. And the government is in the hands of the rich.
It is obvious that if a person was alone in the world, he could amass nothing more than by nature's bounty and his own work. In society, nature's bounty belongs equally to all living humans, as nature's bounty does to all living animals. There is no reason that nature's bounty should belong to anyone more than another. In society, there is also the efficiency of job specialisation, but this factor, whatever it is, belongs equally to all who participate in the job specialisation. So there is nothing in society that justifies anyone having more than arises from his equal share of nature's bounty, his own work, and the efficiency of job specialisation factor.
As it is, all of nature's bounty goes to landowners, and in proportion to their holdings. Although everyone has birthright to equal share of nature's bounty, landowners get it all, and as unequally as their holdings. No one notices this. Most people don't suffer from greed, they suffer from the opposite vice, uncontrollable senseless dangerous selfharming impulse to let others have wealth and power.
It is extraordinary that the community allows a landowner to take all of nature's bounty on his property, when that bounty may be billions of dollars of oil or diamonds. Even if the land is nationalised, the people allow the government to have it all. People have no notion of justice for themselves. And yet the oil has no value except by the community's demand for it. That is, the community makes the oil valuable. People seem to have no self-esteem: It can't belong to me.
And an investment at 10% doubles every seven years and multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. That is a huge sucking straw at national and global wealth, a straw which grows with every suck. The size of the straw is proportional to the size of the fortune. Basically, the rich are sitting sucking the wealth. 1% get 98% of world income. There is enough income for every working person, including housewives and students, to have US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. That is, every working person, including housewives and students, is producing US$100,000 worth of wealth by a fulltime year's work. And 99% are underpaid, are stolen from, and 90% get between 100th and 10,000th of the wealth they make, by their own work. And the violence is proportional.
Interest or usury used to be regarded as bad. Interest is based on profits, and there is nothing to stop profits being in excess of work, being 'pure profit'. Somehow people don't have the power to realise this reality, although it is mad as mad.
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, and we have pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of one billion. There is the unhappiness of not having one's earnings, and one's fair share of political power, and there is the unhappiness of the violence, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. We have had inequality growing, and war, crime and weaponry growing, for 3000 years, since commerce began.
People let their earnings slip away, and then get mad when they are really poor and go to a lot of trouble and danger getting it back.
Everyone loves profit when they are making it. People don't realise that opening that gate to getting something for nothing is not egalitarian: the gate is as large as the fortune, very unequal. Money makes money sounds great, and so everyone supports it, not realising that the net effect, since the money made by money has to come from others, is super-super-extreme inequality and violence. Little money makes little money for nothing, big money makes big money for nothing. Underpay for 99% and super-super-underpay for 90%. And violence for everyone. And money is power, so it also means inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, undemocracy, unfreedom, state terrorism.
The richest are murdering millions at will, quite above the law. And people can see this as evil only in leaders of other countries. Russians in the 1970s were even nostalgic for the Stalin era. Wealthpower is an umbrella for people, even though that wealthpower preys on them too. The more other nations have wealthpower concentrated, the more they want their wealthpower concentrated, which is understandable. But it is the wealthpower that is causing the wars. And the wealthpower concentration makes the nation weak, underproductive. Inequality violence destroys the nation from inside and outside. Governments grow fat and stupid from all the money they get to try to solve the problems caused by the inequality, and the bigger the government, the smaller the production. And the rich feed on the government.
Even the 'radical' measures of the Huey Long movement were far from justice. No fortune was to be more than 100 times the average. But most people are below the average, most fortunes go well below average. And how is anyone supposed to truly earn, by own work, 100 times the average? We seem to have quite lost sight of equal pay for equal work. The average person works over 50 hours a week, no one can work more than 100 hours a week longterm, and the working rich probably work less than 100 hours a week, more like 70 hours a week. Give people the same tools, materials, time, data, etc, and how different will the production be?
There is no magic in accumulation of wealth with leaders of companies. The merchant buys cheap and sells dear, as the Greeks said. It is the easiest thing in the world to make prices 10% above costs, including cost of leaders' work. All that surplus funnels from many transactions onto the table of the leaders. A company is a funnel. Sell millions of 4c and 8c items for 5c and 10c, and you get Woolworth millions. Who can tell the exact cost of anything? How can the customer tell that he is overpaying 10%?
If demand is high relative to supply, prices can be well above costs. In new technology, there is built-in scarcity. We won't know how much computers actually cost until competition finishes forcing the price down. It takes only a 36% annual average personal profit rate to turn Bill Gates's $5,000,000 start-up money into $50 billion in 30 years. And he wasn't the only Microsoft multi-millionaire. New technology simply taxes people for their demand. Demand is not work by Bill Gates.
And the first in the field gets a head start, and so builds up financial muscle to lean on competitors, preserving the monopoly longer. And patents are monopolies. The ones who profit by the situation aren't complaining, and the ones who actually pay for this free money hardly know they are robbed, and are greatly uninterested in the fact. The poor man pays for all, Ambrose Bierce. Inequality grows, and violence, till we all fall down.
