Action plan for making your life much much better
Introduction
The art of maximising happiness is in its infancy, has been thrown into utter confusion. Which is good news, because it means we can be much, much happier.
There are a lot of ideas out there about maximising your happiness, and they are why we are in such a gigantic mess. So there are ideas we have, and have had 'forever', which we have to check with our own sense to see whether they are really sound ideas, or are causing the unhappiness we have. We have to have some skepticism about the ideas we have about maximisation of happiness, and check them with our good sense.
When people agree on things, there are often no insurmountable obstacles. People agreed, long, long ago, that having a law against murder was a good idea, and they got that law, and have been happier for it ever since. And the same applies to insurance, and many other things we have and are happy with. Someone thinks of the idea of insurance, people go through a learning process of finding out what it is, and deciding whether they like it.
Here is a new idea, here are many new ideas, about maximising happiness, and it is for us to go through the same old process of finding out what they are, and whether they agree with our good sense, and whether we want to ditch some old ideas that don't stand up to scrutiny by our own good sense.
If we reach the point of everyone agreeing they are good ideas, we will get the thing they recommend.
So this action plan begins with a stage of checking out some new ideas, and rechecking some old ones. Then comes the stage of telling others about them. The natural process that happens when a film is good and the word gets around.
This is not a process of mindlessly adopting someone else's ideas. This is about you taking a fresh look at reality through the thoughts here, and deciding whether you think reality is a bit different from what you have been taught, and then passing on the new ideas you agree with to your friends, to save them and you a heap of grief.
This book is in the form of a manual to make it easy for you to pass on these new ideas to other people, for them to decide whether they like them.
You can use this book on yourself first, and then use it for passing on ideas you like to your friends.
It takes the form of common ideas, and suggestions on how these ideas might be untrue.
Some of these common ideas you may be very fond of, attached to, and inclined to defend them just because you are fond of them. But rejecting the new ideas in opposition to them because you are attached to the old ideas is not sense. We need to judge the new ideas with our good sense, and that alone.
Where to start?
Many of these new ideas interact and intertwine, so it is hard to find a starting point. We just have to start somewhere, and eventually we will have all the ideas and their intertwinings.
For those who think they are reasonably happy and needn't strive for more.
When there is unhappiness that we think is unchangeable, we forget about it, and so we don't think of it when we add up our happiness. And we put unpleasant things out of our mind, so we forget those things when we look at our happiness. When we think we are happy enough, we are looking at the good bits of our life, and have ignored the bad bits. To know how much happier we can be, we have to look at all those bad things, and imagine how much better we will feel when all those things are gone. We can't solve any problems without looking at the problems. We can't be open to solutions to problems until we have acknowledged the problems. So our natural tendency to put unpleasant things and things we think can't be changed out of our mind prevents us looking for solutions. There could be solutions lying around, and we won't see them because we are unconscious of the problems that the solutions solve. And then there is a double bind, because a person can't tell people about a solution, because people have put out of mind the problems, and a person can't remind people about the problems, so he can then tell them about a new solution, because people don't want to hear about problems unless they know there is a solution. So which comes first, reminding people about the problems or talking about the solutions? One has to talk a little about both, as far as one can, so people can slowly open up to the problems and the solutions. We have superoverpay and superunderpay, and this generates all sorts of problems, including superviolence, which generates war, crime, weaponry, and all the miseries of those. Enormous wealth and enormous poverty are both enormous stimuli to war and crime. And violence gets everywhere that people get, because people carry the violence. Violence gets into the richest homes and the poorest homes. All the time there is pay injustice, overpay and underpay, there are grave problems popping up everywhere in one form or another. For the underpaid, trying to pay bills, finding money for healthcare, education, food, and everything. Money buys just about everything, and the underpaid have less of it than they deserve, so the underpaid have problems, worries, anxieties, griefs. Or they just have a lot of things that they have done the work to have, and yet they do not have them. Underpay is underpower too, so the underpaid have all sorts of problems with overpay and overpower, with fighting for a fairshare, with fighting the powerful who are inclined to ignore the problems of the underpaid. Overpaid people have just as many problems. They are generally under attack in some way or other, from both the underpaid and the overpaid, so they have constant worries and labours of security. And they cannot get much happiness out of the overpay, because fairpay satisfies most desires, right down to teeny tiny ones, so there is not much satisfaction for overpay to buy. Fairpay of $300,000 per family per year buys many many things, all the important things, and many many less important things. The desires and needs of the human bodily life are finite, they run out. The rich can wear only one pair of shoes, sit in one chair, eat one meal, sleep in one bed like everyone. And they have to labour at protecting themselves from kidnapping, murder, robbery, treachery, golddigging, divorce settlements, hostile takeovers, being conquered, and so on. To the underpaid, who still have substantial desires left they could satisfy, overpay sounds great. The underpaid have no experience of desires running out. But often the rich work, although they don't need to, because work gives more satisfaction than anything else they can find. When you can travel anywhere, you reach a point of having had enough of it. When you are thirsty, water is wonderful, but when thirst is satisfied, drinking water is repulsive. So what seems wonderful to the underpaid and unsatisfied, is nothing to the poor rich. Solid gold taps sound terribly exciting to the people who don't have them, but when you have them they are just taps. A $2,000,000 diamond ring becomes just something you put on your finger, or keep in a vault. Many rich people are people who were recently underpaid, like the Mafias and Triads, and so they have no background of experience that overpay is powerless to give pleasure. And every heap of overpay, of overwealth, is under constant attack in many, many ways from the overpaid and the underpaid. Empires, kingdoms, nations, governments, crime gangs fall. And everyone is caught up in one way or another in the endless fighting. World wars, genocide, organised crime, theft, robbery, home invasion, torture, secret police, corrupt officials, arrogant ignoring unserving government, hijacking, riots, skyjacking, carjacking, murder, rape, and the fear of those things, and the gloomy depressing influence of those things. We have had these things for so long, we forget them, and we think they are permanent, unpreventable. But these things have a cause, and that cause is wrong ideas of what gives happiness, and these ideas can be investigated, examined, and overthrown in our heads. If it is true that both overpay and underpay are bad, not good, and bad for everyone, rich and poor, and if we can learn these things, then there is a universal human will to get rid of both overpay and underpay, and where there is a will there is an easy way. Injustice produces violence, because it is theft, theft of money, the joker good, and violence gets to everyone, which produces unhappiness, which no one wants. We have super-super-extreme pay injustice, overpay up to 100,000 times the average, and underpay down to 10,000th of the average, therefore we have super-super-extreme violence, and we can be super-super-extremely happier. Just by realising something. Just by chucking out an old, wrong idea, and putting in its place a new, good idea. And then doing the easy part of acting on it. A law making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates would bring down overpay and bring up underpay to justice in two generations. The private heir has done nothing for that money, everyone in the world has done everything to make that money, everyone in the world has done the work that makes the goods that the money buys, so such a law would be just. It just takes getting used to the idea. It just takes studying the relevant facts until it is all clear to us. Digging out of the brain the old beliefs and putting in their place the new ideas that make for happiness. We have to really look at reality and see if we really can believe with our own good sense that the new ideas are true, and the old ideas are false. Violence tends to be localized and rare, although terrible when it comes, and so we just hope it won't come to us. But it is coming to people just like us, and could come to us just as easily. So we all live in fear instead of freedom and laughter, in caution, isolation, defensiveness and suspicion, all the time. There is great equality among the severely underpaid, and so great is the effect of equality on happiness, that poor people often have much happiness richer people don't. There is much singing and laughing and social enjoyment of the human tribe. Equality without severe underpay would of course be even happier. The underpaid are so vulnerable to attack from the more powerful. How happy could you be if everyone else was either much more wealthy or much poorer than you? You would feel terribly alone, cut off from humanity. so equality is a great source of happiness. And we have almost infinite inequality. So we can be almost infinitely happier. Unfortunately, coming into a world with super-extreme inequality, we all just try to get more. Everyone just trying to get more without limit, regardless of how much we put in to the pool of wealth by our work, means a few get most and most get very little. Everyone trying to get just more increases inequality. If we instead aim to get out as much as we put in, equality and happiness will arise. Everyone trying to get just more is like a heap of humans beings, all trying to get higher in the heap. The lower in the heap, the more weight pressing down on us, the higher in the heap, the more people pulling down on us. With equality, everyone stands on the ground, with no one being crushed or being pulled down. In the heap, everyone is forced to keep the people below from rising to a position where they can be crushing us, and everyone is forces to go higher to try to get less weight on them. But getting higher just means everyone below pulling down on us. The saying, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer suggests that the rich are stable, but they are being thrown off the heap all the time, by the people rising up in the heap. the poor get hard, and the rich get soft, and the strongest of the poor are constantly rising up and throwing the rich off the heap. For example, the communist leaders throwing the Russian monarchy off, the leaders of the French revolution guillotining Marie Antoinette and the rest of the French plutocracy and monarchy, and then Robespierre guillotining leaders of the French revolution. And the Mafia rising up from Sicilian poverty and replacing the American wealthy at the top, only to be increasingly invaded by the South American druglords coming up from their poverty and oppression. So the rich get richer, and they get very suddenly very much poorer, like Ceausescu of Rumania, Hitler, Napoleon, Charles I and Richard III of England, Caesar. And millions of others. So I think that there really is an enormous opportunity for everyone to be much much happier, unimaginably happier, quite easily. To move from the heap of inequality, with all the horrors and terrors of human history in the last 3000 years or so, to the standing on the ground of equality, as we did for millions of years before that. And we can then have all the benefits of equality and all the benefits of technology. And be free of the vast, millions-murderous, warmongering destructiveness of the overpaid. And free of the poverty of environment caused by having most people terribly underpaid. We just have to work hard with our minds to see through the illusion that the way we are on is the path of maximal sense and happiness. And I think that I, thanks to my teachers, have covered all the points that need to be covered so that people can clear the way in their minds to seeing the way to far greater happiness.
For people who think that we cannot be 100 times happier.
Consider the example of a government, say, committing the extreme injustice and theft of taking 90% of aftertax imcome off 90% of the people and giving it all to 1%. Straightaway, there would be a loss of 81% of national happiness, just from the taking of 81% of national earnings from people. Then, on top of that, there would be all the miseries caused by the extreme violence that would erupt between the 90% and the 1%, between the 90% and the 9%, the 9% and the 1%. On top of that would be the crime and murder that would greatly increase among the 90%, as some people weakened by the theft would strive to compensate themselves by robbing the others similarly robbed. The 1% and the 9% would be in a position of power relative to the 90% and some would exploit, oppress and murder among the 90%. the 1% would get no happiness benefit from the overpay, and would also be in a far worse security position, now having to defend themselves against the extreme, energetic, endless and righteous anger of the 90%. The overpaid would be desperate for funds to finance the selfprotection, and would seek to rob from the 1%, the 9% and the 90%. There would be the added labour and cost to the nation of all the violence, destruction and waste. All these factors would I think raise the loss of happiness to 95% or 99%. Now this is only an injustice factor of 820. The 1% would be getting 820 times as much as the 90%. We in the real world have an injustice factor of one billion. The ratio of highest pay for a year's work to the lowest pay for a year's work is one billion. Range of pay for a year's work ranges from $30 to $30 billion. In the example, 90% get 10% of the average. In our real world, 90% get less than 1% of the world-average pay per year. They get between 1% and 0.01% of world-average pay. Highest pay is not just 82 times the average, but 100,000 times the average. So I think that we can really be literally 100 times happier. Every family in the world working average hard on $300,000 a year, goodness. Some nations, like the Middle East, will save 50% of national income by not having internal conflict of overpaid and underpaid. The least inegalitarian countries spend only 2% of national income on defense, and these countries could be considerably more egalitarian and spend even less on defense. The world economy is strangled nearly to death by having 1% of people getting 98% of world income. There would be far more money getting around and about, watering the lives of all, making far more businesses possible, making economies far more stable and crisis-free. There would be 100 times more scientists, driving progress 100 times faster, than we have now, with 90% of the scientists we have tied up working for defense and repair, in the military-industrial complex, the courts, the hospitals, the police, and with 90% of scientists that we could have, too poor to become scientists.
For those who think it is alright to tackle smaller problems.
It makes sense to spend one's time and energies in always first tackling the thing that can make the biggest increase in happiness, that can solve the largest number of problems in one go. If you have a troublesome tree or vine, you can attack it by climbing up and picking off leaves, or cutting off branches. The tree or vine may grow faster than you can remove leaves or branches, and then you have the problem forever, and getting worse. Or you can chop at the trunk, and thus be chopping all the branches, all the leaves in one go. And bringing the tree or vine down forever. It takes discipline to resist putting one's energies at the visible end of the problem, and instead tracing the vine back to its exit from the ground, but when you do, you have the satisfaction of seeing the whole vine die, even tendrils you could not reach and didn't even know about, and having the sense of power and control in knowing that you need only keep an eye on the root to see when it sprouts again, and cut it again. Everyone is tackling some problem, and is therefore too busy to tackle the root. But we don't have the luxury of tackling the vine or tree at leaf or branch level any more when we are so close to self-extinction, thanks to e=mc2.
For those who think that the project is too big.
There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their resources and energies. The sum total of the work needed per person is just really convincing just two people, two friends. In ten times the time it takes to convince two people, there will be 2000 convinced. One will teach two, two will teach 4, 4 will teach 8 - 16, 32, 64, 125, 250, 500, 1000 - plus the 1, 2, 4, 8, etc who taught, adding up to 2000. In twenty times the time to convince two people, there will be 2,000,000 convinced. In just 30 times the time to convince two people, 2,000,000,000 will be convinced. Once you are convinced, all you have to do is cross your fingers that other people are about as smart and as open to thinking as you are, that other people will be convinced on average in about the same time as you were. so do an experiment. Read it, forget about it for a few days, giving it time to spread through the brain, come back to it, read again, look at it from all angles, forget about it again, and if you are convinced it is really true after one month, you can be confident that the whole world will know it in 31 months. Then there is the herd effect. Once, say, 10% know about it, more and more will take in on trust. They will be hearing about it in a number of places, it will be popping up here and there in their lives, more and more people around them will be excited about it, and they will take it more or less on trust. The tendency to distrust a new idea works against us at first, but as time goes on, it works more and more for us. And there is also possibly the 100th monkey effect. It starts to communicate 'through the air'. It just starts to be in the air, and people find they know it without receiving any thought or words at all. We must not assume to know how much mental resistance and how much mental easiness there is out there. It may just be the time in human history in which people finally get it, in which the penny drops, in which we hear what history has been telling us. After all, reality is there and everyone is exposed to it all the time. There has to be a time in which people get things. There was a time people got the idea of agriculture, the idea of fire, the idea of the arch, the idea of the bow and arrow, the idea of the screw, the idea of insurance. The brain is constantly ruminating on reality, putting elements together and coming up with ideas. The very fact that this idea is now on paper is evidence that probably people are getting the idea independently all over the world, since brains have a high degree of similarity.
If someone thinks that ethics is about following rules of right and wrong laid down by others.
Obedience is a virtue for little children, who don't have minds, who don't have much knowledge of the world. If mummy says don't run in the road, or don't go into the woods, it may be a good idea to obey when you have no idea what roads and woods contain. But obedience is essentially mindless. It is abdicating from making decisions yourself, from taking your shots at your happiness, from being an ethically functioning creature. So it is the worst thing you can do. It is sabotaging your pursuit of happiness right at the start. Consider that, if you think you are not smart enough to take a shot at happiness, how can you know that another person is better at taking a shot at hitting your happiness? Obedience is giving your body like a robot to the purposes of another, and that other may be anybody. To be ethical, you have to know the person you obey is good and wise and cares about you. And if you can know all this, you can take a good shot at your happiness for yourself. You know far more about yourself than any other can know.
