what I'd like to know is how an entire nation [america] [and all of humanity] managed to ignore the simple point that money is power, and unlimited [and necessarily unjust] wealth concentration is unlimited power, is unlimited undemocracy unliberty unfreedom tyranny fascism totalitarianism gangsters-in-government
america was *founded* on the principle of prevention of wealth concentration - obviously the tyranny americans escaped and which americans wished to be eternally free from was totally dependent on unjust wealth concentration [wealth in excess of own contribution by own work]
vigilance is the price of liberty, and vigilance over prevention of wealth concentration was zero from the beginning, although in the 19th century prevention of wealth concentration was in all the rhetoric
the greeks had established that laws were spiders' webs, the 'great' break through
inequality, pay injustice had reached an inequality factor of one million in america in the 1880s - 10c a *day* for sew-ers, $10,000/*hr* for Jay Gould - globally today, the inequality factor is one billion -
whence the superblindness?
are people that stupid?
or is there a mighty masochism in humanity?
americans had just come from tyranny, limitless wealth and poverty, overpower and underpower - you would think they would have been passionately vigilant to prevent growth of limitless personal power - you would think the whole pride of people in their new nation would have centred on the fundamental, the sine qua non [the without-which-nothing], the essential
there doesn't seem to be an atom of a good theory to explain this utter ignoring of the whole point by americans for 200 years, by humanity for 3000 years
why was there not a whole intellectual industry in america to establish with exactitude the limits of just fortune, to draw a line in the sand: individual power shall go no farther than this?
you'd think americans would have had a school curriculum subject in pay justice, an academic industry in the thinking behind just limitation of fortune
you'd think all humans in every age and country would have pursued this essential - the purpose of government is justice, james madison - the state built on injustice cannot stand, roman saying - so it was essential to *patriotism* to pursue pay justice, to determine the most one person can contribute to wealth by his own work and can justly claim as his
as henry george wrote, obviously one person on his own cannot produce much more than anyone else in the same time, with the same materials, tools, data, etc
[pay justice is far and away the most important justice, since money buys almost all nonfree necessities and desirables, including political power, social standing]
now that we have 60 times PDC [planet death capability], and ratio of highest to lowest pay/yr of one billion, with violence-generation and growth proportional, the american freshstart chance to make tyranny [which is also corruption, warmongering and cannonfoddering] extinct was probably our last
the greeks had said equality breeds no strife - and humanity has watched inequality and strife grow for 1000s of years, [punctuated with revolutions that were only briefly and very partially effective in justly limiting individual power], without the slightest sign of alarm -
i see no sign of the slightest atom of an explanation for this stupendous utter blindness about the super-obvious
the gitmo trials are just one fruit among millions of evil fruits on the tree of unlimited-fortunes social systems which we have embraced for 1000s of years
the chance that we will wake up and get the point before violence grows to the point of using the 60 times PDC bombs [looks like in the next 30 years] seems to be infinitesimal
the goddess isis is supposed to have said: if they knew they were blind, they wouldnt be blind - we are unconscious of our blindness - because we see many things, we think we are not blind - forgetting that seeing jigsaw puzzle pieces is not seeing the picture ***at all***, although the pieces are part of the puzzle
we have great confidence in our seeing reality when we should have very little confidence in that - it seems the 'obvious' lesson of history is just too big to see - like ants confidently operating on their tiny level that can't interpret the shadow of the giant anteater, evergrowing unlimited wealth-power producing evergrowing weaponry, warmongering and cannonfoddering
- although there are plenty of warning quotes, from american presidents, presidents of national banks, us generals, and from the moneypower itself
the bankers own the earth. take it away from them but leave them the power to create deposits, and with a flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it all back again. sir josiah stamp, president, bank of england, 1920s
it seems every assassinated american president has been assassinated by the moneypower - every assassination has followed some attempt by the president to interfere with the freedom of the moneypower - eg, jfk printed some u.s. money without borrowing it from the privately owned reserve bank
the credit of a country is backed by the natural bounty of the nation and by people's work - and the federal reserve steals this credit and makes the nation buy it!!!!!!!!
in 20 years i have not experienced one example of the slightest interest, enthusiasm, excitement as responses to the fact that the *world* average pay/yr is US$100,000, paying housewives and students too [making world av. family income US$200,000], in the fact that 99% are underpaid [and would therefore get more of their earnings if there was more pay justice - and would get more liberty and democracy and less war and crime].
legal thefts are wide open: a billion at 10% doubles every 7 years, multiplies by 1000 every 70 years - with no work at all
pay justice is pay for work, no pay for no work
are people really so dazzled mindless by limitless wealth that they cannot take in that limitless wealth for what must be limited work [which cannot be more than about 30% more than the average work] means overpay [theft] means underpay for most, means violence, evergrowing, as both sides try to prevail with ever-greater weaponry and terrorism?
are people really so dazzled by overwealth that they cannot take in that the intensity, power and persistence of attacks on overwealth are proportional to the size of the overwealth, so that overwealth is always under seige of many kinds, and must fall in time, as history shows they always have, so that overpay is no fun at all? - that if one person takes or by any means has the property of 1000, that person is vastly unhappier too, with merely 1000 times more than he can use, and loss of 1000 friends, fellows and protectors, and gain of 1000 enemies?
are people swarming to sam pizzigati's free online book greed and good, with its ten times america, or to carey's democratic capitalism? - no - the swarming is flat calm
the good news is that a species with great abundance [every working person, incl housewives and students, producing US$100,000 worth of workproducts per year] and yet knowingly calmly starving 50 million people to death every year, deserves the death sentence they are bringing to themselves with all speed with all technological brilliance
at least the nazis believed or kidded themselves the jews and other minorities were enemies or no good - we know the starving are innocent
but although we know these things factually, do we really know them? - do they penetrate our consciousness? - do they fire a central fire in the brain or mental core?
