100 times happier, part 4

How good is wealth, really?
Everyone wants a billion dollars. Everyone thinks it would be great to own a 400-foot yacht. But what can you actually do with a 400-foot yacht? You can feel good about owning it. You can stand, sit, walk on it. Drink, eat, talk on it.
What can you do with wealth? A lot of wealthy people apparently know that they can do nothing with it, because they spend most of their time playing the game of making more of it.
Is more money always better? Always proportionately better? Is there a point where more money starts being bad and getting worse?
Fairpay, which is US$75,000 per family working average hard, buys all needs, and millions of satisfactions, all the big ones and getting down into very small ones. The only pleasures left for more money to buy are the very very small ones.
With money, you can buy lots of clothes. But how hard do those clothes in your closet work to increase your happiness, your pleasure, your fun? You can feel that you are a superior, successful person because you own them. That is about it. But people can feel good about themselves many other ways.
You can have a more expensive car, but it can only transport you with slightly more pleasure than the car a family on fairpay of US$75,000 can afford. You can sit in a more expensive chair, but the increase in comfort and pleasure is insignificant.
You can own a castle, but again, with it you can only stand, sit or walk, drink, eat and talk, like other people.
You can have solid gold taps, but how much more pleasure do they give than the pleasure of the taps of a family on US$75,000?
You can drink $4000 bottles of wine, but how much more pleasure is there in it than in a $20 bottle of wine? Perhaps another 1% of pleasure.
You can have $70 million art on your walls, but how much pleasure can the greatest painting give? More pleasure per day than a good meal?
So the plus side of overpay seems to be extremely slight. The additional pleasures you can buy are all very small. Just the leftovers after almost all pleasures have been bought by fairpay.
On the other hand, the downside of wealth does not suffer rapidly diminishing returns. The downside stays proportional to the overpay. The bigger the fortune, the more attractive it is to thieves. Just like money in banks. Bigger banks have bigger vaults, because they need them, because their bigger contents attract bigger thieves, motivate greater efforts to overcome the security. Assassination, fraud, embezzling, golddigging, kidnapping, conquering, plundering, hostile takeovers, political dirty tricks, etc. Every empire has fallen. Every plutocracy has fallen. Every empire has power to protect itself, and yet no empire, business or national, has survived the constant erosion from the surrounding underpaid. The late Roman emperors were lasting only weeks or days. The so-called most powerful man in the world has been assassinated. At the very least, positions of privilege are maintained only with extreme unremitted lifelong vigilance.
So, with the upside suffering rapidly diminishing returns, and the downside running proportional to size of fortune, the benefits of wealth are very negative. Those who accumulate vast fortunes are often the most aggressive, so the fights among the superrich are the most intense, the most dangerous, the most exhausting, the most timeconsuming, the most often fatal. The royalty and aristocracy of France. The Roman emperors. Everyone in history who has reached higher positions of wealth and power.
So it seems clear that neither wealth nor poverty bring happiness. Why don't we try the middle, the way of justice, of fairpay, which will diminish the pleasure of the overpaid very slightly, increase their safety and companionship enormously, which will increase the pleasure of the underpaid enormously and increase their safety enormously?
Pay justice is surely clearly win-win-win.