Science tells us that the human body developed from apes by retaining infantile characteristics into adulthood, like the big head. Maybe it is similarly also true that we have retained infantile obedience into adulthood. And so maybe this is why we are ethical infants, not functioning as beings pursuing our own happiness, but too inclined to make a virtue of obedience instead of making a virtue of functioning as an ethical being, constantly making decisions about what will make us happy, about what errors we have made in our pursuit of happiness, keeping an ear out for new ideas on increasing happiness, and so on. The pursuit of happiness is the great adventure, the great game. It enlivens us, it is life. And obedience is the sabotage of it. There are other reasons why obedience is promoted as a virtue, as a means to happiness. There are people who think they will be happiest if other people obey them, look up to them, follow them, serve them, work for them unquestioningly. We have perhaps been taken in by such people because of our psychological inclination to infantile obedience long after the days of mindless infancy are past. These people have put out a whole false ethics, around obedience. But the illogic of it is apparent. If people are to obey, who are they to obey? If some are to obey and others to be obeyed, how are these two types of people to be distinguished? Who is to say who should be obeyed? Who is there to say who goes into each group? Certain people have arrogated to themselves the position of being obeyed, and other people have been awed and impressed by them, or threatened by them, into obedience.
If someone thinks that disobedience is good.
Disobedience is no better than obedience, for the same reason, that it is mindless. It is just obedience with a minus sign in front of it. Someone says do X, so I will do -X. The whole of ethics, the whole of duty, is pursuit of your happiness. And that requires maximum mind. Pursuit of happiness is largely pursuit of reality.
If someone thinks that pursuit of your happiness is not the whole of ethics, because there is also thinking of others.
Thinking of others is a major part of pursuing your own happiness. When a person is wholly awake to pursuit of his own happiness, one of the biggest things on his mind is how this will act on others and how they will react. What has undermined thinking of others has been taking away pursuit of one's own happiness. It is only when you are really thinking of your own happiness that you grasp that injuring others is no sensible part of pursuing your own happiness. Because of the simple fact that injuring others causes a reaction back onto yourself. People do not take injury lying down. The person who is 100% devoted to his own happiness is thinking of others all the time, is being careful to avoid accidentally injuring others, which will bring injury back to him. The people who have tried to build ethics on obedience have been unable to give any solid reason for thinking of others. And so people, divorced from their pursuit of their own happiness by the false ethics of obedience, have not in general grasped the concept of not injuring others, the concept of being as nice to others as possible for one's own sake. Pursuing one's own happiness as the whole of ethics is logical, for the very simple and very solid reason that I am me. And on this solid basis, people will be devoted to avoiding injuring others, as part of pursuit of their own happiness. The false ethics that has undermined pursuing one's own happiness has undermined thinking of others. The people who have undermined pursuit of own's own happiness have done it because they want people to be mindless robots of their aims. And they have undermined rationality itself. For what is more rational than pursuing your own happiness? Every animal does it. And who else is going to do it? So the foundations of life have been attacked and overturned. There is always happiness in the very pursuit of happiness, for, whatever happens, misfortune, bad luck, or evil, the great game of pursuing increase of happiness can always be played. And these people have undermined love, for pursuit of one's own happiness is the root of love. Cut off from pursuit of happiness is cut off from loving oneself. And cut off from that, how can there be love of others, or love of love? How can one feel that one is loved when you are expected to drop your happiness, which is your everything, your life, your joy, your excitement, the meaningfulness and beauty of life? False ethics has made us feel ashamed of pursuit of our own happiness. What loving person is going to tell us to give up our pursuit of happiness? A loving person is working to assist us in our pursuit of our happiness. The feeling that we are entitled to pursue our own happiness is the root of feeling loved. And the game of pursuing happiness with our limited powers is an exciting challenge, the great game, in which, and only in which, we feel alive, only in which can we feel meaning and value in life. In that, and only in that, are we alive, functioning, doing, active, busy doing what we are meant to be doing. We think we are pursuing our happiness when we are very much just following accepted ideas of what brings happiness, ideas which are often the product of unthinking, unwisdom and unlove. Not really looking hard for ourselves, to pierce the veil to see reality plain and true. As simple is it to understand that injuring others will in general bring equal or greater injury upon us, we are so divorced from real individual free independent 100% ardent unabashed pursuit of our own happiness, that we cannot notice this simple connection.
If someone thinks that money is no part of pursuit of happiness, that money is not good, that money cannot buy happiness, that money is unspiritual.
Money is an artificial barter item, with the convenience of portability, divisibility and relative nonperishability. It is good for all the goods that can be bought. Money is as good as the goods it can buy. It can buy necessities and desires. Satisfaction of bodily needs and desires, purchase of worldly goods, is a very major part of happiness. Spirituality is part of pursuit of happiness, or else it is nothing, since maximisation of happiness is everything. And money, the joker good, is a major part of happiness. When people say money is not good, not spiritual, what they mean is that sometimes money does not deliver happiness, that sometimes money delivers unhappiness. People who say money is not good, not important, not spiritual, do not have no wallets, do not fail to pick up their paychecks, so it is strange that they say it at all. It has been said that love of money is the root of all evil, but what is true is that love of other-earned money, love of overpay, love of getting money or other forms of wealth without proportionate work is the root of virtually all our unnecessary unhappiness. Love of getting out of the social pool of wealth more than you put in by your own work. Greed. Theft. Because overpay is theft and theft is injury, and injury produces a reaction, equal or greater. If the injury does not come back to you immediately and directly, it ricochets arround in your environment and takes its toll on your quality of life. Putting twice as much in and taking twice as much out, putting half as much in and taking out half as much, are perfectly harmless to yourself, is not theft, not injury. In nature, before we developed job specialisation, division of labour, for the efficiency benefits, overpay is hardly possible. You do your own work and consume the products of your work. But with job specialisation comes pooling of products of work. And then taking out more than you put in becomes all too easy. And it is hard for others to see when it happens. Until, by the accumulation of overpays, it becomes visible to all, with some having far more than others who have worked equally hard. Visible theft, visible injustice, visible wrong, visible injury. So it is not love of self-earned money that is bad, but love of other-earned money that is bad, selfharming and unspiritual. The distinction between self-earned money and other-earned money seems never to have been made before. People go for just more, without effort, and without seeing the value of making the effort, to take out as much as they put in. Society does not condemn getting out more than you put in. It admires people in proportion to their success in getting money out, quite regardless of whether this exceeds what they put in. We are taught that it is fine to aim at getting out as much as we can, by all legal means. But it is clear, or ought to be, that unlimited fortunes when the contribution of any individual has to be limited, has to be theft, injury, injustice. Society teaches us injustice in pay. Society says: Everyone, go for as much as you can, and whoever gets more will be admired more. There are many wide-open legal thefts in our social systems, and these are invisible as theft. We pooled the products of work because with everyone doing specialised work, the products have to be mixed. One person does nothing but make shoes, but he has to have many things. His shoes are turned into money, and he takes the money to the pool of work products, the shops, and takes out what he wants. Hopefully a sum of products that contain as much work as he put into his shoes. But, with the pool of wealth, of work products, it seems everyone went mad, seeing all the goods of all the people, and started grabbing all they could. It was hard to determine exactly the workvalue in things, so we in effect said, okay everyone, just try to get as much as you can, and we will see how that goes. And it has put so much wealth and power in so few hands, who then strived to undermine other people's pursuit of happiness, to get them to work for them, that very few people are any longer closely in touch with their independent pursuit of happiness, and so no one has identified pay injustice as the enemy of humanity. The people who said that love of money was the root of all evil stated a truth so imprecisely that people saw no sense in it, and ignored it. People know that money is good, for they are prepared to work for it. And some people are aware that there is something wrong about money, and so they say that money is not good, without giving up money. If you have 100 children with 1000 sweets, and say to them, get as many as you can, grabbing from each other too, you are going to have endless fighting, accelerating, as the children get madder and madder, and as inequality increases. The more sweets one child has, the more children will be after him, and the less fun it wil be for him, and the sooner he will lose his store. But no one will be free from being grabbed from, everyone will be perpetually involved in grabbing and being grabbed from, and amity will continuously decrease. And this is human history since job specialisation, trade and money. Theft, injury, is built in to trade, because it is impossible to measure work exactly, so that we can aim at justice. There are many legal thefts in our system, and there is an inability to see them. We are blinded to justice, to noninjury in money matters, by the great pool of goods. It seems to each of us that our taking out as much as we can get cannot hurt the pool, it is so big compared to the individual. But we have ended up with the most extreme pay injustice, and somehow everyone unable to see it, or guess its importance to our individual happinesses. Pay for a family's year's work ranging from $30 to $30,000,000,000 around the average of $300,000. With the average higher than the pay of 99% of us. With 99.9% of us getting less than double the average. With 90% of us getting less than 100th of the average. With pay down to 10,000th of average. And still fighting. And the fighting having grown for 1000s of years, polluting the happiness of everyone. Driving the invention of ever-bigger weaponry. The pool of wealth is limited, limited to the amount of work done and to nature's bounty. The pool can grow or shrink, with more or less work, with machines and computers, but it is always going to be finite. So freedom to get out unlimited amounts drains the pool. If the social pool of wealth was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is now 98% drained. 98% of wealth, the products of work, are up in a very thin, terribly tall needle going up 100 kilometres. 1% of people get US$250 trillion a year, and 99% get US$25 trillion. 90% of the pool is less than 1 cm deep. And yet people work roughly equally hard. And the poorest work hardest. And in 5000 years of this lolly-scramble approach to distribution from the pooled products of specialised work, with ever-growing inequality and consequent ever-growing violence and weaponry all that time, we have not noticed that the lolly-scramble approach is not working, is an unmitigated disaster. So, no, love of money is not the root of all evil. Love of getting out of the pool more than you put in is the root of all our vast unnecessary evils. For money is good, the joker good, and therefore the theft of it is the greatest injury, and injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms, and, unlike atoms, increases in speed. Bombs beget bigger bombs.
For those who think that having more money than you have earned, having lots of money and little work, would be good, or is good.
Money is good, and our disastrous last 5000 years has been caused by falsely concluding from that truth that more money is going to be better. To the 99% who are getting out less than they put in, more money is good, for they still have needs and substantial desires unsatisfied, and more money would satisfy them. But remaining unsatisfied desires get smaller and smaller and have dwindled to very tiny ones at the point of fairpay. Fairpay of $300,000 a year satisfies almost all desires, right down to teeny tiny ones. There just is very little overpay can satisfy. The overpaid can spend big, but they cannot be satisfied any bigger. The body is finite and its desires are finite also. They can buy more rooms but they cannot occupy more room. They can buy more food, but they cannot fill more stomachs. Fairpay buys a very comfortable chair. Overpay can own a skyscraper, but there is no way to consume a skyscraper, to extract out of it any more than another person. So the benefits are tiny. And on the other side, the disadvantages are enormous, are proportional to the size of the fortune. Since money is good, since overpay means underpay for others, since the underpaid still have substantial needs and desires left unsatisfied, the overpay is under attack. Whether the overpay is nations, empires or individuals. However large the overfortune, it must be finite, but the attacks are endless, so the attacks must erode the fortune in finite time. And all the time before the complete erosion of the overfortune, the overpaid must be under seige, must be defending themselves at cost of time, labour, money, health and life. Under attack, not just from the underpaid, but from the overpaid too. Honey attracts bears. Since overpay is always under attack, at cost, it must ever seek more money, which must exacerbate the underpay that surrounds it, driving a vicious circle of collapse. The overpaid are isolated, even from their equals in wealth. Fellowship with other humans is one of the greatest causes of happiness. If one person steals the goods of 1000, that person will be worse off, with 1000 enemies and no friends. And his environment is wretchedness. Ignorance, disease, disorder, crime, war, crisis, betrayal, suspicion, hostility, hatred, waste, destruction. His garden, other people, is blasted. History has no examples in contradiction to this.
For those who think that there are no legal thefts, only illegal ones.
Justice is equal pay for equal work. Work is sacrifice of something, time and energy, and needs to be compensated by an amount of pay that buys workproducts with as much work in them as the working person did. A person works in some specialised work, and should get as much pay as his work produced wealth in the form of goods. Pay for anything but work is pay for no work, overpay, which causes work for no pay, underpay, a greater or lesser degree of slavery, for others, for 99% of others, which then causes ever-growing violence, war, crime and weaponry, which has now reached 60 times PDC [planet death capability], which is as bad as it gets. Unhappiness, not happiness. We allow pay for many things besides work. Students should be paid for studying, because study is work. Societies should pay for this work because it is the whole of society that benefits from the learning of students. Instead, we have parents, scholarships or the students themselves paying for studying, and then we pay people for having studied. There is no work in having studied. 99% of us have to finance this pay for no work, and 100% of us have to pay in the ever-growing violence engendered by the ever-growing overpay and underpay, caused by 99% funding overpay. Violence gets everywhere people get. The overpaid are not on the receiving end of less violence. They are on the receiving end of as much violence, or more. Think French aristocracy guillotined, Ceausescu, Caesar. And a million kings conquered. Hostile takeovers, corporate infighting. It is a funny thing that it is organised crime that has sometimes learned to share, rather than fight each other into hamburger meat. With organised crime, the effects of all-grab-all are more dramatic and immediate, and so it is easier to see the pattern, and thus come to sharing. We pay people for merit. Now merit is largely mother nature's gifts. Again, not work by the person paid. Paying people for having received gifts from mother nature is as absurd as paying people for receiving gifts from other people. But so powerful is the spell cast by accepted ideas and customs, that it is hard for us to see the simple absurdity of it. People with merits and talents should be paid for every bit of work they do developing their talents, like practising the cello, or studying, but not a bit for work that nature not them has done. Again, 99% of us have to finance this overpay, and 100% of us have to pay in the ever-growing violence engendered, which is now so near the destruction of every lifeform on the planet. Our power to destroy has increased by a factor of 60,000 in the last fifty years, to power to kill 6,000,000,000+, 'thanks' to e=mc2. Our technology, transport and computers, have effectively shrunk the planet by a factor of 250 in the last 200 years, compressing the violence, like compressing a gas, raising the temperature. We pay people for scarcity, again not work, not sacrifice of time or energy by the overpaid. Whenever demand is higher than supply, prices take a hike upwards, so profits go beyond fairpay for the work of the owners. Because we pay for scarcity, we get more of it. people who want profits produce scarcity. Big farms are far less efficient than small to medium farms. Russia moved to big farms and had to start importing grain. The agricultural efficiency [production per acre] of the USA is 30th of the Sudan and of China. See World book of rankings. The overpaid worldwide are forcing people off small farms and converting to big farms, to decrease food supply and increase proftis. Overpay, controlling government, is causing subidies [at public expense] to farmers not to produce. New technology has built-in scarcity, because demand is high and the factories are still being set up to meet demand. So it was with computers, and so it was when electricity replaced gas. When machines came in, people could buy the same goods for less, so demand was high. But the price was still higher than the cost of producing the goods on machines. The company owners were being paid for work the machines were doing. And customers, though they thought they were getting a bargain, were overpaying, which means working to fund overpay. So during the 19th century, and still today, workers were being sucked unaware, and getting poorer, when machines were taking over a lot of work, and humanity could have had more leisure or more pay. Patents, which accompany new technology, are monopolies, and monopolies are a license to overprice. Monopoly profits are so extreme, that governments stepped in to moderate monopoly, but how powerful is government against the power of overpay, which often gets into government? And how can government root out every speck of monopoly in the economy? It can find the most glaring examples, but it has a harder and harder job finding the ever-subtler and ever more numerous examples, even if they were not hobbled by the undue influence of the overpaid. We pay people for owning land and owning stocks. Every worker, down to the children helping their parents on the farm or in the shop, are building up the infrastructure of the world, making it more valuable. This steady increase in value, in bridges, hospitals, roads, buildings, soil, is reflected in the longterm steady rise in value of land and stocks. So while everyone sows, only the owners of land and stocks get paid for this. And the owners of land and stocks get paid in proportion to their holdings, to their wealth. The most overpaid get most and so on. A person can buy a piece of land, the whole community of workers can increase the value of that land from practically nothing to billions, by building a city around it, and the owner gets the added value without having to do anything. In this way, many fortunes have been made. The world is steadily growing in value, as more cities and other infrastructure are built, and only the landowners and stockholders are reaping. The purpose of government is justice, because no state built on injustice can stand, but governments are in the hands or under the hands of the overpaid, and they are not doing anything about it, nor telling the people what is going on. And most people are stuck in a trust in their governments, victims of a nature-given reliance on parents, reluctant to leave the nest and face the fact that parents have faults and that you have to be the one who takes responsibility for your happiness and your view of reality. Animals seem to make the transition much more easily. I suppose our spending much longer with parents greatly reinforces the habit of relying on others. Again, nature's bounty is great, but landowners and stockholders get all this bounty. Animals automatically get an equal share in nature's bounty as soon as born. All the fish, fruit, leaves, seeds, grass, land, meat and milk is theirs. Animals automatically lose all control over nature's bounty when they die, and their share automatically reverts to the common pool. Theft of nature's bounty from all newborns is built in to private property. Not that private property should be got rid of, but there is legal theft built in to it, which contributes to inequality, violence, misery, danger and extinction for all humans. Job specialisation created the need for trade, transaction, and unfortunately legal theft is built in to transaction itself. The two things exchanged, in buying, selling or barter, cannot be exactly equal in value, in the work gone into them. Their workvalue must be x and x+y. So every transaction must be a fair-exchange-no-robbery [the x's] and a robbery, the y. Over trillions of transactions, just from statistics alone, inequality will evergrow. A few will, just by luck alone, come out with large net gain. A few will come out with large net loss. Many will come out wth smaller net gain and loss. Almost no one will come out with justice, neither losing or gaining from transaction. Add to this the fact that virtually everyone is trying to maximise the size of y, and you only have an aggravation of the inequality built in to transaction. It is hard for a beggar to get $1 for nothing, but very easy for a company to get $11 for something that contains $10 of work. No one can exactly measure the workvalue in the product. The customer does $11 of work, the company does $10 of work. In a nonprofit company without volunteers, everyone gets paid for their work, so what are profits? Clearly not work. Profits are reflected in interest payments on deposits. Clearly the person who puts money in the bank and gets paid interest does no work. Everyone loves interest and profits, because they hope to gain from them, forgetting that opening up the pandora's box of people getting unlimited money for nothing means that 1% get up to 100,000 times what they earn, and 99% get down to 10,000th of what they earn, and everyone without exception is embroiled in endless escalating violence and is facing extinction. But this plan does not propose to try to get rid of profits and interest, just to note at this stage that they are legal theft. Which means that the superrich have not earned the money they have. There is a much easier way to get pay justice and thus destroy war, crime and extinction than interfering with profits and interest, or with any of the other legal thefts. We justify and allow, because we think we will profit from them, unlimited pay for business risk, 'responsibility', experience, natural gifts. But business risk is risking a sprat to catch a mackerel for oneself. And everyone risks, and workers risk up to and including their lives. And the sprat risked may be, most often is, overpay, other-earned. And, if there were reason to pay for risk, there is no way of measuring risk, or of setting a fairpay per unit of risk if we could measure it. So no one is being paid for risk, because no one can be paid for risk, because we can't measure it. People in lower-echelon jobs are not irresponsible or less responsible. The person in a 'reponsible' position is just doing his job with what nature gave him. Experience is gained in paid work at no cost to the person, so no work is involved in having experience. So there are many wide-open legal thefts. When the little people approved of profits and interest, captial gains, pay for natural gifts, experience, business risk, 'responsibility', etc, because they hoped to gain from them, they gave themselves a little straw and the overpaid a big straw to suck on the milkshake of wealth. Giving up the little straw will have the effect of getting rid of the big straws, and saving us all from extreme violence and the nearness of extinction. People saw freedom to get limitlessly rich as a good thing, and people see prohibition of freedom to get limitlessly rich as bad. Freedom to get limitlessly rich is only good if you have the biggest straw, and if desires that can be satisfied do not get smaller and smaller as more desires are satisfied, and if no one objects to you having a bigger straw.