The immaturity of believing in this hocuspocus is beyond belief.
The two things in a trade can hardly be of equal workvalue. What is invisible in one trade is clear in the real stories of trading up from a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. So there is a tiny drop of inequality in every trade, which, with trillions of trades, grows an ocean of inequality. A very stormy ocean, in which all drown.
The state: that fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else, Frederic Bastiat.
One can imagine a small community in which, if someone managed by some means to amass a fortune significantly larger than others, the leader or the group of leaders would go to that person and say: Look, I don't know how it happened, but there is no way you could have earned that much more than everyone else, you'll have to give it up, spread it around everyone.
A sane community would have no trouble seeing that person as having too much, as having somehow got more than his rightful wealth. The moral force of that clear idea in the community would be overwhelming. The person would have no choice but to agree. The moral force of that idea in the community would incline his own attitude towards agreement, if he was inclined to disagree. It is obvious the person hasn't worked significantly harder than anyone else. There would be this clear idea in the community even if they didn't know how the accumulation happened. If they had the explanation, say, that the overpay came from being a merchant, and making a little on a lot of transactions, their opinion would only be stronger.
In ancient Israel, the idea was to cancel all debt every seven years. Clearly the community saw the obvious.
Somehow this sanity has been lost in our communities. Even with the explanations.
We pay people for their natural gifts. Yet these are no work of the person, but of nature. We should pay Pablo Casals for every bit of practice he did, but not for having a gift. By paying for gifts, not work, we have to work for no pay. We see nothing wrong in paying Paul McCartney half a billion for 'his' lovely songs. How many people can we pay for no work before running out of money? We allow superfortune to Bill Gates for his genius. But who assessed his genius? We merely assume it from 'his' money. And who provided the genius? Not Bill Gates.
The person being paid $10 an hour is giving, or allowing to be taken from him or her, $30 an hour. Each person is producing $40 worth of workproducts an hour. It has to be so. All the annual world income divided by all the annual workhours has to be the wealth production of each hour. Annual income $300 trillion, 3 billion workers, is $100,000 a year, or $40 an hour.
But the tendency of most people is to oppose pay justice, to support the status quo. I suspect they think pursuit of justice is naughty. Is there a psychological hangover from the family dynamic, the rich are Daddy, and we want to please Daddy, and the child who is against Daddy is way out of line? [Think Sugar Daddy, Daddy Warbucks.]
We allow higher pay per hour for having studied. But there is no work in having studied. [There is work in studying, and so that should be paid for by the whole community, which benefits, not parents or scholarships or loans.] And we never enquire who pays for this unjust largesse of paying for the no-work of having studied. And we go on overpaying for health services, lawyers, government, etc.
And that theory explains why we trust 'Daddy' with the money. The trouble is, it isn't Daddy, it is some fellow who crawled in the window. In USA, Britain, and most other countries, we have given private citizens the license to print money. The American Federal Reserve Bank is privately owned. The government has to *borrow* money from this bank.
This is tear-your-hair-out stupidity.
Even when people notice, the word doesn't spread. Apparently, most adults aren't even adolescent. They are innocents. It looks as though we should educate our children from a young age in the family finances.
Re Chomsky re South America
Re Chomsky talking about the growing independence of South America
Perspective is truth, unperspective isn't.
To put Chomsky in the bigger perspective, the third world is at 51% of world wealth now and climbing 10% every 30 years, and no doubt with acceleration. That's like 98% by 2100. [Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258.]
Empires plunder and then get plundered. Every time. Steal a heap, meet the neighbours. If I steal the neighbours' property, they will come around. I can keep them off with all the guns I bought with what I stole, for a while, but I'm busy at every window. What I steal is limited, but the energy of the neighbours goes on and on till I'm gone. Infinite attack beats finite plunder every time. The first world stole the world for 500 years. American superwealth steals from American citizens to pay defense costs, so the plunderers are attacked from within the house too. Lesson of history.
Plundering is a mug's game. Eg, Hitler. Spain stole Inca gold. Where is the Spanish empire of the 17th C? The Dutch of the 18th? Ditto British empire of the 19th C. Ditto America, 20th C. And ditto Chinese empire of the 21st century. Justice is a virtue because it delivers happiness.
99% of people are decent enough, but they let a few steal the world, and warmonger and cannonfodder their way to extinction. Selfearned money is good, and love of selfearned money is fine. Otherearned money comes with an angry person attached, is the root of all unnecessary social evils, and is fatal. The robbed can only throw grains of sand, but sand erodes rocks. The robbers get soft, and the robbed get busy. Injury energises. People are too dangerous to annoy. The sense of equality is stronger than plunder. As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
The whites in South Africa, the thieves of Russia, got a century of grief and selfbrutalisation. Inequality grows and then collapses. We have pay/yr from $10 to $10 billion. Pay justice is $100,000 /yr for every working person, including housewives and students. World income is $300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion working people. 99% are underpaid. Pay injustice means superpoverty, means emptying the market.