WHY are we technological giants and yet [in the crucial main point] ethical [pursuit of happiness] cretins?
are we programmed by nature to settle for enough, which in our present technological super-abundant society is underpay, which then releases overpay to grow limitlessly, growing underpay and violence limitlessly?
has nature not fitted us with consciousness of more than our patch, so that our technologically very much more connected world is beyond our natural mindset?
[a day away has grown from 50 miles to 12,500 miles in the last 200 years, shrinking the world by a factor of 250]
[weaponry has grown by a factor of 60,000 times in 50 years, from power to kill 100,000 in one day to power to kill 6 billion - have big parts of our consciousness just not caught up with this?]
[world income: $300 trillion - world working persons: 3 billion - world income is from sprout and weaver, international distribution of income, kyklos journal, v45, 1992, pp237-258, updated with global inflation since 1987]
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Can you put what you are saying in 25 words or less?
In 25 words or less:
Commit pay justice and reap vast benefits: pull humanity out of the nosedive to selfextinction soon, and chop down the great tree of problems permanently.
In a few more words:
Imagine a community in which everyone works and plenty is produced. How can you make that community very unhappy without destroying the workproducts, the plenty? Just by extreme maldistribution. For instance, giving all the property to one, as in communism. Or giving 98% of income earnings to 1%, as in the world today.
Can we be literally 100 times happier? At first it seems not. We have been searching for happiness for 1000s of years and it is unlikely we have missed anything that big.
But consider these points. One, we routinely ignore problems, so we underestimate how unhappy we are. We get used to the level of happiness-unhappiness that is around, and consider it natural, normal and inevitable. And two, happiness could have declined, imperceptibly slowly, for 1000s of years, and we would not have any memory or record of happiness levels of 1000s of years ago to compare with our present state.
Inequality causes unhappiness. Inequality causes violence, which causes unhappiness. Inequality is higher and lower pay for equal work, which is unjust, which is injury. Inequality is the greatest injury, because money is the joker good, good for almost all things, including necessities and desires. So the theft of money, pay, is the theft of almost everything, causing the greatest violence. Inequality has been growing for 1000s of years. Inequality is now at the super-super-extreme level of an inequality factor of one billion: that is, the ratio of highest to lowest pay for equal work is one billion. Income for a year's work ranges from $10 to $10 billion. Super-extreme violence [relative to what we would ahve without the inequality].
Violence is not caused by human nature, because violence has increased and human nature hasn't changed, so there is no correlation between violence and human nature. So we can change violence.
1000s of years ago, such inequality was not possible. People mostly produced for themselves and consumed for themselves. That is, they were fully paid for their work. With job specialisation [division of labour] workproducts were in effect pooled, so people could throw the products of their specialised work into the pool, and take from the pool the great variety of things they wanted and needed. Ideally, everyone took out as much as they put in. That is, they got out goods that contained as much work in them as went into the goods they made. The purpose of trade was just to give everyone the mix of goods they needed. The market sprang up, so that things could be traded, that is, remixed after being separated by job specialisation.
But this pooling created the possibility of taking out more than one had put in, leaving others in the position of taking out less than they put in. Indeed, this was inevitable, because the exact workvalue of anything cannnot be determined. In every trade, the amount of work gone into the two things exchanged could hardly be equal. In general, there would be some difference in workvalue in the two things exchanged. That is, one person would go away from the exchange with something with an undetectably small bit less work in it than the thing they brought to the exchange, and the other would go away with a bit more. This is clear from the real stories of people trading up frrom a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. The accumulation of little gains in each trade would sometimes accumulate to something far more valuable. This is legal theft.
This was the seed of inequality. And this seed grew. This seed would inevitably grow, with every transaction. Slowly, imperceptibly, inequality would grow ceaselessly. When the inequality became noticeable, there would be resentment, and this resentment would grow as inequality grew. So, out of the necessity of trade, out of job specialisation, started growing inequality, which produced ever-growing anger and violence, which produced evergrowing weaponry and evergrowing unhappiness.
Money is a power, the second greatest, so inequality is inequality of power, which is tyranny and slavery. Tyranny extends its sway, gathers more wealth, more slaves, more power. This creates deeper poverty and slavery, which eventually bits hard enough for the poor to rebel, and there is a revolution or fall of empire, and then inequality starts building again. So violence gets to everyone, tyrant and slave. People escape to other shores, but inequality starts building again. The bigger the heap of wealth, the more the attacks and erosions on it. And so the costs of defending the heap grow with the heap. And the attacks are endless, so the fall of the heap is inevitable in time. And the heap is maintained, for a limited time, only with great effort. So it has been in every case in history. It happened to Rome, it happened to Holland, Spain, Britain, and it is happening now with America. And it will happen with every heap of wealth. Where today is Spanish Inca plunder? The wealth attracted thieves, other nations, and it was eaten away in plunder and the costs of protecting it. Every heap of wealth is finite, the attacks on it are endless, so fall is inevitable, and only after ceaseless endeavour to retain.
So it seems that unhappiness has grown imperceptibly slowly for 1000s of years. And we have got used to each new slightly lower level, since we have no way of remembering or recording the level of happiness of past times to compare it with our own level.