For those who think that redistribution of wealth, just or not, is impossible, because the rich would never go along with it.
Money is power, a great power, but it is not the only power, and not the greatest power. Every heap of overpay in history, individual, national and imperial, has been overturned. That the state built on injustice cannot stand is a very old saying. No state built on injustice has survived. Being robbed, being enslaved, releases an energy far greater. The underpaid can only throw grains of sand, but winddriven sand erodes rock. The underpaid go on and on forever, whereas the greatest heap of wealth and power is only finite. The underpaid have lost many battles, they have never lost a war. Injustice energises. 99% are underpaid. Can 99 people make one person do what is good for the 100? About 99.9% are paid less than double fairpay. Can 999 make one person behave to reverse the destruction of 99% of natural levels of happiness of 1000, and annihilation of 1000? What percentage of the overpaid will not be able to come to thinking that fairpay, survival, peace and world amity, a beautiful garden of other people, through which you can move freely and fearlessly, is better than extinction, a life of most intense, exhausting, unwinnable labour and stress of selfdefense, without more satisfaction of desires than fairpay? And imagine a new state of things where the underpaid, reactivated in pursuit of their own happiness, liberated from thinking obedience is virtue, are perfectly clear that overpay is other-earned, is theft, is the cause of the starvation of 1% of humanity every year, and the death of millions every year from violence, is soon very likely to be the cause of extinction of all planet life, is the root cause of torture, brutality of regimes, genocide, hiroshimas, world wars, crime, terrorism, all the worst things in present human life?
What if the 99.9%, reinvigorated in ardent unabashed independent individualist pursuit of their own happiness, had cogitated, chewed, pondered new ideas and had become perfectly clear that there was legal theft, pay injustice, and that pay injustice was the real cause of violence? What if they knew that scientific progress would go ahead 100 times faster with justice? At the moment we have 90% of the scientists we have tied up in the deadsea fruits of inequality, in the governments, courts, hospitals, military-industrial complexes, and we have 90% of scientists [and inventors and entrepreneurs] gifted enough but too poor to become scientists. People could come to be certain that we are on the brink of extinction and on the brink of a golden age. Not all the superrich and overpaid are without sense, and without spirit of justice. Philanthropists realise, more or less, that they have been overpaid. Someone said: Why shouldn't I give half my money to people?, they gave it all to me. Another rich man said: Business is just selling for more than you paid for it. Not all overpaid people are greedy, unable to see straight, just saying in their hearts: Me, me, me, not them, not them, mine, mine, mine, like a child with a big chunk of birthday cake, attacking all forms of sense inimical to their selfdestructive will. Insanity like Hitler's, thinking that he could steal Europe, thinking that he was stronger than Europe and America, is very rare. The most arrogant, megalomaniac dictator cannot walk around naked, because people are too sure it is wrong. What if people were as certain that overpay is wrong? The confidence of the overpaid would wilt into the ground. Respect for them would have vanished. They would give up a losing battle, even if they had no atom of sense of justice. If there was ever anyone against insurance, they gave up the unequal battle. Also, with 99% conscious that pay justice means more pay for them, means world peace, means survival, means an end to warmongering and cannonfoddering of the people, much of the muscle of the superrich will be against them. Ideas are the root of all action. Changing ideas changes everything. Permanently. Without a fight. Like the coming of insurance. You judge. It seems to me that the arguments are very strong, and that people will see them if they look the ideas hard in the face, while ignoring the voice of accepted ideas, the voice of custom, which has got where we are.
For those who think that not all wars are pay-justice wars.
It seems that there are religious wars and racial wars. But take overpay and underpay out of the situation, will you have war left? There are places where there are religious differences, racial differences, with low inequality of wealth and power, with little violence. South Africa was clearly an economic war along racial lines, not a racial war. Northern Ireland is an inequality war along religious lines, the Catholics being kept poor and out of power. Rwanda was a war for monopoly of power and hence wealth. In the Middle East, there are vast disparities of wealth, 10-20% absolute poverty with oil-rich shieks. Egalitarian Scandinavia spends 2% of wealth on defense, the Middle East spends around 50%. Average Israeli income is 20 times Palestinian income. For some reason, the newspapers always present these as religious or racial wars, never as justice wars. Perhaps newspaper owners do not like to think about pay justice. The top twenty countries on the peace index and the equality index have ten names in common, although peacefulness of a country is partly dependent on interference from outside.
For those who think that extinction is not going to happen, even if we do nothing to correct pay theft.
Inequality, violence, war, crime and weaponry have grown for 3000 years or more. Clearly they will continue to grow, if we do nothing appropriate. We are at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] now. Power to destroy has increased by a factor of 60,000 in the last fifty years, from power to kill 100,000 in one day [Dresden, Hiroshima, 87 firebombed Japanese cities] to power to put up enough smoke, above the rain washout level, to block out the sun permanently and lower world temperature 25 degrees, which is three times colder than an ice-age, and to irradiate the earth for a million years. Advance in transport technology in the last 200 years has effectively shrunk the planet by a factor of 250, concentrating the violence, like pressurizing a gas, raising the temperature, bringing the opponents 250 times closer together, like bringing electric poles closer together. 200 years ago, a day away was 50 miles away, today a day away is 12,500 miles away. The rich get soft and drained by defense and the poor get busy. Third-world share of wealth is climbing by 10% every 30 years, and accelerating. By 2100, if we get there, the third world will have 98% of population and 98% of wealth. Meanwhile topsoil loss is 1% a year, 100% a century, which means vast billions fighting over dwindling remnants of topsoil. Then there is oil. The reduction of oil will put a brake on transport, therefore on 'warability', but people will fight over the remaining stores of oil. We have already dumped 600 tonnes of depleted uranium, so we [super-unequal humanity, humanity in the hands of the megalomaniacs] don't seem to be shy of using radiation. We are less likely to have an all-at-once nuclear war, but we will have a bomb here, a bomb there, here a bomb, there a bomb, making irreversible inroads on sunlight, without which, nothing. I think there is better than a 1% chance of extinction, and that means a better than 1% chance of a bomb in your house. Global means local. Every local. Global extinction is a local issue. People think that big issues are for big people, leaders. But the leaders we have with super-extreme inequality are the most rapacious, the most mindlessly more-for-me people, busy in a very intense fight with all the other most rapacious and mindless. They are giants in fierce battle with giants. How much time do you think giants spend, can spend, want to spend, thinking about the welfare of ants? Think Katrina. They are the ones with least sense of the practical benefits of the golden rule. They are like Shakespeare's Richard III, killing all around him, to get and hold power, till he is left alone, defenseless. Like Hitler. Like Stalin. Like Cardinal Wolsey, pulling down those above him and pushing down those below him, climbing to be alter rex, the other king, and then getting pushed out. Every rapacious person born is heading up to the top, and battling it out with the softer, older, more exhausted top people. If a good, or half-good person reaches the top, they are disposed of. Only the people can save us. Many people sense the wrongness of overwealth and avoid it. Governments in unequal societies, which most are, are the least responsible, the least able to respond to reality.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
We have simply been throwing wealth
We have simply been throwing wealth constantly at a small group of unfortunates, making a rod [the 1% overpaid] for our own backs and making a rod [the 99% underpaid] for their backs. The overpaid have the second greatest power in overwealth, and the underpaid have the greatest power. The underpaid lose many battles but never lose the war, but then start shovelling wealth at a small group of unfortunates after every revolution, every overthrow of a plutocracy.
When we see we are doing this, we may stop.
But it is so easy to see that we have been doing this [at least after it is explained, see below] that one is forced to wonder if we have been doing it deliberately, in some degree. It is as though we are gods playing a rough game. We give one side the second greatest power, and then we both go at it for fun. Whenever the underpaid win, which they must in time, we set up the game all over again, like rugby players returning the ball to the centre to try to get it to one end all over again. Some explanation is needed to explain why we are so unconscious of super-overpay, why we are so uninterested in pay justice. You would think people, confronted with the blatant fact of super-overpay, with increase of fortune up to US$30,000,000,000 a year, US$100,000,000 a day, would feel something like: Hey, there is something wrong here, there is no way this is right. And do something about it. You would think people, confronted with the blatant fact of super-underpay, pay down to US$30 a year, 10c a day, would notice it. And connect it with the super-overpay. And yet billions of people are talking and thinking of billions of things, and not talking and thinking about these most screaming facts of human life. Yet millions of children are daily saying: Liberty and justice for all. And some people [only a few] are talking and thinking about justice and inequality, without starting from, or even ever coming to mention, this most screaming fact of human life. Yet money is the joker good, good for all good things, except some free good things like air. Theft of money is theft of virtually everything. It is far and away the greatest injury, causing the greatest anger. Super-extreme pay injustice means super-extreme violence, super-extreme danger and unhappiness, super-extreme, unnecessary multiplication of problems and labours. You'd think it would be the life focus of everyone who wanted to be happy, and who therefore wanted to minimise other-injury to avoid self-injury. You'd think it would be the focus of every religious person, every ethical philosopher. Mythology has written it into the most anciently and easily recognisable asterism in the sky, the hunter becoming the hunted, injury that goes around comes around, dharma and karma, the golden rule, all the law and all the prophets, the circumpolar round, the source of more abundant life, the key to happiness, and it is completely unknown and unsuspected, the camel of a golden age completely hidden by the gnats of our Kali Yuga existence. We live amidst horrors and terrors and we cannot knock because we don't see the need. We are not missing the mark, we are not shooting the arrow. We are dying of thirst and we do not know to seek water.
We know what would happen if a government, say, committed the extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of people and giving it to 1%. No one will want to argue that this will not produce a great increase in violence and decline in happiness. So we understand the connection between pay injustice and unhappiness. And we know we have pay injustice more extreme than this extreme example. But connecting the few dots we are not.
We pay 1% of people for their work, their sacrifice of time and energy, and then we pay them for nothing. We pay them up to billions for nothing.
We pay people for having gifts of nature, and never notice the strangeness of paying people for having been given gifts, never notice the oddity of paying people for work that they have not done, but nature has done, and never notice that 99% of us fund this pay for nothing, fund this overpay by underpay.
We allow all sorts of nonrational justifications of overpay, and never analyse these justifications to see that we are paying for nothing.
We allow justifications for overpay on grounds of having gifts, business risk, skill, experience, having studied, 'responsibility', scarcity. Yet having studied is not work. We should pay for studying, and, since it is society that benefits from people studying, it should be society that pays for what it gets, not parents, scholarships or the students themselves. But we pay for having studied, which is no work at all. We cough up big fees for the services of the educated and never notice that they are not working harder at all, that they are simply using what is in their brain as everyone is. There is no sacrifice of time or energy in having studied. The learning is not inclined to fall out of the brain and require constant reinsertion. We pay for scarcity, for high ratio of demand to supply, and never notice that this is payment for nothing, for absence of goods. We pay for scarcity, so we get more of it. We pay governments to destroy mountains of food, we pay governemnts to pay farmers not to produce, we permit bigfarming, which is far less productive than small farming. [The agricultural efficiency of USA is 30th of the agricultural efficiency of the Sudan [!!!] and China. See World book of rankings. Russia turns to bigfarming and has to start importing grain.] We pay for experience, although experience is gained at no cost in paid work. We pay for skill, which is either nature's gift or experience. We pay for 'responsibility', although the person in the 'responsible' job is merely doing what he can do with what he has got. He is not sweating harder being responsible, not using more calories, more time. We do not attempt to measure 'responsibility', to make sure people are being paid the right amount for their 'responsibility', neither getting paid for responsibility they don't have or not getting paid for resonsibility they have. We have no way of measuring responsibility, nor of putting a dollar value per unit of responsibility if we could measure it. We simply allow unlimited pay to some on grounds of 'responsibility'. While ignoring the fact that people in lower-echelon jobs are not doing them irresponsibly or less responsibly. We pay for business risk, although the person is risking to get more for himself. We do not attempt to measure risk. We simply allow risk as an excuse for limitless overpay, as an excuse to shovel money from earners to non-earners. With the money the overpaid get for nothing, they buy goods that have been made by work by others. We never notice that worker risk is greater, up to and including death. We allow unlimited pay for 'hard work', and never notice that the poor are working hardest, that housewives are working up to 90+ hours a week. We never notice that the average person works 50+ hours a week, so no one can work more than twice the average longterm. We allow 'hard work' as an excuse for unlimited overpay. We have this unlimited soft spot for the rich, and this perfect blindness to the 99% underpaid, even if we are among the 99%, funding the overpay. It is like a parent that has extreme favouritism towards one child and against another. Blind to the vices of one and blind to the virtues of another.
