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.