Misery exercises such a paralyzing effect over the nature of people, that no class is ever conscious of its own suffering, Leo Tolstoy.
This applies to the rich as well as to the poor. We ignore, as much as possible, the bad things in our lives. We ignore them so well we forget them. And we accept what seems inevitable, unavoidable. We do not often enquire whether the bad thing can in fact be removed. We do not often enquire deeply to find the cause of the bad thing. We jump to the conclusion that the bad thing is inevitable, unavoidable. Since we believe, too quickly, that we cannot change it, we put it out of mind. Since we do not look at the problem, we do not see a solution when it comes along. We had given up looking out for it, and so the bus goes past. As time passes, and we never catch the bus, we are more and more confirmed in our opinion that there is no bus, and so the more we ignore things that might in fact be solutions. Our opinion that there is no solution closes the door on solutions.
In fact, the solution has been sitting there forever.
Instead of acting to remove the inequality, we have worked within it, trying to reach the top, or trying to reach a comfortable spot within it, or bearing it, or walking away from it. Too few voices have said: let's get rid of the inequality, and too few have heard those voices.
America was founded on the principle of preventing limitless wealth concentration, and this was mostly ignored or unknown. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s. Sew-ers got 10c a day, Jay Gould got $10,000 an hour. An inequality factor of one million. Efforts to counter the evergrowing inequality and loss of quality of life were of slight effectiveness.
The full return to the equality of 1000s of years ago, before job specialisation and trade, with its drop of inequality which grew, where everyone was paid for all their work because they mostly consumed all they produced, was never in sight. Globally, the range of pay/year is $10 to $10 billion, an inequality factor of one billion. A violence, danger, unhappiness, disorder and problems factor of one billion.
There are 1000 [1,000,000,000] who hack at the branches of the tree of problems for every one who strikes at the root, Henry Thoreau.
We have been hacking at the million branches for 1000s of years, and the tree has grown faster than we have hacked. And it is approaching the time when the tree crashes down under its own weight, with us in it. But the tree of problems has a weak spot: it gathers itself in the trunk.
Consider what would happen if a government committed the super-extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of citizens and giving it to 1% of the people.
There would first be the loss of 81% of national happiness in the loss of 90% of income for 90% of people. 90% x 90% is 81%. Then, on top of that would be the super-extreme violence, which would affect the happiness of everyone, and the great destruction of property and people, and the great loss of productivity. These extra factors could well raise the loss of happiness from 81% to 99%. 99% of happiness would be destroyed. Everyone will readily agree with this.
Therefore the reversal of that mad policy will increase happiness 100-fold. The 81% will be restored, the violence will disappear, the productivity will rise again, the waste of property and lives will greatly decline.
And we have far greater inequality than this super-extreme, mad example. In the example, the 1% get 82 times. In reality, the 1% overpaid get up to 100,000 times. In the example, the 90% get 10th. In reality the 90% get 100th to 10,000th. In the example, the 9% in the middle get what they were getting before. In the real world, the 9% get between average and 100th of average.
So it seems that everyone with logic will readily agree that we can be, literally, conservatively, 100 times happier, with far less violence, danger, tragedies, horrors, fears, crises and unsafety, and far more liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness, community, social trust, amity, togetherness, goodfeeling, confidence in others].
It doesn't seem hard to understand. It only takes people being willing to put aside their opinions long enough to consider and study the facts without prejudice.
Many more points can be made, and have been made at happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com, which only strengthen the case.
And it is not hard to spread the word. If everyone who learns it tells just two people, every adult in the world will learn it in just 31 times the time to tell two. Just by word of mouth. You can light four billion candles from one candle in just 31 times the time to light two if everyone who gets their candle lit lights just two candles. There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their energies and resources. It just needs people to allow their supreme confidence that there is no solution to be eroded, and replaced with a realistic assessment of reality. We are standing on the brink of self-extinction and of a golden age.
The underpaid are certainly unhappier, and the overpaid are miserable too, trapped in a boxing ring, forced into fighting off all comers endlessly till they fall with exhaustion, and isolated from the human tribe, perpetually at bay. Like Hitler, Ceausescu, Caesar, Stalin, every empire, and today, America. And overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, 1000 rooms for one body. So inequality is lose-lose, equality is win-win.
We just have to dig out a deeply rooted erroneous mindset. We have to open our minds. We have to step back from our struggling, desperate position in the mad heap and see the heap for what it is, hell [compared to what we could have]. The bus is waiting.
It is easy to conclude you are happy by ignoring all the bad stuff, by not comparing it with possibility. Free from pride, people would eagerly compare the happiness of other countries, and compete in happiness-pursuit. So what is pride, friend or foe?
Equality can be attained easily, in two generations, without making destructive waves in the economy, by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to make that superwealth, and everyone has done everything to make the things that moeny represents and buys, so such an act is just. Or [or and] by giving everyone in the world equal shares in a 1%-a-month increase in the money supply. Inflation is not bad when everyone gets the added money. These methods do not require a large suffocating bureaucracy, they allow us greatly to reduce bureaucracy and increase freedom from being buried in petty regulation and its vast costs.
But we are 98% genetically identical to chimpanzees, and we are loaded by nature with powerful instincts which are good in nature but disastrous in dealing with the complications of society.
It is only by heroic mental effort that we can hope to get free from our natural mental limitations and correctly 'read' our social reality. Only the people who see the big picture are awake, Heraclitus. It is easier for people to see small things than big things, Plato. Good things are hard, Plato.