This super-super fantastic, bizarre, 'unbelievable' blindness is rooted in the mentality of competition. We run a race, we heap honours on the winner, and ignore the losers. We have this will to turn life into a race, and to heap rewards on the winners and ignore the losers. If the losers protest, we say they are bad losers. We see no justice in their claims. Even the losers mostly accept the competition. What is this competition business? Why are we so keen on competition, to the point that pay injustice, violence, danger and unhappiness grow to super-super-extreme levels without us coming to feel that this is something to ponder on, to care about, to concern ourselves with? We have had growing war, crime and weaponry for 1000s of years, with weaponry now at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and all we want to do is go on competing, heaping rewards on winners and ignoring losers even when the losers include ourselves. And never noticing that these super-overrewards are extreme danger and misery to the winners, never noticing that the winners always lose, that plutocracies always fall, that plutocracies have to labour mightily to preserve their overpay, that every heap of overpay in history has been constantly under attack by underpay and has fallen to underpay. If it is all a game, well, it is utterly irrelevant if both sides have to struggle mightily, if they suffer injuries.
Animals show not the slightest sign of this competition mania. People travel 12,000 miles to attend an Olympics. What is going on? What is it we are celebrating when someone runs fastest? It means merely that some run faster than others, that with extreme effort someone will run a fraction of a second faster. 1000s of spectators, who can't run fastest, feel enormous pleasure in someone running fastest. Why? It seems so normal, school sports. Someone gets a medal. What for? We feel something has been established, something good has happened to everyone. What is it that has happened, been established? And why do so many people identify with this event? Why is this event positive? Out of the undistinguished mass of people has arisen a distinction. We say: the distinguished professor. Some lack, some want is felt in undistinguishment, which is satisfied by distinguishing, by picking out of the mass a one. We could measure the leaves on a tree and establish the leaf that is the longest or the shortest or the widest. But that wouldn't do. It has to be one of us. We have no power of identification with leaves. There is not going to be this outpouring of love, admiration and gratitude to a leaf. A whole town, a whole country feels lifted up by having a fastest runner or world champion golfer among them, one of them. People smile at him on the street, they elect him to the council, they are happy to shop in his shop. He has put them on the map. Apparently they felt they were not on the map before. People feel forgotten if they are not special, if they are not distinguished from others. Apparently people don't like the feeling of being merely one among a number. But people don't want this to go too far. They wouldn't like it to be established that someone is the best person in the world. That would start to exclude them. Identification with the winner would become impossible, for some reason. People don't feel excluded when it is a case of distinguishing the fastest runner. Why? It appears to be because identifying the fastest runner leaves room for them to be the mostest at something, somehow, somewhere. The fastest runner is adored, loved, because he stands as a symbol of hope of the self being distinguished someday, somehow. And what if the fastest was a woman? The magic of identification would fail for the men. So we have men's and women's sports separate, so the women can identify through the woman, and the men through the man.
No one benefits from this overpay-underpay. The overpay can get nothing out of the overpay because of the limitation of bodily desires, which are all satisfied by fairpay, and the overpaid get the enormous danger and labour of being overpaid amidst underpaid. The underpaid cannot satisfy all their bodily desires, and they also have the super-extreme violence. Everyone benefits from pay justice. The golden age is standing by, waiting for us to connect the few dots. Unhappiness is super-extreme, and the potential for increase in happiness is super-extreme. Please see through the gnats and see the golden camel waiting to take you where you want to go. The golden rule is harder than steel. It is not mocked. People retaliate injury. Injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms. What is the psychological damage of living in all this mess? Everyone is going after just more. Ambition is admired. Ambition has become detached from taking out no more than you put in by your own work, your own sacrifice of time and energy, detached from non-injury, non-theft. It is like 100 children each trying to get 1000 sweets out of 1000 sweets. It means endless labour of grabbing sweets and stopping others grabbing sweets from you. Endless labour. For nothing, since 10 sweets is all the satisfaction your body can take. There is enough for every worker, including housewives and students, to get US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. Plenty, and no endless labour of getting and keeping. World income is US$300 trillion and there are 3 billion workers. Giving yourself freedom to get unlimited fortune for limited work is freedom for others to get unlimited fortune for limited work.
World annual income is from Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258, compounded with global inflation since 1987.
When we see we are doing this, we may stop.
But it is so easy to see that we have been doing this [at least after it is explained, see below] that one is forced to wonder if we have been doing it deliberately, in some degree. It is as though we are gods playing a rough game. We give one side the second greatest power, and then we both go at it for fun. Whenever the underpaid win, which they must in time, we set up the game all over again, like rugby players returning the ball to the centre to try to get it to one end all over again. Some explanation is needed to explain why we are so unconscious of super-overpay, why we are so uninterested in pay justice. You would think people, confronted with the blatant fact of super-overpay, with increase of fortune up to US$30,000,000,000 a year, US$100,000,000 a day, would feel something like: Hey, there is something wrong here, there is no way this is right. And do something about it. You would think people, confronted with the blatant fact of super-underpay, pay down to US$30 a year, 10c a day, would notice it. And connect it with the super-overpay. And yet billions of people are talking and thinking of billions of things, and not talking and thinking about these most screaming facts of human life. Yet millions of children are daily saying: Liberty and justice for all. And some people [only a few] are talking and thinking about justice and inequality, without starting from, or even ever coming to mention, this most screaming fact of human life. Yet money is the joker good, good for all good things, except some free good things like air. Theft of money is theft of virtually everything. It is far and away the greatest injury, causing the greatest anger. Super-extreme pay injustice means super-extreme violence, super-extreme danger and unhappiness, super-extreme, unnecessary multiplication of problems and labours. You'd think it would be the life focus of everyone who wanted to be happy, and who therefore wanted to minimise other-injury to avoid self-injury. You'd think it would be the focus of every religious person, every ethical philosopher. Mythology has written it into the most anciently and easily recognisable asterism in the sky, the hunter becoming the hunted, injury that goes around comes around, dharma and karma, the golden rule, all the law and all the prophets, the circumpolar round, the source of more abundant life, the key to happiness, and it is completely unknown and unsuspected, the camel of a golden age completely hidden by the gnats of our Kali Yuga existence. We live amidst horrors and terrors and we cannot knock because we don't see the need. We are not missing the mark, we are not shooting the arrow. We are dying of thirst and we do not know to seek water.
We know what would happen if a government, say, committed the extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of people and giving it to 1%. No one will want to argue that this will not produce a great increase in violence and decline in happiness. So we understand the connection between pay injustice and unhappiness. And we know we have pay injustice more extreme than this extreme example. But connecting the few dots we are not.
We pay 1% of people for their work, their sacrifice of time and energy, and then we pay them for nothing. We pay them up to billions for nothing.
We pay people for having gifts of nature, and never notice the strangeness of paying people for having been given gifts, never notice the oddity of paying people for work that they have not done, but nature has done, and never notice that 99% of us fund this pay for nothing, fund this overpay by underpay.
We allow all sorts of nonrational justifications of overpay, and never analyse these justifications to see that we are paying for nothing.
We allow justifications for overpay on grounds of having gifts, business risk, skill, experience, having studied, 'responsibility', scarcity. Yet having studied is not work. We should pay for studying, and, since it is society that benefits from people studying, it should be society that pays for what it gets, not parents, scholarships or the students themselves. But we pay for having studied, which is no work at all. We cough up big fees for the services of the educated and never notice that they are not working harder at all, that they are simply using what is in their brain as everyone is. There is no sacrifice of time or energy in having studied. The learning is not inclined to fall out of the brain and require constant reinsertion. We pay for scarcity, for high ratio of demand to supply, and never notice that this is payment for nothing, for absence of goods. We pay for scarcity, so we get more of it. We pay governments to destroy mountains of food, we pay governemnts to pay farmers not to produce, we permit bigfarming, which is far less productive than small farming. [The agricultural efficiency of USA is 30th of the agricultural efficiency of the Sudan [!!!] and China. See World book of rankings. Russia turns to bigfarming and has to start importing grain.] We pay for experience, although experience is gained at no cost in paid work. We pay for skill, which is either nature's gift or experience. We pay for 'responsibility', although the person in the 'responsible' job is merely doing what he can do with what he has got. He is not sweating harder being responsible, not using more calories, more time. We do not attempt to measure 'responsibility', to make sure people are being paid the right amount for their 'responsibility', neither getting paid for responsibility they don't have or not getting paid for resonsibility they have. We have no way of measuring responsibility, nor of putting a dollar value per unit of responsibility if we could measure it. We simply allow unlimited pay to some on grounds of 'responsibility'. While ignoring the fact that people in lower-echelon jobs are not doing them irresponsibly or less responsibly. We pay for business risk, although the person is risking to get more for himself. We do not attempt to measure risk. We simply allow risk as an excuse for limitless overpay, as an excuse to shovel money from earners to non-earners. With the money the overpaid get for nothing, they buy goods that have been made by work by others. We never notice that worker risk is greater, up to and including death. We allow unlimited pay for 'hard work', and never notice that the poor are working hardest, that housewives are working up to 90+ hours a week. We never notice that the average person works 50+ hours a week, so no one can work more than twice the average longterm. We allow 'hard work' as an excuse for unlimited overpay. We have this unlimited soft spot for the rich, and this perfect blindness to the 99% underpaid, even if we are among the 99%, funding the overpay. It is like a parent that has extreme favouritism towards one child and against another. Blind to the vices of one and blind to the virtues of another.
This super-super fantastic, bizarre, 'unbelievable' blindness is rooted in the mentality of competition. We run a race, we heap honours on the winner, and ignore the losers. We have this will to turn life into a race, and to heap rewards on the winners and ignore the losers. If the losers protest, we say they are bad losers. We see no justice in their claims. Even the losers mostly accept the competition. What is this competition business? Why are we so keen on competition, to the point that pay injustice, violence, danger and unhappiness grow to super-super-extreme levels without us coming to feel that this is something to ponder on, to care about, to concern ourselves with? We have had growing war, crime and weaponry for 1000s of years, with weaponry now at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and all we want to do is go on competing, heaping rewards on winners and ignoring losers even when the losers include ourselves. And never noticing that these super-overrewards are extreme danger and misery to the winners, never noticing that the winners always lose, that plutocracies always fall, that plutocracies have to labour mightily to preserve their overpay, that every heap of overpay in history has been constantly under attack by underpay and has fallen to underpay. If it is all a game, well, it is utterly irrelevant if both sides have to struggle mightily, if they suffer injuries.
Animals show not the slightest sign of this competition mania. People travel 12,000 miles to attend an Olympics. What is going on? What is it we are celebrating when someone runs fastest? It means merely that some run faster than others, that with extreme effort someone will run a fraction of a second faster. 1000s of spectators, who can't run fastest, feel enormous pleasure in someone running fastest. Why? It seems so normal, school sports. Someone gets a medal. What for? We feel something has been established, something good has happened to everyone. What is it that has happened, been established? And why do so many people identify with this event? Why is this event positive? Out of the undistinguished mass of people has arisen a distinction. We say: the distinguished professor. Some lack, some want is felt in undistinguishment, which is satisfied by distinguishing, by picking out of the mass a one. We could measure the leaves on a tree and establish the leaf that is the longest or the shortest or the widest. But that wouldn't do. It has to be one of us. We have no power of identification with leaves. There is not going to be this outpouring of love, admiration and gratitude to a leaf. A whole town, a whole country feels lifted up by having a fastest runner or world champion golfer among them, one of them. People smile at him on the street, they elect him to the council, they are happy to shop in his shop. He has put them on the map. Apparently they felt they were not on the map before. People feel forgotten if they are not special, if they are not distinguished from others. Apparently people don't like the feeling of being merely one among a number. But people don't want this to go too far. They wouldn't like it to be established that someone is the best person in the world. That would start to exclude them. Identification with the winner would become impossible, for some reason. People don't feel excluded when it is a case of distinguishing the fastest runner. Why? It appears to be because identifying the fastest runner leaves room for them to be the mostest at something, somehow, somewhere. The fastest runner is adored, loved, because he stands as a symbol of hope of the self being distinguished someday, somehow. And what if the fastest was a woman? The magic of identification would fail for the men. So we have men's and women's sports separate, so the women can identify through the woman, and the men through the man.
No one benefits from this overpay-underpay. The overpay can get nothing out of the overpay because of the limitation of bodily desires, which are all satisfied by fairpay, and the overpaid get the enormous danger and labour of being overpaid amidst underpaid. The underpaid cannot satisfy all their bodily desires, and they also have the super-extreme violence. Everyone benefits from pay justice. The golden age is standing by, waiting for us to connect the few dots. Unhappiness is super-extreme, and the potential for increase in happiness is super-extreme. Please see through the gnats and see the golden camel waiting to take you where you want to go. The golden rule is harder than steel. It is not mocked. People retaliate injury. Injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms. What is the psychological damage of living in all this mess? Everyone is going after just more. Ambition is admired. Ambition has become detached from taking out no more than you put in by your own work, your own sacrifice of time and energy, detached from non-injury, non-theft. It is like 100 children each trying to get 1000 sweets out of 1000 sweets. It means endless labour of grabbing sweets and stopping others grabbing sweets from you. Endless labour. For nothing, since 10 sweets is all the satisfaction your body can take. There is enough for every worker, including housewives and students, to get US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. Plenty, and no endless labour of getting and keeping. World income is US$300 trillion and there are 3 billion workers. Giving yourself freedom to get unlimited fortune for limited work is freedom for others to get unlimited fortune for limited work.
World annual income is from Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258, compounded with global inflation since 1987.
Easy, painless strategic plan to make human life better and safer
Easy, painless strategic plan of action to make human life better and safer.
There is an assumption that nothing can be done to put an end to unlimited power and corruption, or, perhaps it is truer to say, there is a lack of considering the possibility. It looks as though people transfer the child-parent relation to the citizen-leader relationship, it seems that people no more ask the question, can overpower be permanently removed from human life, than a little child asks can bad guardians be removed. [Biology tells us that human evolution has involved the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood [neoteny] and perhaps this applies psychologically too, and we are victims of the carrying over of juvenile obedience [an effective survival strategy for young animals] into adulthood. Many people set up as moral police and few ask to see their license. Whereas animals part from their parents quickly, easily and permanently, we do not. This human characteristic has advantages and disadvantages. False ethics is obedience and disobedience. True ethics is independently doing your best, seeking reality and thus happiness. Some cultures have ceremonies to mark the changeover point. The overpowerful promote obedience, inability to respond, and we have people with up to 100,000 times fair share of power.]
But there are factors in favour of the possibility of putting an end to unlimited power and corruption.
1. It can be powerfully argued that we are heading straight and fast for extinction, by nuclear winter or other means, which presumably not even the overpowered want. [Weaponry power at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and tension, anger, injustice, madness and weaponry power rising.]
2. It can be powerfully argued that the overpowered are not so much active and free in their behaviour, as victims, like people chained to an exercise machine set to steadily accelerate, and, again, it can be argued that this is something that not even the overpowered want. And, whether you believe it or not at this stage, it can be powerfully argued that overpay is necessarily miserable, not happy. Think Shakespeare's Richard III. And miserable in proportion to the size of the overpay.
3. The super-overpaid and super-overpowerful are a very tiny minority. More than 99.99% of people have incomes less than five times the global average. Globally, there are only about 10 million millionaires, 1 in 600+ people, less than 0.2%, and only 100,000 with fortunes over US$20 million, 1 in 60,000+, less than 0.002%.
Can 60,000 people persuade 1 to prefer survival and happiness to misery and extinction? At the moment, the underpaid are unaware of the powerful arguments that overpay is misery, and that extinction is inevitable on the present path. In fact, many of the underpaid, at this stage of 'missed understandings', support and defend overpay, and all the rationalisations for overpay, because they see overpay as a beacon of hope to their underpay and underpower.
4. The 3+ billion adults can be reached, just by word of mouth, in just 31 times the time it takes to reach and inform two people. 4 billion candles can be lit from just one candle in just 31 times the time it takes to light two candles. ['Don't complain about the darkness, light a candle.'] It may take just a month or a year to reach and inform the thinking of two people, just by word of mouth, and therefore just 31 months or years to convince humanity of the benefits of pay justice.