With pay justice, we would have 100 times faster progress, because now 90% of scientists are tied up in pay inequality, in the military-industrial complex etc, and 90% of potential scientists are too poor to become scientists [and inventors, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, innovators, etc]. Allow all the blood to go to the head, and the whole body dies. Sicily conquered America. Underpay is constantly attacking overpay. Overpay is hell. The only reason anyone thinks overpay is good is lack of perspective. Hitler stole Europe, Europe hit back. Duh. Ceausescu stole Rumania, Rumania hit back. Overpay is overpower to rake money, but it falls to underpower. Marie Antoinette.
No one is more than about 30% more productive than the average person. Set 100 people to create wealth by work, with equal tools, materials, data, time, etc, and no one will produce more than about 30% more than the average. We allow pay for many things that are not work, which equals theft, equals violence, evergrowing.
Awake, aware selfinterest will energetically act to avoid injuring others. Overpay is pollution of your own nest/environment. Don't be moral, or altruistic, educate your selfinterest. Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to earn that money. Everyone has done the work to make the goods that money buys. 1% get 98% of world income and do less than 1% of the work. The golden rule is the real thing: don't hit people, they hit back! Duh.
Be afraid, be very afraid of stealing, of taking out more than you put in. Money is good for everything, so theft of money is theft of everything. China is now gungho for limitless overpay. If it knew, it is consequently already falling.
By allowing a little overpay for yourself, you allow limitless overpay for others.
Money doesn't trickle down like healing water, it gushes up like burning fire. Make everyone equal heirs of large deceased fortunes and thus water your garden, the world.
Attack your faith in just going for limitlessly more with the question: Dude, where's my happiness?!
Perspective is truth, unperspective isn't.
To put Chomsky in the bigger perspective, the third world is at 51% of world wealth now and climbing 10% every 30 years, and no doubt with acceleration. That's like 98% by 2100. [Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258.]
Empires plunder and then get plundered. Every time. Steal a heap, meet the neighbours. If I steal the neighbours' property, they will come around. I can keep them off with all the guns I bought with what I stole, for a while, but I'm busy at every window. What I steal is limited, but the energy of the neighbours goes on and on till I'm gone. Infinite attack beats finite plunder every time. The first world stole the world for 500 years. American superwealth steals from American citizens to pay defense costs, so the plunderers are attacked from within the house too. Lesson of history.
Plundering is a mug's game. Eg, Hitler. Spain stole Inca gold. Where is the Spanish empire of the 17th C? The Dutch of the 18th? Ditto British empire of the 19th C. Ditto America, 20th C. And ditto Chinese empire of the 21st century. Justice is a virtue because it delivers happiness.
99% of people are decent enough, but they let a few steal the world, and warmonger and cannonfodder their way to extinction. Selfearned money is good, and love of selfearned money is fine. Otherearned money comes with an angry person attached, is the root of all unnecessary social evils, and is fatal. The robbed can only throw grains of sand, but sand erodes rocks. The robbers get soft, and the robbed get busy. Injury energises. People are too dangerous to annoy. The sense of equality is stronger than plunder. As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
The whites in South Africa, the thieves of Russia, got a century of grief and selfbrutalisation. Inequality grows and then collapses. We have pay/yr from $10 to $10 billion. Pay justice is $100,000 /yr for every working person, including housewives and students. World income is $300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion working people. 99% are underpaid. Pay injustice means superpoverty, means emptying the market.
With pay justice, we would have 100 times faster progress, because now 90% of scientists are tied up in pay inequality, in the military-industrial complex etc, and 90% of potential scientists are too poor to become scientists [and inventors, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, innovators, etc]. Allow all the blood to go to the head, and the whole body dies. Sicily conquered America. Underpay is constantly attacking overpay. Overpay is hell. The only reason anyone thinks overpay is good is lack of perspective. Hitler stole Europe, Europe hit back. Duh. Ceausescu stole Rumania, Rumania hit back. Overpay is overpower to rake money, but it falls to underpower. Marie Antoinette.
No one is more than about 30% more productive than the average person. Set 100 people to create wealth by work, with equal tools, materials, data, time, etc, and no one will produce more than about 30% more than the average. We allow pay for many things that are not work, which equals theft, equals violence, evergrowing.
Awake, aware selfinterest will energetically act to avoid injuring others. Overpay is pollution of your own nest/environment. Don't be moral, or altruistic, educate your selfinterest. Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to earn that money. Everyone has done the work to make the goods that money buys. 1% get 98% of world income and do less than 1% of the work. The golden rule is the real thing: don't hit people, they hit back! Duh.
Be afraid, be very afraid of stealing, of taking out more than you put in. Money is good for everything, so theft of money is theft of everything. China is now gungho for limitless overpay. If it knew, it is consequently already falling.
By allowing a little overpay for yourself, you allow limitless overpay for others.
Money doesn't trickle down like healing water, it gushes up like burning fire. Make everyone equal heirs of large deceased fortunes and thus water your garden, the world.
Attack your faith in just going for limitlessly more with the question: Dude, where's my happiness?!
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