Test everything, Bible. Like the railway engineer, who regularly tests the wheels. If your ideas are sound, testing them will increase your confidence in them. If they are not, testing them will save you a crash. So testing has no downside. We come closest to truth when we hear all opinions. And happiness is totally dependent on realism. And happiness is your everything. The human tendency to hold hard onto opinions without testing them honestly against other opinions is selfdestructive.
Reality is merciless, it won't even flinch in sympathy when you bark your shins against the coffee table you thought wasn't there. And part of the picture is nothing like the picture. Compare a jigsaw puzzle piece with the complete picture.
Restrained by custom, and the ridiculous prejudices of the world, we go with the crowd, and it is late in life before we dare to think, Frances Brookes. Economic truth emerges only when things are considered whole, John Galbraith ['Dean of economists'].
The plane of human being is in a nosedive, close to crashing. Weaponry at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and a violence factor of one billion, rising. And reality won't even flinch when we culminate our big mistake.
A 500-page book in bitesize sections is free at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org], and the globalhappiness site will soon have a new, somewhat annoyingly-written but invaluable book. People say it [or at least the first chapter] is 'teachy'. Putting up with its annoyances can be your penance for hurting yourselves unnecessarily, enormously, for 1000s of years. As mothers say: Serves you right.
Commit pay justice and reap vast benefits: pull humanity out of the nosedive to selfextinction soon, and chop down the great tree of problems permanently.
In a few more words:
Imagine a community in which everyone works and plenty is produced. How can you make that community very unhappy without destroying the workproducts, the plenty? Just by extreme maldistribution. For instance, giving all the property to one, as in communism. Or giving 98% of income earnings to 1%, as in the world today.
Can we be literally 100 times happier? At first it seems not. We have been searching for happiness for 1000s of years and it is unlikely we have missed anything that big.
But consider these points. One, we routinely ignore problems, so we underestimate how unhappy we are. We get used to the level of happiness-unhappiness that is around, and consider it natural, normal and inevitable. And two, happiness could have declined, imperceptibly slowly, for 1000s of years, and we would not have any memory or record of happiness levels of 1000s of years ago to compare with our present state.
Inequality causes unhappiness. Inequality causes violence, which causes unhappiness. Inequality is higher and lower pay for equal work, which is unjust, which is injury. Inequality is the greatest injury, because money is the joker good, good for almost all things, including necessities and desires. So the theft of money, pay, is the theft of almost everything, causing the greatest violence. Inequality has been growing for 1000s of years. Inequality is now at the super-super-extreme level of an inequality factor of one billion: that is, the ratio of highest to lowest pay for equal work is one billion. Income for a year's work ranges from $10 to $10 billion. Super-extreme violence [relative to what we would ahve without the inequality].
Violence is not caused by human nature, because violence has increased and human nature hasn't changed, so there is no correlation between violence and human nature. So we can change violence.
1000s of years ago, such inequality was not possible. People mostly produced for themselves and consumed for themselves. That is, they were fully paid for their work. With job specialisation [division of labour] workproducts were in effect pooled, so people could throw the products of their specialised work into the pool, and take from the pool the great variety of things they wanted and needed. Ideally, everyone took out as much as they put in. That is, they got out goods that contained as much work in them as went into the goods they made. The purpose of trade was just to give everyone the mix of goods they needed. The market sprang up, so that things could be traded, that is, remixed after being separated by job specialisation.
But this pooling created the possibility of taking out more than one had put in, leaving others in the position of taking out less than they put in. Indeed, this was inevitable, because the exact workvalue of anything cannnot be determined. In every trade, the amount of work gone into the two things exchanged could hardly be equal. In general, there would be some difference in workvalue in the two things exchanged. That is, one person would go away from the exchange with something with an undetectably small bit less work in it than the thing they brought to the exchange, and the other would go away with a bit more. This is clear from the real stories of people trading up frrom a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. The accumulation of little gains in each trade would sometimes accumulate to something far more valuable. This is legal theft.
This was the seed of inequality. And this seed grew. This seed would inevitably grow, with every transaction. Slowly, imperceptibly, inequality would grow ceaselessly. When the inequality became noticeable, there would be resentment, and this resentment would grow as inequality grew. So, out of the necessity of trade, out of job specialisation, started growing inequality, which produced ever-growing anger and violence, which produced evergrowing weaponry and evergrowing unhappiness.
Money is a power, the second greatest, so inequality is inequality of power, which is tyranny and slavery. Tyranny extends its sway, gathers more wealth, more slaves, more power. This creates deeper poverty and slavery, which eventually bits hard enough for the poor to rebel, and there is a revolution or fall of empire, and then inequality starts building again. So violence gets to everyone, tyrant and slave. People escape to other shores, but inequality starts building again. The bigger the heap of wealth, the more the attacks and erosions on it. And so the costs of defending the heap grow with the heap. And the attacks are endless, so the fall of the heap is inevitable in time. And the heap is maintained, for a limited time, only with great effort. So it has been in every case in history. It happened to Rome, it happened to Holland, Spain, Britain, and it is happening now with America. And it will happen with every heap of wealth. Where today is Spanish Inca plunder? The wealth attracted thieves, other nations, and it was eaten away in plunder and the costs of protecting it. Every heap of wealth is finite, the attacks on it are endless, so fall is inevitable, and only after ceaseless endeavour to retain.
So it seems that unhappiness has grown imperceptibly slowly for 1000s of years. And we have got used to each new slightly lower level, since we have no way of remembering or recording the level of happiness of past times to compare it with our own level.
Misery exercises such a paralyzing effect over the nature of people, that no class is ever conscious of its own suffering, Leo Tolstoy.