5. History is unanimous on the non-survival of heaps of overwealth, individual, national and imperial, and logic is strong in support of this too. History has fewer examples of equality [pay justice], but history is again unanimous on the strength, sustainability and happiness of equality. [The early period of empires, the Marshall Plan, the high wages philosophy of Henry Ford, MacArthur's land reforms in Japan, etc.] Wisdom and logic are also unanimous on these points. The universal pursuit of unlimited fortune has been by deafness to all voices of wisdom. ['Money like manure is best when spread', Francis Bacon. Spread in proportion to work, which, per-hour, is close to equal.] There is hope in the great length of time we have spent failing to prove that pay injustice causes happiness. Examples abound. The penny may drop. The understanding may break out of the dense thornthicket of human life. Ambition detached from taking out no more than you put in may come to feel self-disrespectful and self-harming.
6. 99% of people are underpaid, and I guess that there are many among the 1% who prefer survival and happiness to overpay and extinction, and that there are some among them who are open or openable to the arguments that these are the options, so the majority is potentially great enough to include many among the 'muscle' of the overpaid, so education can produce a power ratio so extreme that the concrete-mindset overpaid will potentially concede without battle. When opinion is 'in the air', when opinion is 'everywhere', when the leaders know the people are clear and convinced, they have no 'steam'.
7. Word of mouth is hard to police, hard to suppress, so education by word of mouth can spread relatively freely to the point that even the 0.001% concrete-mindset super-overpaid can get a whiff that this might be very, very good 'even' for them. There is no need for an organisation, which the overpaid can burn, bomb, raid, character-assassinate or infiltrate and eviscerate. There is need only for the character to examine with objective self-interest, teach two, and cross the fingers that the average level of character in the human race is at least equal.
8. The herd instinct works for change as more minds are changed, although the herd instinct works against change in the beginning. 10% of people adapted is 100% of people adapted. [Or 99.99% of people adapted. I doubt if the concrete-mindset super-overpaid are susceptible to the herd instinct, but they may be.]
9. People have adapted to startling new ideas many, many times. The idea of handling and using fire must have seemed like purest insanity. ['Money, like fire, is a good slave, a bad master.'] Having a law against murder was a new idea once, which got around, was considered, soaked in, became approved. The idea of being a dashboard away from exploding petrol had its critics. Insurance had to have been learned, considered, weighed and found good. The idea of being on a ball floating in space would have made people queasy. The learning curve is not new to people, and they have conquered it.
10. The possibility of extinction soonish, and the sudden recent acceleration of danger may prick humans awake. We have multiplied our power to kill ourselves by a factor of 60,000 in 50 years, thanks to e=mc2, from power to kill 100,000 in a day to being able to snowball and irradiate the planet. By transport technology we have compressed the violence like a gas by a factor of 250 in the last 200 years, from a day away being 50 miles to being 12,500 miles. An increase of danger factor of 15,000,000. Quite a prick.
11. We can be literally 100 times happier. This 'unbelievable' conclusion follows from very believable premises. Imagine if a government, say, committed the super-extreme injustice of taking 90% of after-tax income permanently off 90% of citizens and giving it all to 1%. There would be 81% loss of happiness just in the financial loss to the 90%. [Money is the joker good, it is good for virtually all good things.] Then there would be the enormous increase in violence [civil war, robbery, murder, mayhem, rape]. Riots have happened in relatively peaceful, egalitarian New Zealand over not getting a 6% payrise. [There have been only two deaths in people-government clashes in NZ.] The 1% would suffer social isolation, endless labour and cost of selfdefense, and losses. [The energy of the underpaid is endless.] The 90% would suffer from their decreased social power, the increased social power of the 1%. All these additional factors could easily raise the loss of happiness from 81% to 99%. Therefore reversing the practice would likely increase happiness by a factor of 100. We have in the real world far greater pay injustice. The 1% get, not 82 times as much, but up to 100,000 times as much. The 9% in the middle get, not fairpay, but between fairpay and 100th of fairpay. The 90% get, not 10th, but between 100th and 10,000th of fairpay. [One billion on less than a dollar a day per family [between 100th and 10,000th of fairpay], three billion on less than $2 a day, below 50th of fairpay.] If equality was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is 98% up in a thin, thin needle going up 100 kilometres, and 90% of the pool is between 1cm and 0.1mm deep. [Global means every locality. Global issues are local issues.] Therefore 100 times happier is not excessive, impractical, unrealistic. Decline of happiness has been imperceptibly slow but over a very long time. [Although the unprecedented horrors of WWII might give clues.]
12. Once there is a 99+% will to pay justice, pay justice can be approximated with very little pain or disturbance of social systems. Everyone in the world can be made equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to earn that fortune [except, probably, suffer absence of parents]. Everyone has done everything to earn that fortune, to do the work that has made the goods that the money represents and buys. The deceased has not earned by own work more than $10 million of that fortune. [100 hours x 50 weeks x 50 years x US$40. Rather surprisingly, all arguments for higher-than-average pay per hour turn out to be fallacious. Hence also, all arguments for lower-than-average pay per hour.] Governments can be responsible for making sure everyone has access to a bank [mobile where appropriate]. [Governments gain by reduced social costs and labour. The extremely rich-poor Middle East spends around 50% of GNP on defense, mostly internal.] No need for the enormous bureaucratic cost of distinguishing the 1% overpaid and 99% underpaid. The 1% are being trimmed by the law anyway. A small department finalising estates and moving the money directly, electronically to all accounts [one per person of course] with the click of a set-up system. The super-overpay accumulated over 3000+ years will gently rain down over two generations, making the overpaid happier and safer. Warmongering and cannonfoddering will cease. [A person with one billion can now hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day. With pay justice, one person will be hardput to hire one soldier.] Or, requiring even less administration and intervention, money supply can be increased 1% per month by adding equal shares of 1% of the money supply to all accounts. The inflation effect reduces overpay more than the extra money raises it, the extra money raises underpay more than the inflation effect lowers it. Inflation is not bad when the underpaid are getting more [mostly much more] in the extra money than losing in the inflation. Once the undue influence of the super-overpaid is gone, and once people see the benefits of pay justice, finer adjustments towards pay justice can be made.
13. This plan is immediately empowering, immediately begins to erode the passivity thrust upon the underpaid. And one can do it until a better plan comes along. Action in a plan in which one has confidence is already a happiness.
14. There is enormous strategic power and efficiency in a plan that strikes at the root. 'There are a 1000 striking at the branches of the tree of problems for every one who is striking at the root', Henry Thoreau. Small things are easier for people. Can't see the forest for the leaves. Only those who see the big picture are awake. Time spent in committee is inversely proportional to the importance of the subject. In other words, we reverse-prioritise. To our enormous cost. If you try to destroy a tree by cutting at branches, the rest of the tree is growing while you labour at one branch. The world tree of problems is growing faster than people are succeeding at cutting branches. If you strike at the root, you are attacking all the branches at once. The tree gathers itself for your convenience into the trunk. Cutting the tree at the trunk removes the tree permanently. But we have limited mental vision of a big, big world, and branches appear in front of our eye. It appears that a branch problem is plenty big enough for the efforts of one person. We think: If a branch problem is very big, how big must the root problem be? And we bite off a problem plenty big enough for our energies. But attacking the tree at trunk or root level is far easier. If we can resist the temptation to attack at branch level, and instead follow the branch back to the trunk, every step we take on that route from branches towards the trunk increases the number of branches our labours attack, increases our power and efficiency, shrinks the problems. We would think someone mad who tried to remove a tree by cutting branches, when the trunk is right there at ground level, offering itself gathered into one. It would be mad to remove just the one leaf of a poisonous tree that poisoned someone. Again and again, the root of problems is pay injustice, whether the problem is warmongering, government failure to respond to the will of the people, saving the whales, the war on marijuana, dangerous cars and pharmaceuticals, suppression of cheaper solutions, environmental pollution, crime, corruption, hidden agendas, strikes, racial 'tensions', religious wars. [Races and religions live in amity where there is no pay injustice, where there is no theft of wealth and power along religious or racial lines.] None enjoy unless all enjoy. Money is a joker good, good for everything, and money is power, so pay injustice is at the root of everything. Wealth [overpay] breeds insolence, said Theognis 2500 years ago. Limited mental vision, falsely distinguishing self-interest from the interest of everyone despite the connectedness of everyone, works against all enjoying, and therefore against any enjoying. What made Hitler think he was strong enough to steal the world was extraordinary failure to grasp the power of others. It is the same failure, different only in degree, that lies behind every arrogant government, corporation and group, and it is the same failure behind striking at branches instead of root. It requires mental discipline to resist striking at branches. Knowledge is power. Truth is perspective. Happiness depends entirely on truth, on perspective, on seeing the whole tree. How much governing is a government unable to do because it is fighting wars [within government and business, the nation and worldwide] to get or keep an unfair share of power? The goods of the world gather themselves in money. The portability and non-perishability of money, increased by electronic money, work against us. How much could a person steal if there were only goods? But this gathering in money can work for us if we focus on pay injustice, if we focus on the ricocheting deathlessness of the greatest injury, overpay and love of overpay. Grabbing from nature is harmless, because nature gives freely. Grabbing from each other is all harm, because others do not give freely. This root distinction is all we need get to remove 99+% of human unhappiness. This plan allows people to strike at the global root at home, just by talking with two friends. What follows, if it is true, that people fight injuries [legal and illegal]? Pay injustice is the huge raging bear in the chinashop of human culture. When it is gone, we can begin to pick up the pieces.
Force has achieved nothing. 3000 years of force have not prevented the steady growth of overpay-underpay and the growth of violence [war, crime and weaponry] that is caused by pay injustice. The underpaid have lost battles, they have never lost a war, all empires have fallen, but the underpaid have never prevented, or even in general tried to prevent, the regrowth of pay injustice after revolutions. There are two American dreams. One is the Jeffersonian dream of permanent prevention of tyranny, the permanent survival of democracy and freedom, liberty and justice for all, by prevention of 'wealth concentration', [overpay-underpay, pay injustice, unlimited fortunes for what is necessarily limited contribution by own work]. The other is freedom to pursue unlimited fortunes. The 'addicted' or just thoughtless gambler is induced to part with his wealth by the dream of wealth. 99.99% of gamblers could produce the same effect in their lives by writing a cheque to the casino and leaving. And post-revolution humanity has been the same. Our ideas are always at the root of our behaviour, and force is but a doomed attempt to graft behaviour on a dominant rootstock.
Therefore, education, quite free from the slightest element of force, including 'moral' pressure, is the only option we have. Education in these points has been nigh zero. The arguments against overpay have never, to my of-course limited knowledge, been formulated before. Few if anyone has suspected, sufficiently strongly to seek them out, that there are powerful arguments in favour of pay justice. Those who have spoken out against 'Mammon' have never given reasons, or the reasons have been suppressed by the overpaid. The very idea of overpay is hardly in the vocabulary of thought. The powerful arguments that it is true that the gambler loses whether s/he wins or loses money should be given so that humanity can have them. At the least, on the Keynesian principle of: Because they cannot hear sense, does that mean I should speak nonsense to them? We cannot assume that the resistance, the 3000-year-old mindset, is unconquerable. As powerful as the arguments are that there are large handicaps to human realism, we cannot assume, we do not have the luxury of assuming, that they are unconquerable. The possibility of extinction by nuclear or other weaponry or technology may be the very thing that will create, that is creating, the opening of minds to new mindsets. So there is hope even in the possibility of extinction soonish.
The disadvantages of underpay are obvious to all. It is the conviction that overpay is good for the overpaid, the conviction that more money is always good, that has driven overpaid and underpaid through the gore of human history for 3000+ years. If this conviction can be overthrown, by study of reality, the way is cleared to the human embracing of pay justice.
One strategy that could be used, perhaps is used, on gamblers is to show them the house and car they would have had if they had not gambled. The world-average family pay is US$200,000, or US$300,000 if there is a student in the house. The world-average worker pay is US$100,000 a year, including housewives and students. World annual income is US$300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion workers, including housewives and students. [World annual income [purchasing power parity figures] is taken from Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258, compounded with global inflation since 1987.]
People think they are pretty happy, happy enough. You can apparently cook a frog without it noticing if you raise the temperature slow enough. Decline of happiness has been imperceptibly slow, but it has been over 3000+ years. Pay justice is of course equal pay for equal work. We have family pay for a year's work from $30 to $30,000,000,000. That is, from 10,000th to 100,000 times average. A pay injustice factor of one billion. A violence factor of one billion. A brutality factor of one billion. A disinformation factor of one billion. A waste and destruction factor of one billion. For instance, technological progress would have gone ahead, will go ahead something like 100 times faster with pay justice. 90% of tertiary minds we have are tied up in the myriad consequences of pay injustice violence, in the military-industrial complex, in the courts, police, hospitals, universities, government, business. And 90% of the tertiary minds we have are too poor to become scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, etc.
Arguments against the goodness and happiness of overpay.
1. Violence is proportional to pay injustice and inversely proportional to distance between people. Violence gets to everyone. Violence gets everywhere people get. No one is exempt, no one is safe. Although violence is localised and temporary, it is unconfined. And people move about. Honey attracts bears. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. Empires attract vandals. Overpay implies underpay, relative and absolute. Overpay is attacked by greater and equal overpay as well as by underpay. However great the overpay, it is finite, and meanwhile the energy of the underpaid is endless, so every overpay must fall. The underpaid can only throw grains of sand, but they can throw them forever. [Ezra Pound's epithet for the poor, unkillable. And anyway, the rich need the poor to do the work.] And the underpaid are often of mind to throw what they can. Sand erodes rocks. Every underpay is constantly sending the most ambitious, hardest fighters, the next Mafia. And meanwhile the rich get 'soft'. [Conditions for political prisoners under the Russian monarchy were kindly. Rich nations hobble their anti-crime power with decencies.] The overpaid are endlessly in a painful, hopeless bind: they have to make their subordinates as strong as possible to defend them, and as weak as possible not to attack them. Every time the overpaid smack down their subordinates, they increase their own danger. And every time they strengthen their subordinates, they increase their danger. Whenever the overpaid keep the slaves down, they weaken themselves against attack. Eg, the American South. Contrast the Roman Empire, which was 70% slaves at one point, but the slaves were educated, therefore pro-Roman. If soldiers don't get enough loot, they may go over to the other side. Alexander the so-called Great said he could always defeat a town with a golden arrow [bribes to the disaffected]. Both underpay and the golden carrot of overpay are enormous stimuli to war and crime. The super-overpaid have always been falling like drops in a fountain. We underestimate their numbers because people are not interested by the fallen.
2. The overpaid are isolated from the human tribe in freedom and amity. The feeling of belonging to a group is one of the greatest determinants of human happiness. The absolute hermit is rare. The World Happiness Index is constantly finding poor countries happiest. This is not because of their poverty, but because of their high level of belonging, of social trust, of being together with others without fear. Even under attack or oppression, they have company. There are many people of equal wealth among the poor, very few of equal wealth among the rich. 'Beggars fear no thieves.' Among equals, power is equal, so theft has lower chance of success.
3. There is rapidly decreasing marginal utility with overpay, because desires are limited by the body. The super-rich cannot sit in more comfortable chairs, eat more delicious food, occupy more room, wear more clothes and shoes, have more sex, drugs and rock and roll than the fairpaid. They can spend more but they can't consume more. The underpaid glamourise overpay because they have desires unsatisfied, they have no consciousness of satiety. This keeps the stardust bright. The overpaid are not rolling in delights proportional to the size of their overpay. Gluttony is a vice, not because it is distasteful, but because it is a failure. Satisfaction waits on appetite.
'[Wo]mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to [wo]mankind', JFK.
There is an assumption that nothing can be done to put an end to unlimited power and corruption, or, perhaps it is truer to say, there is a lack of considering the possibility. It looks as though people transfer the child-parent relation to the citizen-leader relationship, it seems that people no more ask the question, can overpower be permanently removed from human life, than a little child asks can bad guardians be removed. [Biology tells us that human evolution has involved the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood [neoteny] and perhaps this applies psychologically too, and we are victims of the carrying over of juvenile obedience [an effective survival strategy for young animals] into adulthood. Many people set up as moral police and few ask to see their license. Whereas animals part from their parents quickly, easily and permanently, we do not. This human characteristic has advantages and disadvantages. False ethics is obedience and disobedience. True ethics is independently doing your best, seeking reality and thus happiness. Some cultures have ceremonies to mark the changeover point. The overpowerful promote obedience, inability to respond, and we have people with up to 100,000 times fair share of power.]
But there are factors in favour of the possibility of putting an end to unlimited power and corruption.
1. It can be powerfully argued that we are heading straight and fast for extinction, by nuclear winter or other means, which presumably not even the overpowered want. [Weaponry power at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and tension, anger, injustice, madness and weaponry power rising.]
2. It can be powerfully argued that the overpowered are not so much active and free in their behaviour, as victims, like people chained to an exercise machine set to steadily accelerate, and, again, it can be argued that this is something that not even the overpowered want. And, whether you believe it or not at this stage, it can be powerfully argued that overpay is necessarily miserable, not happy. Think Shakespeare's Richard III. And miserable in proportion to the size of the overpay.
3. The super-overpaid and super-overpowerful are a very tiny minority. More than 99.99% of people have incomes less than five times the global average. Globally, there are only about 10 million millionaires, 1 in 600+ people, less than 0.2%, and only 100,000 with fortunes over US$20 million, 1 in 60,000+, less than 0.002%.
Can 60,000 people persuade 1 to prefer survival and happiness to misery and extinction? At the moment, the underpaid are unaware of the powerful arguments that overpay is misery, and that extinction is inevitable on the present path. In fact, many of the underpaid, at this stage of 'missed understandings', support and defend overpay, and all the rationalisations for overpay, because they see overpay as a beacon of hope to their underpay and underpower.
4. The 3+ billion adults can be reached, just by word of mouth, in just 31 times the time it takes to reach and inform two people. 4 billion candles can be lit from just one candle in just 31 times the time it takes to light two candles. ['Don't complain about the darkness, light a candle.'] It may take just a month or a year to reach and inform the thinking of two people, just by word of mouth, and therefore just 31 months or years to convince humanity of the benefits of pay justice.
5. History is unanimous on the non-survival of heaps of overwealth, individual, national and imperial, and logic is strong in support of this too. History has fewer examples of equality [pay justice], but history is again unanimous on the strength, sustainability and happiness of equality. [The early period of empires, the Marshall Plan, the high wages philosophy of Henry Ford, MacArthur's land reforms in Japan, etc.] Wisdom and logic are also unanimous on these points. The universal pursuit of unlimited fortune has been by deafness to all voices of wisdom. ['Money like manure is best when spread', Francis Bacon. Spread in proportion to work, which, per-hour, is close to equal.] There is hope in the great length of time we have spent failing to prove that pay injustice causes happiness. Examples abound. The penny may drop. The understanding may break out of the dense thornthicket of human life. Ambition detached from taking out no more than you put in may come to feel self-disrespectful and self-harming.
6. 99% of people are underpaid, and I guess that there are many among the 1% who prefer survival and happiness to overpay and extinction, and that there are some among them who are open or openable to the arguments that these are the options, so the majority is potentially great enough to include many among the 'muscle' of the overpaid, so education can produce a power ratio so extreme that the concrete-mindset overpaid will potentially concede without battle. When opinion is 'in the air', when opinion is 'everywhere', when the leaders know the people are clear and convinced, they have no 'steam'.
7. Word of mouth is hard to police, hard to suppress, so education by word of mouth can spread relatively freely to the point that even the 0.001% concrete-mindset super-overpaid can get a whiff that this might be very, very good 'even' for them. There is no need for an organisation, which the overpaid can burn, bomb, raid, character-assassinate or infiltrate and eviscerate. There is need only for the character to examine with objective self-interest, teach two, and cross the fingers that the average level of character in the human race is at least equal.
8. The herd instinct works for change as more minds are changed, although the herd instinct works against change in the beginning. 10% of people adapted is 100% of people adapted. [Or 99.99% of people adapted. I doubt if the concrete-mindset super-overpaid are susceptible to the herd instinct, but they may be.]
9. People have adapted to startling new ideas many, many times. The idea of handling and using fire must have seemed like purest insanity. ['Money, like fire, is a good slave, a bad master.'] Having a law against murder was a new idea once, which got around, was considered, soaked in, became approved. The idea of being a dashboard away from exploding petrol had its critics. Insurance had to have been learned, considered, weighed and found good. The idea of being on a ball floating in space would have made people queasy. The learning curve is not new to people, and they have conquered it.
10. The possibility of extinction soonish, and the sudden recent acceleration of danger may prick humans awake. We have multiplied our power to kill ourselves by a factor of 60,000 in 50 years, thanks to e=mc2, from power to kill 100,000 in a day to being able to snowball and irradiate the planet. By transport technology we have compressed the violence like a gas by a factor of 250 in the last 200 years, from a day away being 50 miles to being 12,500 miles. An increase of danger factor of 15,000,000. Quite a prick.
11. We can be literally 100 times happier. This 'unbelievable' conclusion follows from very believable premises. Imagine if a government, say, committed the super-extreme injustice of taking 90% of after-tax income permanently off 90% of citizens and giving it all to 1%. There would be 81% loss of happiness just in the financial loss to the 90%. [Money is the joker good, it is good for virtually all good things.] Then there would be the enormous increase in violence [civil war, robbery, murder, mayhem, rape]. Riots have happened in relatively peaceful, egalitarian New Zealand over not getting a 6% payrise. [There have been only two deaths in people-government clashes in NZ.] The 1% would suffer social isolation, endless labour and cost of selfdefense, and losses. [The energy of the underpaid is endless.] The 90% would suffer from their decreased social power, the increased social power of the 1%. All these additional factors could easily raise the loss of happiness from 81% to 99%. Therefore reversing the practice would likely increase happiness by a factor of 100. We have in the real world far greater pay injustice. The 1% get, not 82 times as much, but up to 100,000 times as much. The 9% in the middle get, not fairpay, but between fairpay and 100th of fairpay. The 90% get, not 10th, but between 100th and 10,000th of fairpay. [One billion on less than a dollar a day per family [between 100th and 10,000th of fairpay], three billion on less than $2 a day, below 50th of fairpay.] If equality was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is 98% up in a thin, thin needle going up 100 kilometres, and 90% of the pool is between 1cm and 0.1mm deep. [Global means every locality. Global issues are local issues.] Therefore 100 times happier is not excessive, impractical, unrealistic. Decline of happiness has been imperceptibly slow but over a very long time. [Although the unprecedented horrors of WWII might give clues.]
12. Once there is a 99+% will to pay justice, pay justice can be approximated with very little pain or disturbance of social systems. Everyone in the world can be made equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to earn that fortune [except, probably, suffer absence of parents]. Everyone has done everything to earn that fortune, to do the work that has made the goods that the money represents and buys. The deceased has not earned by own work more than $10 million of that fortune. [100 hours x 50 weeks x 50 years x US$40. Rather surprisingly, all arguments for higher-than-average pay per hour turn out to be fallacious. Hence also, all arguments for lower-than-average pay per hour.] Governments can be responsible for making sure everyone has access to a bank [mobile where appropriate]. [Governments gain by reduced social costs and labour. The extremely rich-poor Middle East spends around 50% of GNP on defense, mostly internal.] No need for the enormous bureaucratic cost of distinguishing the 1% overpaid and 99% underpaid. The 1% are being trimmed by the law anyway. A small department finalising estates and moving the money directly, electronically to all accounts [one per person of course] with the click of a set-up system. The super-overpay accumulated over 3000+ years will gently rain down over two generations, making the overpaid happier and safer. Warmongering and cannonfoddering will cease. [A person with one billion can now hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day. With pay justice, one person will be hardput to hire one soldier.] Or, requiring even less administration and intervention, money supply can be increased 1% per month by adding equal shares of 1% of the money supply to all accounts. The inflation effect reduces overpay more than the extra money raises it, the extra money raises underpay more than the inflation effect lowers it. Inflation is not bad when the underpaid are getting more [mostly much more] in the extra money than losing in the inflation. Once the undue influence of the super-overpaid is gone, and once people see the benefits of pay justice, finer adjustments towards pay justice can be made.
13. This plan is immediately empowering, immediately begins to erode the passivity thrust upon the underpaid. And one can do it until a better plan comes along. Action in a plan in which one has confidence is already a happiness.
14. There is enormous strategic power and efficiency in a plan that strikes at the root. 'There are a 1000 striking at the branches of the tree of problems for every one who is striking at the root', Henry Thoreau. Small things are easier for people. Can't see the forest for the leaves. Only those who see the big picture are awake. Time spent in committee is inversely proportional to the importance of the subject. In other words, we reverse-prioritise. To our enormous cost. If you try to destroy a tree by cutting at branches, the rest of the tree is growing while you labour at one branch. The world tree of problems is growing faster than people are succeeding at cutting branches. If you strike at the root, you are attacking all the branches at once. The tree gathers itself for your convenience into the trunk. Cutting the tree at the trunk removes the tree permanently. But we have limited mental vision of a big, big world, and branches appear in front of our eye. It appears that a branch problem is plenty big enough for the efforts of one person. We think: If a branch problem is very big, how big must the root problem be? And we bite off a problem plenty big enough for our energies. But attacking the tree at trunk or root level is far easier. If we can resist the temptation to attack at branch level, and instead follow the branch back to the trunk, every step we take on that route from branches towards the trunk increases the number of branches our labours attack, increases our power and efficiency, shrinks the problems. We would think someone mad who tried to remove a tree by cutting branches, when the trunk is right there at ground level, offering itself gathered into one. It would be mad to remove just the one leaf of a poisonous tree that poisoned someone. Again and again, the root of problems is pay injustice, whether the problem is warmongering, government failure to respond to the will of the people, saving the whales, the war on marijuana, dangerous cars and pharmaceuticals, suppression of cheaper solutions, environmental pollution, crime, corruption, hidden agendas, strikes, racial 'tensions', religious wars. [Races and religions live in amity where there is no pay injustice, where there is no theft of wealth and power along religious or racial lines.] None enjoy unless all enjoy. Money is a joker good, good for everything, and money is power, so pay injustice is at the root of everything. Wealth [overpay] breeds insolence, said Theognis 2500 years ago. Limited mental vision, falsely distinguishing self-interest from the interest of everyone despite the connectedness of everyone, works against all enjoying, and therefore against any enjoying. What made Hitler think he was strong enough to steal the world was extraordinary failure to grasp the power of others. It is the same failure, different only in degree, that lies behind every arrogant government, corporation and group, and it is the same failure behind striking at branches instead of root. It requires mental discipline to resist striking at branches. Knowledge is power. Truth is perspective. Happiness depends entirely on truth, on perspective, on seeing the whole tree. How much governing is a government unable to do because it is fighting wars [within government and business, the nation and worldwide] to get or keep an unfair share of power? The goods of the world gather themselves in money. The portability and non-perishability of money, increased by electronic money, work against us. How much could a person steal if there were only goods? But this gathering in money can work for us if we focus on pay injustice, if we focus on the ricocheting deathlessness of the greatest injury, overpay and love of overpay. Grabbing from nature is harmless, because nature gives freely. Grabbing from each other is all harm, because others do not give freely. This root distinction is all we need get to remove 99+% of human unhappiness. This plan allows people to strike at the global root at home, just by talking with two friends. What follows, if it is true, that people fight injuries [legal and illegal]? Pay injustice is the huge raging bear in the chinashop of human culture. When it is gone, we can begin to pick up the pieces.
Force has achieved nothing. 3000 years of force have not prevented the steady growth of overpay-underpay and the growth of violence [war, crime and weaponry] that is caused by pay injustice. The underpaid have lost battles, they have never lost a war, all empires have fallen, but the underpaid have never prevented, or even in general tried to prevent, the regrowth of pay injustice after revolutions. There are two American dreams. One is the Jeffersonian dream of permanent prevention of tyranny, the permanent survival of democracy and freedom, liberty and justice for all, by prevention of 'wealth concentration', [overpay-underpay, pay injustice, unlimited fortunes for what is necessarily limited contribution by own work]. The other is freedom to pursue unlimited fortunes. The 'addicted' or just thoughtless gambler is induced to part with his wealth by the dream of wealth. 99.99% of gamblers could produce the same effect in their lives by writing a cheque to the casino and leaving. And post-revolution humanity has been the same. Our ideas are always at the root of our behaviour, and force is but a doomed attempt to graft behaviour on a dominant rootstock.
Therefore, education, quite free from the slightest element of force, including 'moral' pressure, is the only option we have. Education in these points has been nigh zero. The arguments against overpay have never, to my of-course limited knowledge, been formulated before. Few if anyone has suspected, sufficiently strongly to seek them out, that there are powerful arguments in favour of pay justice. Those who have spoken out against 'Mammon' have never given reasons, or the reasons have been suppressed by the overpaid. The very idea of overpay is hardly in the vocabulary of thought. The powerful arguments that it is true that the gambler loses whether s/he wins or loses money should be given so that humanity can have them. At the least, on the Keynesian principle of: Because they cannot hear sense, does that mean I should speak nonsense to them? We cannot assume that the resistance, the 3000-year-old mindset, is unconquerable. As powerful as the arguments are that there are large handicaps to human realism, we cannot assume, we do not have the luxury of assuming, that they are unconquerable. The possibility of extinction by nuclear or other weaponry or technology may be the very thing that will create, that is creating, the opening of minds to new mindsets. So there is hope even in the possibility of extinction soonish.
The disadvantages of underpay are obvious to all. It is the conviction that overpay is good for the overpaid, the conviction that more money is always good, that has driven overpaid and underpaid through the gore of human history for 3000+ years. If this conviction can be overthrown, by study of reality, the way is cleared to the human embracing of pay justice.
One strategy that could be used, perhaps is used, on gamblers is to show them the house and car they would have had if they had not gambled. The world-average family pay is US$200,000, or US$300,000 if there is a student in the house. The world-average worker pay is US$100,000 a year, including housewives and students. World annual income is US$300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion workers, including housewives and students. [World annual income [purchasing power parity figures] is taken from Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258, compounded with global inflation since 1987.]
People think they are pretty happy, happy enough. You can apparently cook a frog without it noticing if you raise the temperature slow enough. Decline of happiness has been imperceptibly slow, but it has been over 3000+ years. Pay justice is of course equal pay for equal work. We have family pay for a year's work from $30 to $30,000,000,000. That is, from 10,000th to 100,000 times average. A pay injustice factor of one billion. A violence factor of one billion. A brutality factor of one billion. A disinformation factor of one billion. A waste and destruction factor of one billion. For instance, technological progress would have gone ahead, will go ahead something like 100 times faster with pay justice. 90% of tertiary minds we have are tied up in the myriad consequences of pay injustice violence, in the military-industrial complex, in the courts, police, hospitals, universities, government, business. And 90% of the tertiary minds we have are too poor to become scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, etc.
Arguments against the goodness and happiness of overpay.
1. Violence is proportional to pay injustice and inversely proportional to distance between people. Violence gets to everyone. Violence gets everywhere people get. No one is exempt, no one is safe. Although violence is localised and temporary, it is unconfined. And people move about. Honey attracts bears. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. Empires attract vandals. Overpay implies underpay, relative and absolute. Overpay is attacked by greater and equal overpay as well as by underpay. However great the overpay, it is finite, and meanwhile the energy of the underpaid is endless, so every overpay must fall. The underpaid can only throw grains of sand, but they can throw them forever. [Ezra Pound's epithet for the poor, unkillable. And anyway, the rich need the poor to do the work.] And the underpaid are often of mind to throw what they can. Sand erodes rocks. Every underpay is constantly sending the most ambitious, hardest fighters, the next Mafia. And meanwhile the rich get 'soft'. [Conditions for political prisoners under the Russian monarchy were kindly. Rich nations hobble their anti-crime power with decencies.] The overpaid are endlessly in a painful, hopeless bind: they have to make their subordinates as strong as possible to defend them, and as weak as possible not to attack them. Every time the overpaid smack down their subordinates, they increase their own danger. And every time they strengthen their subordinates, they increase their danger. Whenever the overpaid keep the slaves down, they weaken themselves against attack. Eg, the American South. Contrast the Roman Empire, which was 70% slaves at one point, but the slaves were educated, therefore pro-Roman. If soldiers don't get enough loot, they may go over to the other side. Alexander the so-called Great said he could always defeat a town with a golden arrow [bribes to the disaffected]. Both underpay and the golden carrot of overpay are enormous stimuli to war and crime. The super-overpaid have always been falling like drops in a fountain. We underestimate their numbers because people are not interested by the fallen.