This applies to the rich as well as to the poor. We ignore, as much as possible, the bad things in our lives. We ignore them so well we forget them. And we accept what seems inevitable, unavoidable. We do not often enquire whether the bad thing can in fact be removed. We do not often enquire deeply to find the cause of the bad thing. We jump to the conclusion that the bad thing is inevitable, unavoidable. Since we believe, too quickly, that we cannot change it, we put it out of mind. Since we do not look at the problem, we do not see a solution when it comes along. We had given up looking out for it, and so the bus goes past. As time passes, and we never catch the bus, we are more and more confirmed in our opinion that there is no bus, and so the more we ignore things that might in fact be solutions. Our opinion that there is no solution closes the door on solutions.
In fact, the solution has been sitting there forever.
Instead of acting to remove the inequality, we have worked within it, trying to reach the top, or trying to reach a comfortable spot within it, or bearing it, or walking away from it. Too few voices have said: let's get rid of the inequality, and too few have heard those voices.
America was founded on the principle of preventing limitless wealth concentration, and this was mostly ignored or unknown. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s. Sew-ers got 10c a day, Jay Gould got $10,000 an hour. An inequality factor of one million. Efforts to counter the evergrowing inequality and loss of quality of life were of slight effectiveness.
The full return to the equality of 1000s of years ago, before job specialisation and trade, with its drop of inequality which grew, where everyone was paid for all their work because they mostly consumed all they produced, was never in sight. Globally, the range of pay/year is $10 to $10 billion, an inequality factor of one billion. A violence, danger, unhappiness, disorder and problems factor of one billion.
There are 1000 [1,000,000,000] who hack at the branches of the tree of problems for every one who strikes at the root, Henry Thoreau.
We have been hacking at the million branches for 1000s of years, and the tree has grown faster than we have hacked. And it is approaching the time when the tree crashes down under its own weight, with us in it. But the tree of problems has a weak spot: it gathers itself in the trunk.
Consider what would happen if a government committed the super-extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of citizens and giving it to 1% of the people.
There would first be the loss of 81% of national happiness in the loss of 90% of income for 90% of people. 90% x 90% is 81%. Then, on top of that would be the super-extreme violence, which would affect the happiness of everyone, and the great destruction of property and people, and the great loss of productivity. These extra factors could well raise the loss of happiness from 81% to 99%. 99% of happiness would be destroyed. Everyone will readily agree with this.
Therefore the reversal of that mad policy will increase happiness 100-fold. The 81% will be restored, the violence will disappear, the productivity will rise again, the waste of property and lives will greatly decline.
And we have far greater inequality than this super-extreme, mad example. In the example, the 1% get 82 times. In reality, the 1% overpaid get up to 100,000 times. In the example, the 90% get 10th. In reality the 90% get 100th to 10,000th. In the example, the 9% in the middle get what they were getting before. In the real world, the 9% get between average and 100th of average.
So it seems that everyone with logic will readily agree that we can be, literally, conservatively, 100 times happier, with far less violence, danger, tragedies, horrors, fears, crises and unsafety, and far more liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness, community, social trust, amity, togetherness, goodfeeling, confidence in others].
It doesn't seem hard to understand. It only takes people being willing to put aside their opinions long enough to consider and study the facts without prejudice.
Many more points can be made, and have been made at happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com, which only strengthen the case.
And it is not hard to spread the word. If everyone who learns it tells just two people, every adult in the world will learn it in just 31 times the time to tell two. Just by word of mouth. You can light four billion candles from one candle in just 31 times the time to light two if everyone who gets their candle lit lights just two candles. There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their energies and resources. It just needs people to allow their supreme confidence that there is no solution to be eroded, and replaced with a realistic assessment of reality. We are standing on the brink of self-extinction and of a golden age.
The underpaid are certainly unhappier, and the overpaid are miserable too, trapped in a boxing ring, forced into fighting off all comers endlessly till they fall with exhaustion, and isolated from the human tribe, perpetually at bay. Like Hitler, Ceausescu, Caesar, Stalin, every empire, and today, America. And overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, 1000 rooms for one body. So inequality is lose-lose, equality is win-win.
We just have to dig out a deeply rooted erroneous mindset. We have to open our minds. We have to step back from our struggling, desperate position in the mad heap and see the heap for what it is, hell [compared to what we could have]. The bus is waiting.
It is easy to conclude you are happy by ignoring all the bad stuff, by not comparing it with possibility. Free from pride, people would eagerly compare the happiness of other countries, and compete in happiness-pursuit. So what is pride, friend or foe?
Equality can be attained easily, in two generations, without making destructive waves in the economy, by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to make that superwealth, and everyone has done everything to make the things that moeny represents and buys, so such an act is just. Or [or and] by giving everyone in the world equal shares in a 1%-a-month increase in the money supply. Inflation is not bad when everyone gets the added money. These methods do not require a large suffocating bureaucracy, they allow us greatly to reduce bureaucracy and increase freedom from being buried in petty regulation and its vast costs.
But we are 98% genetically identical to chimpanzees, and we are loaded by nature with powerful instincts which are good in nature but disastrous in dealing with the complications of society.
It is only by heroic mental effort that we can hope to get free from our natural mental limitations and correctly 'read' our social reality. Only the people who see the big picture are awake, Heraclitus. It is easier for people to see small things than big things, Plato. Good things are hard, Plato.
Test everything, Bible. Like the railway engineer, who regularly tests the wheels. If your ideas are sound, testing them will increase your confidence in them. If they are not, testing them will save you a crash. So testing has no downside. We come closest to truth when we hear all opinions. And happiness is totally dependent on realism. And happiness is your everything. The human tendency to hold hard onto opinions without testing them honestly against other opinions is selfdestructive.
Reality is merciless, it won't even flinch in sympathy when you bark your shins against the coffee table you thought wasn't there. And part of the picture is nothing like the picture. Compare a jigsaw puzzle piece with the complete picture.
Restrained by custom, and the ridiculous prejudices of the world, we go with the crowd, and it is late in life before we dare to think, Frances Brookes. Economic truth emerges only when things are considered whole, John Galbraith ['Dean of economists'].
The plane of human being is in a nosedive, close to crashing. Weaponry at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and a violence factor of one billion, rising. And reality won't even flinch when we culminate our big mistake.
A 500-page book in bitesize sections is free at www.globalhappiness.org [not an org], and the globalhappiness site will soon have a new, somewhat annoyingly-written but invaluable book. People say it [or at least the first chapter] is 'teachy'. Putting up with its annoyances can be your penance for hurting yourselves unnecessarily, enormously, for 1000s of years. As mothers say: Serves you right.
Yes, socialism doesn't work
If you are talking about hard socialism, no-private-property, central-planning socialism, then, yes, it hasn't worked. The state owning everything means the government leaders owning everything, which is the most extreme pay injustice, since everyone works, and creates the wealth. It is extreme wealth concentration, unjustly, and people's sense of justice opposes it, and then there is war between the govt and the people, which absorbs a lot of wealth and productivity, and destroys the nation.
As for soft socialism, govt trying to prevent the extremes of wealth and poverty caused by pure capitalism, all first-world states are soft socialist states, including USA. Which has led to fat bureaucracies suffocating productivity, and shovelling wealth, mostly to the lower middle class, not to the poor.
Capitalism is good for the invisible hand, automatically and sensitively adjusting supply and demand, far better than central planning can, but pure capitalism, as practised in the 19th century, led to extreme wealth and poverty, because of the many wideopen LEGAL THEFTS in the system [as well as the successful illegal thefts, like the Mafia]. In pure capitalism, there are many wideopen legal thefts, like pay for scarcity, which in one century, the 19th, caused such poverty that the market, the buyers, was drying up. Money had been sucked up into few hands, and there was little money in the markets for people to buy things. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s in America. And America and every country in the first world took steps, and labour took steps, to reduce the extreme inequality, by unions, to give workers more power, by eg Henry Ford giving high wages, so workers could afford the cars, by govt interference in inequality, by graduated tax, social security, old age pensions, minimum wages etc. But these methods involve bureaucracy, which is ever-growing, and which now absorbs 40% of USA national wealth, and suffocates productivity with rules and regulations.
What I suggest is capitalism with a simple non-bureacratic way of preventing endlessly more extreme wealth and poverty, which obviously generates violence [endless growth of war, crime and weaponry]. That way we have the advantages of capitalism without the disadvantages of extreme inequality, evergrowing violence, suffocating bureaucracy, and everincreasing warmongering by the superrich and cannonfoddering of the underpaid. Call it democratic capitalism, call it justice capitalism, call it survival capitalism. Every empire has fallen due to ever-increasing inequality. Money is power, so extreme inequality of wealth is extreme inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, unliberty, which is what we had in Europe and what Americans were fleeing.
Liberty and justice for all. The most important justice is pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no pay for no work, no overpay and no underpay, everyone taking out of the social pool of wealth as much as they put in by their work. Because money is the joker good, good for just about everything, including power and social standing. We have many wideopen pays for no work [overpay, overpower, corruption, welldressed theft], which means work for no pay [underpay, wageslavery, slavery, powerlessness] for others. Which means evergrowing inequality, violence, brutality, war and weaponry. Murder is proportional to inequality.
The state built on injustice cannot stand, Roman saying. Every state and empire in history has fallen because of extreme inequality. In the world today, we have pay from 10,000th of average to 100,000 times average. 99% are underpaid.
The purpose of government is justice, James Madison.
When our fathers prevented entail [and primogeniture, and when they fixed clergy salaries], they though they had erected a bulwark [safety wall] against the money power that had killed Britain [and every other state and empire in history]. They forgot that money can combine, that a moneyed corporation is like the papacy, it never dies. Wendell Phillips.
Both Lincoln and Jefferson warned against the corporation.
We are free today [early 19th century] substantially, but the day will come when our Republic [the American nation] will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth [and political power, and govt, and the military] will be concentrated in the hands of the few. James Madison, founding father.
A US Senate committee in the 1950s reported that big business was more powerful than the US Govt. Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both, Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court judge.
The working people have been expoited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody, Henry Ford.
When we resist concentration of power, we are resisting the pwoers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties, Woodrow Wilson.
If there were but one person in the world, it is manifest that he could have no more wealth than he was able to make and to save. That is the natural order. Henry George, founder of the Single Tax societies in the early 20th century, author of Progress and poverty.
I needed the good will of the legislature of four states. I formed the legislature bodies with my own money. Jay Gould, getting $1,000,000 a day in the 1880s.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, Stanley Kubrick.
Now we have discovered war to be derived from the unlimited accumulation of wealth which is also the cause of almost all the evils in states, Plato.