2. The overpaid are isolated from the human tribe in freedom and amity. The feeling of belonging to a group is one of the greatest determinants of human happiness. The absolute hermit is rare. The World Happiness Index is constantly finding poor countries happiest. This is not because of their poverty, but because of their high level of belonging, of social trust, of being together with others without fear. Even under attack or oppression, they have company. There are many people of equal wealth among the poor, very few of equal wealth among the rich. 'Beggars fear no thieves.' Among equals, power is equal, so theft has lower chance of success.
3. There is rapidly decreasing marginal utility with overpay, because desires are limited by the body. The super-rich cannot sit in more comfortable chairs, eat more delicious food, occupy more room, wear more clothes and shoes, have more sex, drugs and rock and roll than the fairpaid. They can spend more but they can't consume more. The underpaid glamourise overpay because they have desires unsatisfied, they have no consciousness of satiety. This keeps the stardust bright. The overpaid are not rolling in delights proportional to the size of their overpay. Gluttony is a vice, not because it is distasteful, but because it is a failure. Satisfaction waits on appetite.
'[Wo]mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to [wo]mankind', JFK.
100 times happier?! No way! Pie in the sky! - Yes way! Pie on your plate!
100 times happier? No way! Pie in the sky! Yes way! Pie on your plate!
What if we have been getting unhappier for a very long time, so slowly that one lifetime cannot detect the overall fall? Where did I read that if you raise the temperature slowly enough, a live frog or something will cook without noticing?
Global fair pay for the family working at world-average hardness is US$200,000 [two workers, including, if applicable, a houseperson].
There is enough world income to pay every worker, including housewives and tertiary students, US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. That is, every worker, including housewives and students, is producing US$100,000 worth of goods or services per year, or $40 worth of goods or services an hour. [The whole of society benefits from study, so students are in justice paid, by society, for studying.] World annual income is US$300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion workers, including housewives and tertiary students. US$100,000 per worker.
The overpaid have been getting more overpaid and the underpaid more underpaid for 1000s of years.
No one has bothered to, or has been able to, determine how much fairpay is, so no one has known how much less than fairpay they are getting. People just go for some more money, when they feel that they are being underpaid, but no one has known how much underpaid they are.
The range of pay for a year's work is from $30 to $30,000,000,000 [billion].
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, and we have pay from x to 1,000,000,000x for equal work, from 10,000th the fairpay to 100,000 times the fairpay.
Pay justice ['equality'] is one of the most important causes of happiness, pay injustice one of the biggest causes of unhappiness, for both overpaid and underpaid.
Violence [war and crime] is proportional to pay injustice.
Violence gets to everyone, overpaid and underpaid.
Violence is ever-growing, even without growth of pay injustice.
Pay injustice is growing.
The body is limited, finite, and bodily desires are limited, finite. When the tank is full, further petrol is useless, valueless to the vehicle. Drinking water after thirst is satisfied becomes torture.
Money is good, it buys most good things. It buys most necessities and millions of desires, major and minor. Money is the joker good, it is good for most things.
The pool of social wealth is limited, finite, not infinite. Number of workers is finite, number of hours of work is finite, nature's bounty is great but finite, quantity of materials is finite. Individual contribution by work is finite. So unlimitation of fortunes is unjust, is overpay, is theft, creates underpay. No one can take out more than they put in without others having to take out less than they put in. The size of the social pool of wealth can expand, with machines, with IT, with discoveries of more of nature's bounty, for example, but it is always finite. Individual contribution to the pool of wealth is always finite, so pay can always exceed fairpay.
There has never been a rational determination of what exactly constitutes pay justice. Pay justice is equal pay for equal work. But there has never been an exact determination of what constitutes work and what doesn't. People have been paid for many things that are not work, not personal sacrifice of time and energy. Pay for no work for some means work for no pay for others. Greed is wanting or allowing oneself to be paid for no work, wanting or allowing oneself to be paid for no work, for things that are not work, not personal sacrifice, as well as for one's work. Greed is love of overpay.
Attacks on overpay are proportional to the size of the overpay. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. Being attacked is not happiness.
An overfortune, however great it is, is finite, limited. But the attacks on it are endless. Underpay, theft of money, which is the joker good, is the theft of everything, so it gives endless energy to attack. So every overfortune is necessarily doomed, as history shows. The underpaid can only throw grains of sand, but sand erodes rocks. The underpaid have lost battles, they have never lost a war. Every empire has grown, though small, with pay justice, and every empire, though large, has fallen with pay injustice, overpay and underpay.
Every overfortune is eroded by the ceaseless cost of its defence, and so is driven to get money by more taking, which increases the underpay, which increases the speed of its fall.
Every time a heap of overpay [individual, national or imperial] is brought down, heaps of overpay start growing again, because no one has known where overpay starts, no one has known wherre to draw the line.
Overpay is miserable, because overpay cannot provide more satisfaction, because bodily desires are finite, and because overpay is always under attack [from both underpaid and overpaid]. Even if the overpaid manage to die a natural death, they have been forced to continuously defend the overfortune.
The overpaid are always in a hopeless, stressful bind: they are forced to make their subordinates strong to defend them, and weak to not attack them. They must always pay them well to quell the subordinates' inclination to attack them, and always pay them less to keep them too weak to attack them. They must find subordinates aggressive enough to be good defenders for them, and not aggressive enough to want to attack them. Every time they whack the subordinates down increases the 'steam' of the subordinates to attack them. Every time they lift the subordinates up, they increase the power of the subordinates to attack them. There is no balance point between the two. Every strength to defend them is strength to attack them. Every weakness is weakness to defend them. The overpaid person needs maximum strength and maximum weakness in their subordinates.
The overpaid are isolated, even from their subordinates and friends. But belonging to a community in amity and acceptance is one of the major causes of happiness. Loss of the human tribe is one of the greatest disasters, or is the greatest disaster to the human spirit. We are social animals.
It is not love of money that is the root of virtually all evils, but love of overpay that is the root of virtually all evils of humanity. Love of overpay is love of getting pay disproportionate to, in excess of, personal work, sacrifice of time and energy.
Money is power, power to rake money. This aggravates pay injustice, accelerates pay injustice.
Self-earned money is always good. Working 10% harder and getting 10% more is perfectly good, perfectly harmless to oneself. One is putting in more and getting out proportionately more. There is no overpay, no theft. There is no creation of underpay, no injury, no creation of enemies. Other-earned money is always bad, it is theft, it creates enemies.
Injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms. And, unlike atoms, injury increases with every ricochet.
People have thought money is good, and therefore they have thought that more money is always better. Self-earned money is always good, other-earned money is always bad, it always comes with an angry, a righteously angry person attached.
Because people have thought money is good, they have supported and allowed unlimited fortunes.
The more underpaid people are, the more that overfortune is a beacon of hope for them. The more underpaid people are, the more they dote on overpay.
The more that people are underpaid, the more they have gone for just more, and the less they have gone for getting out as much as they have put in. The more they have been underpaid, and the higher overpay has been, the more they have wanted overpay. Arguing from equality, they have argued that if anyone can have a superfortune, they can too. Pay injustice promotes the practice of pay injustice with everyone. Fairpay seems like injustice as long as there is overpay. Meanwhile, the overpaid are driven to seek more money by the endless costs of selfdefence. So no one has been interested in pursuing fairpay.
Everyone has supported all the ways that support and promote pay injustice. The underpaid have supported them because they can repair their underpay. The overpaid have supported them because they, more than anyone, fail to suspect that more money is not proportionately good. The overpaid are often those who least can imagine the effect of injury on others. Hitler thought that stealing Europe was a good idea. His unconsciousness of others was extreme, or total. Most people suspect that trying to steal Europe would not be a good idea.
The consciousness of the danger to themselves of themselves being overpaid has inhibited many people from venturing there, has made people turn away from pursuit of overpay or even of fairpay. Failure to distinguish money and other-earned money has made them think all money is bad. This has aided overpay. They have left the field more open for the overpaid. Similarly, failure to distinguish private property and other-earned private property has led people to abandon private property, or to fail to oppose the taking of private property, which has made it easier for the greedy to amass private property [eg, Communism].
Some people came down on the side of private property good, because they knew there was something good about private property, others came down on the side of private property bad, because they knew there was something bad about private property. And they have fought each other.
Self-earned money is perfectly good, it is taking out as much as you put in. It is as innocent and right, as spiritual, as godly, as good as a bear fishing and a bear eating.
Because of this all-or-nothing mindset about money, people have been put in a fog, in which they have been unable to pursue the identification of pay justice, the line between self-earned and other-earned money. This fog has been so dense that people have been forced to assume that what a person gets is what they have earned, although people get from $30 to $30,000,000,000 a year, from 10,000th to 100,000 times the world-average pay per year. [The figures for inequality, 'wealth disparity', we have heard have greatly muted the reality, because the figures are for groups of people, within which higher and lower pays are mixed.] People have been unable to say that greed is bad [destructive of happiness]. People have been unable to form the ideas of overpay and underpay.
There are so many rationalisations for higher-than-average pay per hour that people have been unable to decide that there has to be something wrong with extremely high incomes. When these rationalisations are sifted for rationality, it turns out that there are no reasons for higher-than-average pay per hour. Tertiary students should be paid for studying, because it is work, sacrifice of time and energy. [Society has the right to decide how much studying it wants to buy.] Both the overpaid and the underpaid have supported these rationalisations for higher-than-average pay per hour, the overpaid have supported them because they just want more, and whatever argument, true or false, helps them get it, is good to them, the underpaid have supported them because they hope to reduce their underpay by them.
The rationalisations for overpay make the underpaid more underpaid, because the overpaid profit from the rationalisations far more. Every opening for pay for no work is an opening for work for no pay for others. While the underpaid may gain something from them, they lose more. Their net financial gain is negative. Every unjust little straw the underpaid get, in order to suck on the milkshake of wealth, the overpaid get an unjust big straw. Only work adds to the pool of wealth, only work entitles to take out.
It may seem better if one is free to take out as much as one can, than to be limited to taking out only as much as you put in, but being limited to taking out only as much as you put in also limits everyone else to the same.
Before job specialisation, division of labour, everyone did their own work and consumed their own production. Pay injustice was impossible, except by obvious theft. Job specialisation required a pooling of products of work, so that everyone could get a mix of goods. This made it possible to get out more than you put in, making theft, making violence, ever-increasing, as both sides tried to prevail, with ever bigger weapons.
With job specialisation, trade was necessary. With trade came money, a convenient artificial barter item with the advantages of nonperishability, portability and divisibility. If you grew lettuces, and needed a wheelbarrow, it was hard to find someone who made wheelbarrows and wanted 100 lettuces, and your lettuces perished on the way. It was much easier to find people who wanted lettuces, and to exchange them for money, and then find someone making wheelbarrows, and give money for one.
But it was here that the transaction imp stepped in. It is impossible to determine the exact value of anything [the exact amount of work, of sacrifice of time and energy, that has gone into the product]. So the workvalues of any two things exchanged have to be x and x+y. So every transaction has to be a fair-exchange-no-robbery [the x's] plus a robbery [the y]. So theft is built in to every transaction, even if the parties intend no theft. And the theft is invisible, unobvious. Over trillions of transactions over time, very few will break even, most will net gain or lose, a few will net gain or lose a lot. Inequality will grow with every transaction. And become obvious. The underpaid will blame the overpaid, but the overpaid will know that they have done nothing intentionally wrong, and so will be reluctant to say they have more than they should have. [Are you calling me a thief?!] So the two sides will fight, the underpaid certain they have been injured, the overpaid confident they have not injured. All this without greed. The overpaid begin to seek rationalisations for their overpay, and the underpaid begin to use the rationalisations to try to repair their underpay.
Add in the greedy [shortsighted, selfdestructive] desire to make the y as big as possible, by stealing wages and puffing product, add in the power that money gives to make money, to plunder and coerce, and you speed up the evergrowing inequality.
We pay for natural gifts. But natural gifts are work that nature has done, not the person. The person should be paid for every bit of work they do developing their gift [if the product is something people want], but not for the gift. [Which is as big a nonsense as paying people for receiving birthday gifts. 'Ah, I see Uncle Jack has given you a guitar. How much do I owe you?'] 99% are underpaid, 99% are net funding this pay for no work [overpay] by work for no pay [underpay]. But the underpaid see it as a way they can repair their underpay, and support it. So no one can see the nonsense. We pay people for having studied, although having studied is not work. 99% are funding this pay for no work. But the underpaid support it, hoping to get on the paying end of it. We pay for experience, although experience is gained in paid work at no effort by the person. People think: Ah, I will one day be paid for my experience, that will be good. And then when someone is super-overpaid, we are forced to think: He must have tremendous experience. Or any of the other rationalisations for higher-than-average pay per hour of work. We pay for skill, but that is either gift or experience. We allow pay for 'responsibility', although that is gift, not work. Or it may not exist. No one can measure it, quantify it, and no one can set a correct payment per unit of it if we could quantify it. Yet we still allow 'responsibility' as a reason to justify higher-than-average pay per hour. And then we set ourselves to climb the ladder of success, getting a 'more responsible' job with 'more pay'. And the people in 'less responsible' jobs are left feeling inferior, are not looked up to as much, although they are doing their jobs as responsibly, or perhaps more responsibly. And, since the 'responsible' person has not added anything to the pool of wealth by his 'responsibility', the 99% underpaid have to work without pay to make the goods the 'responsible' person takes out [buys with the money he is paid for 'responsibility'] without having put anything in. [The 'responsibility' may add to the pool of wealth, but nature has done the work in giving the person the responsible character. The person doesn't work harder being responsible. It flows effortlessly from character. If it exists. If someone says: I am paid this grand salary because of my onerous responsibilities, ask them: Who measured your responsibility?] We pay for business risk, although the person is risking for themselves! [I'm going fishing for myself, I'm going to be risking my bait. Pay me now, will you, I might not see you later.] And we don't pay a limited sum, we pay unlimitedly. However much he gets, risk justifies it, or helps to justify it.
Once all these rationalisations for higher-than-average pay are seen for what they are, we can determine the maximum self-earned fortune. It is 100 hours x 50 weeks x 50 years x $40 - US$10 million. [We should subtract the minimum lifetime spending, but we are only need a ballpark figure that is definitely above the maximum self-earnable fortune, and near it.] Then we can limit fortunes with a clear conscience. This will stop underpay going so terribly, brutally low. The injury will be greatly reduced. The violence, which gets to everyone, will be greatly reduced. Happiness for all will soar.
I like the idea of limiting pay to 50 hours a week, to discourage overwork. Overwork steals from the self, the family and the community. Balance of work and leisure is vital for quality work. Leisure gives perspective to see when you need a change of direction. Leisure is thought. Thought is good. Ad this allows us to lower the maximum to $5 million, which will raise the underpay more, and reduce the violence more, and increase happiness more.
If pay justice was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is 98% up in a thin, thin needle going up 100,000 metres, 100 kilometres. A simple way of bringing this down gently, without making economic waves, is to make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased fortunes. The overpay will rain down on everyone over two generations. The deceased could not have made the overfortune. The private heir did nothing to make the fortune. Everyone in the world did everything to make the goods that the money represents and buys. So such a law is just. Justice is good for everyone, because injustice makes violence, and violence gets to everyone. We pay everyone, the overpaid and the underpaid, only because it saves the enormous bureaucratic cost and labour of distinguishing the two. The overpaid are being trimmed by the law anyway. Underpay will come up close to fairpay. Governments to be responsible for making sure everyone has access to a bank. [Governments profit from the reduced social costs of war and crime.] The equal shares to be transferred immediately, directly, electronically. The overpower and misery of the overpaid will be being whittled steadily, effectively, and the money going to the underpaid will immediately start to pour waters on the fires of terrorism, uneducation, anger, disease, starvation, slavery, etc.