When individuals get a lot of wealth, they often go a-warmongering, fomenting wars, and selling to both sides, making huge profits, because the products get blown up, and also cannonfoddering millions of people [soldiers and civilians] in the process. The League of Nations was founded to try to prevent warmongerers fomenting wars. When people find themselves working very hard and getting very little, they sometimes get mad, and turn to war or crime. For the poor, being in the army, risking being shot, but being fed and clothed, is often the best option. So both wealth and poverty, overpay and underpay, contribute to war.
Governments can do nothing, because they are held hostage by the superwealthy. Only the people are strong enough to oppose the superwealthy. The people have always been stronger than the superwealthy. Every empire, every plutocracy has fallen to the people, the underpaid. But the people are relying on government, and are doing nothing, are not taking responsibility. Democracy is rule by the people, but the people have abdicated responsibility to the governments, who are in the hands of the warmongering superwealthy. So overpay-underpay violence and weaponry will continue growing, till the atomic bombs are used. The superwealthy will use the bombs on the people attacking them, and then it will be all over for everyone.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and growing rapidly in wealth and population. The superrich are selling weaponry to both sides. Conquering is a mug's game, because the plunderers get plundered by the plundered and the enslaved. This forces the superwealthy to raid the national wealth to defend themselves, and so increase the rage of the people against them. This is how every overwealth has fallen. And this time it will happen, over the next two or three decades, with bombs capable of killing everyone, putting up enough smoke to block out the sun, lower the temperature 25 degrees, three times colder than an iceage.
Unless the people move for pay justice.
Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. This is just, because the private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the workproducts that that money buys. This will gently, over two generations, make the super-overpay rain down on everyone, bring the 99% underpaid up towards $100,000 a year, and the overpaid down towards $100,000 a year.
This is simple, and doesn't need a big bureaucracy, just a small department to settle the estates and distribute the overpay electronically.
There is an even simpler method. But it is very unlikely that people will act responsibly, and think their way through to the reality of the present human situation, to the necessity and the enormous positive value for everyone of doing this. People will not grasp the danger till too late. We will be extinct. Already NATO are asking for the right to make pre-emptive nuclear strikes. First-world share of popluation is shrinking fast, to 2% of world population by 2100. Already depleted uranium has been used. Already, South America is starting to oppose the tyranny of USA.
As long as there are rich and poor, there will be growing war, as both sides throw everbigger weaponry. Pay up to 100,000 times the world average of $100,000 is absurd, madness. And against the sane principles of the founding fathers.
1% get 98% of world income, while doing 1% of the work.
A billion makes $100 million every year at 10%. A billion doubles at 10% every 7 years, multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. With no work at all by the owner. Therefore there is clearly extreme legal theft, pay for no work.
But since people cannot see even this super-extreme injustice, how can they see anything? People see superwealth, and instead of bringing it back down to justice, they try to climb up to it, or they settle for what they can get. Obviously wealth is power, and extreme overpay-underpay is overpower-underpower, tyranny-slavery, not democracy freedom peace survival order intelligence happiness safety friendliness, the good life.
Obviously individual contribution by own work is limited, not unlimited, so unlimited fortunes are unjust, which means the decline and fall of states and planets. No one wants fortunes to be limited, but they forget that unlimited fortunes means underpay for 99%.
Opening the gates to unlimited wealth for self is opening the gates to unlimited fortunes for others.
Unlimited overpay means unlimited underpay, because no one contributes unlimited amounts of wealth by their work. New technology has built-in scarcity, high demand and low supply, prices way above costs, till factories meet demand in maybe two decades.
People trust that common sense will prevail, and that they don't have to do anything. But has common sense prevailed for 3000 years? Tyranny, slavery, conquering, being conquered, every empire falling, ceaseless growth of war, crime and weaponry?
The golden rule is ironhard: don't hit people, they hit back! As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
Pay justice is the only escape hatch for homo sapiens, and after 3000 years of following pay injustice to super-super-extreme pay injustice, pay justice seems very strange, very foreign, very unlikely to be true or necessary.
People cannot believe in extinction, because it has never happened before.
We humans are sorcerer's apprentices, smart enough to get ourselves into giant technological trouble, unable to get ourselves out by common sense.
Head-in-the-sand we have lived and head-in-the-sand we will die.
Yet the way out is easy.
As for soft socialism, govt trying to prevent the extremes of wealth and poverty caused by pure capitalism, all first-world states are soft socialist states, including USA. Which has led to fat bureaucracies suffocating productivity, and shovelling wealth, mostly to the lower middle class, not to the poor.
Capitalism is good for the invisible hand, automatically and sensitively adjusting supply and demand, far better than central planning can, but pure capitalism, as practised in the 19th century, led to extreme wealth and poverty, because of the many wideopen LEGAL THEFTS in the system [as well as the successful illegal thefts, like the Mafia]. In pure capitalism, there are many wideopen legal thefts, like pay for scarcity, which in one century, the 19th, caused such poverty that the market, the buyers, was drying up. Money had been sucked up into few hands, and there was little money in the markets for people to buy things. Pay for 10 day's work ranged from $1 to $1,000,000 in the 1880s in America. And America and every country in the first world took steps, and labour took steps, to reduce the extreme inequality, by unions, to give workers more power, by eg Henry Ford giving high wages, so workers could afford the cars, by govt interference in inequality, by graduated tax, social security, old age pensions, minimum wages etc. But these methods involve bureaucracy, which is ever-growing, and which now absorbs 40% of USA national wealth, and suffocates productivity with rules and regulations.