Another possible way is to run a 1% per month increase of the money supply by putting equal shares of the 1% into all bank accounts [one per person, of course]. The inflation effect will bring overfortunes down more than the equal share will raise them, the inflation effect will bring underfortunes down less than the equal share will raise them. Fortunes will approach fairfortune from both sides. This method is even less interfering than the first idea. And it is even easier to administer. Set everyone up with accounts, work out what 1% of the money supply is, work out the number of people there are, and electronically write equal shares into the accounts. Inflation is only bad if people have to earn at the old rate and buy at the new rate. But the underpaid will be getting more money than the inflation will trim from their fortune, and the overpaid are not short of money.
So how much happier can we be? We have a pay injustice factor of one billion. We have a violence factor of one billion. We have a potential for increase of happiness factor of one billion.
Imagine if a government committed the super-extreme injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of workers and giving it all to 1%.
What if we have been getting unhappier for a very long time, so slowly that one lifetime cannot detect the overall fall? Where did I read that if you raise the temperature slowly enough, a live frog or something will cook without noticing?
Global fair pay for the family working at world-average hardness is US$200,000 [two workers, including, if applicable, a houseperson].
There is enough world income to pay every worker, including housewives and tertiary students, US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. That is, every worker, including housewives and students, is producing US$100,000 worth of goods or services per year, or $40 worth of goods or services an hour. [The whole of society benefits from study, so students are in justice paid, by society, for studying.] World annual income is US$300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion workers, including housewives and tertiary students. US$100,000 per worker.
The overpaid have been getting more overpaid and the underpaid more underpaid for 1000s of years.
No one has bothered to, or has been able to, determine how much fairpay is, so no one has known how much less than fairpay they are getting. People just go for some more money, when they feel that they are being underpaid, but no one has known how much underpaid they are.
The range of pay for a year's work is from $30 to $30,000,000,000 [billion].
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, and we have pay from x to 1,000,000,000x for equal work, from 10,000th the fairpay to 100,000 times the fairpay.
Pay justice ['equality'] is one of the most important causes of happiness, pay injustice one of the biggest causes of unhappiness, for both overpaid and underpaid.
Violence [war and crime] is proportional to pay injustice.
Violence gets to everyone, overpaid and underpaid.
Violence is ever-growing, even without growth of pay injustice.
Pay injustice is growing.
The body is limited, finite, and bodily desires are limited, finite. When the tank is full, further petrol is useless, valueless to the vehicle. Drinking water after thirst is satisfied becomes torture.
Money is good, it buys most good things. It buys most necessities and millions of desires, major and minor. Money is the joker good, it is good for most things.
The pool of social wealth is limited, finite, not infinite. Number of workers is finite, number of hours of work is finite, nature's bounty is great but finite, quantity of materials is finite. Individual contribution by work is finite. So unlimitation of fortunes is unjust, is overpay, is theft, creates underpay. No one can take out more than they put in without others having to take out less than they put in. The size of the social pool of wealth can expand, with machines, with IT, with discoveries of more of nature's bounty, for example, but it is always finite. Individual contribution to the pool of wealth is always finite, so pay can always exceed fairpay.
There has never been a rational determination of what exactly constitutes pay justice. Pay justice is equal pay for equal work. But there has never been an exact determination of what constitutes work and what doesn't. People have been paid for many things that are not work, not personal sacrifice of time and energy. Pay for no work for some means work for no pay for others. Greed is wanting or allowing oneself to be paid for no work, wanting or allowing oneself to be paid for no work, for things that are not work, not personal sacrifice, as well as for one's work. Greed is love of overpay.
Attacks on overpay are proportional to the size of the overpay. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. Being attacked is not happiness.
An overfortune, however great it is, is finite, limited. But the attacks on it are endless. Underpay, theft of money, which is the joker good, is the theft of everything, so it gives endless energy to attack. So every overfortune is necessarily doomed, as history shows. The underpaid can only throw grains of sand, but sand erodes rocks. The underpaid have lost battles, they have never lost a war. Every empire has grown, though small, with pay justice, and every empire, though large, has fallen with pay injustice, overpay and underpay.
Every overfortune is eroded by the ceaseless cost of its defence, and so is driven to get money by more taking, which increases the underpay, which increases the speed of its fall.
Every time a heap of overpay [individual, national or imperial] is brought down, heaps of overpay start growing again, because no one has known where overpay starts, no one has known wherre to draw the line.
Overpay is miserable, because overpay cannot provide more satisfaction, because bodily desires are finite, and because overpay is always under attack [from both underpaid and overpaid]. Even if the overpaid manage to die a natural death, they have been forced to continuously defend the overfortune.
The overpaid are always in a hopeless, stressful bind: they are forced to make their subordinates strong to defend them, and weak to not attack them. They must always pay them well to quell the subordinates' inclination to attack them, and always pay them less to keep them too weak to attack them. They must find subordinates aggressive enough to be good defenders for them, and not aggressive enough to want to attack them. Every time they whack the subordinates down increases the 'steam' of the subordinates to attack them. Every time they lift the subordinates up, they increase the power of the subordinates to attack them. There is no balance point between the two. Every strength to defend them is strength to attack them. Every weakness is weakness to defend them. The overpaid person needs maximum strength and maximum weakness in their subordinates.
The overpaid are isolated, even from their subordinates and friends. But belonging to a community in amity and acceptance is one of the major causes of happiness. Loss of the human tribe is one of the greatest disasters, or is the greatest disaster to the human spirit. We are social animals.
It is not love of money that is the root of virtually all evils, but love of overpay that is the root of virtually all evils of humanity. Love of overpay is love of getting pay disproportionate to, in excess of, personal work, sacrifice of time and energy.
Money is power, power to rake money. This aggravates pay injustice, accelerates pay injustice.
Self-earned money is always good. Working 10% harder and getting 10% more is perfectly good, perfectly harmless to oneself. One is putting in more and getting out proportionately more. There is no overpay, no theft. There is no creation of underpay, no injury, no creation of enemies. Other-earned money is always bad, it is theft, it creates enemies.
Injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms. And, unlike atoms, injury increases with every ricochet.
People have thought money is good, and therefore they have thought that more money is always better. Self-earned money is always good, other-earned money is always bad, it always comes with an angry, a righteously angry person attached.
Because people have thought money is good, they have supported and allowed unlimited fortunes.
The more underpaid people are, the more that overfortune is a beacon of hope for them. The more underpaid people are, the more they dote on overpay.
The more that people are underpaid, the more they have gone for just more, and the less they have gone for getting out as much as they have put in. The more they have been underpaid, and the higher overpay has been, the more they have wanted overpay. Arguing from equality, they have argued that if anyone can have a superfortune, they can too. Pay injustice promotes the practice of pay injustice with everyone. Fairpay seems like injustice as long as there is overpay. Meanwhile, the overpaid are driven to seek more money by the endless costs of selfdefence. So no one has been interested in pursuing fairpay.
Everyone has supported all the ways that support and promote pay injustice. The underpaid have supported them because they can repair their underpay. The overpaid have supported them because they, more than anyone, fail to suspect that more money is not proportionately good. The overpaid are often those who least can imagine the effect of injury on others. Hitler thought that stealing Europe was a good idea. His unconsciousness of others was extreme, or total. Most people suspect that trying to steal Europe would not be a good idea.
The consciousness of the danger to themselves of themselves being overpaid has inhibited many people from venturing there, has made people turn away from pursuit of overpay or even of fairpay. Failure to distinguish money and other-earned money has made them think all money is bad. This has aided overpay. They have left the field more open for the overpaid. Similarly, failure to distinguish private property and other-earned private property has led people to abandon private property, or to fail to oppose the taking of private property, which has made it easier for the greedy to amass private property [eg, Communism].
Some people came down on the side of private property good, because they knew there was something good about private property, others came down on the side of private property bad, because they knew there was something bad about private property. And they have fought each other.
Self-earned money is perfectly good, it is taking out as much as you put in. It is as innocent and right, as spiritual, as godly, as good as a bear fishing and a bear eating.
Because of this all-or-nothing mindset about money, people have been put in a fog, in which they have been unable to pursue the identification of pay justice, the line between self-earned and other-earned money. This fog has been so dense that people have been forced to assume that what a person gets is what they have earned, although people get from $30 to $30,000,000,000 a year, from 10,000th to 100,000 times the world-average pay per year. [The figures for inequality, 'wealth disparity', we have heard have greatly muted the reality, because the figures are for groups of people, within which higher and lower pays are mixed.] People have been unable to say that greed is bad [destructive of happiness]. People have been unable to form the ideas of overpay and underpay.
There are so many rationalisations for higher-than-average pay per hour that people have been unable to decide that there has to be something wrong with extremely high incomes. When these rationalisations are sifted for rationality, it turns out that there are no reasons for higher-than-average pay per hour. Tertiary students should be paid for studying, because it is work, sacrifice of time and energy. [Society has the right to decide how much studying it wants to buy.] Both the overpaid and the underpaid have supported these rationalisations for higher-than-average pay per hour, the overpaid have supported them because they just want more, and whatever argument, true or false, helps them get it, is good to them, the underpaid have supported them because they hope to reduce their underpay by them.
The rationalisations for overpay make the underpaid more underpaid, because the overpaid profit from the rationalisations far more. Every opening for pay for no work is an opening for work for no pay for others. While the underpaid may gain something from them, they lose more. Their net financial gain is negative. Every unjust little straw the underpaid get, in order to suck on the milkshake of wealth, the overpaid get an unjust big straw. Only work adds to the pool of wealth, only work entitles to take out.
It may seem better if one is free to take out as much as one can, than to be limited to taking out only as much as you put in, but being limited to taking out only as much as you put in also limits everyone else to the same.
Before job specialisation, division of labour, everyone did their own work and consumed their own production. Pay injustice was impossible, except by obvious theft. Job specialisation required a pooling of products of work, so that everyone could get a mix of goods. This made it possible to get out more than you put in, making theft, making violence, ever-increasing, as both sides tried to prevail, with ever bigger weapons.
With job specialisation, trade was necessary. With trade came money, a convenient artificial barter item with the advantages of nonperishability, portability and divisibility. If you grew lettuces, and needed a wheelbarrow, it was hard to find someone who made wheelbarrows and wanted 100 lettuces, and your lettuces perished on the way. It was much easier to find people who wanted lettuces, and to exchange them for money, and then find someone making wheelbarrows, and give money for one.
But it was here that the transaction imp stepped in. It is impossible to determine the exact value of anything [the exact amount of work, of sacrifice of time and energy, that has gone into the product]. So the workvalues of any two things exchanged have to be x and x+y. So every transaction has to be a fair-exchange-no-robbery [the x's] plus a robbery [the y]. So theft is built in to every transaction, even if the parties intend no theft. And the theft is invisible, unobvious. Over trillions of transactions over time, very few will break even, most will net gain or lose, a few will net gain or lose a lot. Inequality will grow with every transaction. And become obvious. The underpaid will blame the overpaid, but the overpaid will know that they have done nothing intentionally wrong, and so will be reluctant to say they have more than they should have. [Are you calling me a thief?!] So the two sides will fight, the underpaid certain they have been injured, the overpaid confident they have not injured. All this without greed. The overpaid begin to seek rationalisations for their overpay, and the underpaid begin to use the rationalisations to try to repair their underpay.
Add in the greedy [shortsighted, selfdestructive] desire to make the y as big as possible, by stealing wages and puffing product, add in the power that money gives to make money, to plunder and coerce, and you speed up the evergrowing inequality.
We pay for natural gifts. But natural gifts are work that nature has done, not the person. The person should be paid for every bit of work they do developing their gift [if the product is something people want], but not for the gift. [Which is as big a nonsense as paying people for receiving birthday gifts. 'Ah, I see Uncle Jack has given you a guitar. How much do I owe you?'] 99% are underpaid, 99% are net funding this pay for no work [overpay] by work for no pay [underpay]. But the underpaid see it as a way they can repair their underpay, and support it. So no one can see the nonsense. We pay people for having studied, although having studied is not work. 99% are funding this pay for no work. But the underpaid support it, hoping to get on the paying end of it. We pay for experience, although experience is gained in paid work at no effort by the person. People think: Ah, I will one day be paid for my experience, that will be good. And then when someone is super-overpaid, we are forced to think: He must have tremendous experience. Or any of the other rationalisations for higher-than-average pay per hour of work. We pay for skill, but that is either gift or experience. We allow pay for 'responsibility', although that is gift, not work. Or it may not exist. No one can measure it, quantify it, and no one can set a correct payment per unit of it if we could quantify it. Yet we still allow 'responsibility' as a reason to justify higher-than-average pay per hour. And then we set ourselves to climb the ladder of success, getting a 'more responsible' job with 'more pay'. And the people in 'less responsible' jobs are left feeling inferior, are not looked up to as much, although they are doing their jobs as responsibly, or perhaps more responsibly. And, since the 'responsible' person has not added anything to the pool of wealth by his 'responsibility', the 99% underpaid have to work without pay to make the goods the 'responsible' person takes out [buys with the money he is paid for 'responsibility'] without having put anything in. [The 'responsibility' may add to the pool of wealth, but nature has done the work in giving the person the responsible character. The person doesn't work harder being responsible. It flows effortlessly from character. If it exists. If someone says: I am paid this grand salary because of my onerous responsibilities, ask them: Who measured your responsibility?] We pay for business risk, although the person is risking for themselves! [I'm going fishing for myself, I'm going to be risking my bait. Pay me now, will you, I might not see you later.] And we don't pay a limited sum, we pay unlimitedly. However much he gets, risk justifies it, or helps to justify it.
Once all these rationalisations for higher-than-average pay are seen for what they are, we can determine the maximum self-earned fortune. It is 100 hours x 50 weeks x 50 years x $40 - US$10 million. [We should subtract the minimum lifetime spending, but we are only need a ballpark figure that is definitely above the maximum self-earnable fortune, and near it.] Then we can limit fortunes with a clear conscience. This will stop underpay going so terribly, brutally low. The injury will be greatly reduced. The violence, which gets to everyone, will be greatly reduced. Happiness for all will soar.
I like the idea of limiting pay to 50 hours a week, to discourage overwork. Overwork steals from the self, the family and the community. Balance of work and leisure is vital for quality work. Leisure gives perspective to see when you need a change of direction. Leisure is thought. Thought is good. Ad this allows us to lower the maximum to $5 million, which will raise the underpay more, and reduce the violence more, and increase happiness more.
If pay justice was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is 98% up in a thin, thin needle going up 100,000 metres, 100 kilometres. A simple way of bringing this down gently, without making economic waves, is to make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased fortunes. The overpay will rain down on everyone over two generations. The deceased could not have made the overfortune. The private heir did nothing to make the fortune. Everyone in the world did everything to make the goods that the money represents and buys. So such a law is just. Justice is good for everyone, because injustice makes violence, and violence gets to everyone. We pay everyone, the overpaid and the underpaid, only because it saves the enormous bureaucratic cost and labour of distinguishing the two. The overpaid are being trimmed by the law anyway. Underpay will come up close to fairpay. Governments to be responsible for making sure everyone has access to a bank. [Governments profit from the reduced social costs of war and crime.] The equal shares to be transferred immediately, directly, electronically. The overpower and misery of the overpaid will be being whittled steadily, effectively, and the money going to the underpaid will immediately start to pour waters on the fires of terrorism, uneducation, anger, disease, starvation, slavery, etc.
Another possible way is to run a 1% per month increase of the money supply by putting equal shares of the 1% into all bank accounts [one per person, of course]. The inflation effect will bring overfortunes down more than the equal share will raise them, the inflation effect will bring underfortunes down less than the equal share will raise them. Fortunes will approach fairfortune from both sides. This method is even less interfering than the first idea. And it is even easier to administer. Set everyone up with accounts, work out what 1% of the money supply is, work out the number of people there are, and electronically write equal shares into the accounts. Inflation is only bad if people have to earn at the old rate and buy at the new rate. But the underpaid will be getting more money than the inflation will trim from their fortune, and the overpaid are not short of money.
So how much happier can we be? We have a pay injustice factor of one billion. We have a violence factor of one billion. We have a potential for increase of happiness factor of one billion.
Imagine if a government committed the super-extreme injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of workers and giving it all to 1%.
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