What I suggest is capitalism with a simple non-bureacratic way of preventing endlessly more extreme wealth and poverty, which obviously generates violence [endless growth of war, crime and weaponry]. That way we have the advantages of capitalism without the disadvantages of extreme inequality, evergrowing violence, suffocating bureaucracy, and everincreasing warmongering by the superrich and cannonfoddering of the underpaid. Call it democratic capitalism, call it justice capitalism, call it survival capitalism. Every empire has fallen due to ever-increasing inequality. Money is power, so extreme inequality of wealth is extreme inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, unliberty, which is what we had in Europe and what Americans were fleeing.
Liberty and justice for all. The most important justice is pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no pay for no work, no overpay and no underpay, everyone taking out of the social pool of wealth as much as they put in by their work. Because money is the joker good, good for just about everything, including power and social standing. We have many wideopen pays for no work [overpay, overpower, corruption, welldressed theft], which means work for no pay [underpay, wageslavery, slavery, powerlessness] for others. Which means evergrowing inequality, violence, brutality, war and weaponry. Murder is proportional to inequality.
The state built on injustice cannot stand, Roman saying. Every state and empire in history has fallen because of extreme inequality. In the world today, we have pay from 10,000th of average to 100,000 times average. 99% are underpaid.
The purpose of government is justice, James Madison.
When our fathers prevented entail [and primogeniture, and when they fixed clergy salaries], they though they had erected a bulwark [safety wall] against the money power that had killed Britain [and every other state and empire in history]. They forgot that money can combine, that a moneyed corporation is like the papacy, it never dies. Wendell Phillips.
Both Lincoln and Jefferson warned against the corporation.
We are free today [early 19th century] substantially, but the day will come when our Republic [the American nation] will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth [and political power, and govt, and the military] will be concentrated in the hands of the few. James Madison, founding father.
A US Senate committee in the 1950s reported that big business was more powerful than the US Govt. Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex.
We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both, Louis Brandeis, Supreme Court judge.
The working people have been expoited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody, Henry Ford.
When we resist concentration of power, we are resisting the pwoers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties, Woodrow Wilson.
If there were but one person in the world, it is manifest that he could have no more wealth than he was able to make and to save. That is the natural order. Henry George, founder of the Single Tax societies in the early 20th century, author of Progress and poverty.
I needed the good will of the legislature of four states. I formed the legislature bodies with my own money. Jay Gould, getting $1,000,000 a day in the 1880s.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, Stanley Kubrick.
Now we have discovered war to be derived from the unlimited accumulation of wealth which is also the cause of almost all the evils in states, Plato.
When individuals get a lot of wealth, they often go a-warmongering, fomenting wars, and selling to both sides, making huge profits, because the products get blown up, and also cannonfoddering millions of people [soldiers and civilians] in the process. The League of Nations was founded to try to prevent warmongerers fomenting wars. When people find themselves working very hard and getting very little, they sometimes get mad, and turn to war or crime. For the poor, being in the army, risking being shot, but being fed and clothed, is often the best option. So both wealth and poverty, overpay and underpay, contribute to war.
Governments can do nothing, because they are held hostage by the superwealthy. Only the people are strong enough to oppose the superwealthy. The people have always been stronger than the superwealthy. Every empire, every plutocracy has fallen to the people, the underpaid. But the people are relying on government, and are doing nothing, are not taking responsibility. Democracy is rule by the people, but the people have abdicated responsibility to the governments, who are in the hands of the warmongering superwealthy. So overpay-underpay violence and weaponry will continue growing, till the atomic bombs are used. The superwealthy will use the bombs on the people attacking them, and then it will be all over for everyone.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and growing rapidly in wealth and population. The superrich are selling weaponry to both sides. Conquering is a mug's game, because the plunderers get plundered by the plundered and the enslaved. This forces the superwealthy to raid the national wealth to defend themselves, and so increase the rage of the people against them. This is how every overwealth has fallen. And this time it will happen, over the next two or three decades, with bombs capable of killing everyone, putting up enough smoke to block out the sun, lower the temperature 25 degrees, three times colder than an iceage.
Unless the people move for pay justice.
Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. This is just, because the private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the workproducts that that money buys. This will gently, over two generations, make the super-overpay rain down on everyone, bring the 99% underpaid up towards $100,000 a year, and the overpaid down towards $100,000 a year.
This is simple, and doesn't need a big bureaucracy, just a small department to settle the estates and distribute the overpay electronically.
There is an even simpler method. But it is very unlikely that people will act responsibly, and think their way through to the reality of the present human situation, to the necessity and the enormous positive value for everyone of doing this. People will not grasp the danger till too late. We will be extinct. Already NATO are asking for the right to make pre-emptive nuclear strikes. First-world share of popluation is shrinking fast, to 2% of world population by 2100. Already depleted uranium has been used. Already, South America is starting to oppose the tyranny of USA.
As long as there are rich and poor, there will be growing war, as both sides throw everbigger weaponry. Pay up to 100,000 times the world average of $100,000 is absurd, madness. And against the sane principles of the founding fathers.
1% get 98% of world income, while doing 1% of the work.
A billion makes $100 million every year at 10%. A billion doubles at 10% every 7 years, multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. With no work at all by the owner. Therefore there is clearly extreme legal theft, pay for no work.
But since people cannot see even this super-extreme injustice, how can they see anything? People see superwealth, and instead of bringing it back down to justice, they try to climb up to it, or they settle for what they can get. Obviously wealth is power, and extreme overpay-underpay is overpower-underpower, tyranny-slavery, not democracy freedom peace survival order intelligence happiness safety friendliness, the good life.
Obviously individual contribution by own work is limited, not unlimited, so unlimited fortunes are unjust, which means the decline and fall of states and planets. No one wants fortunes to be limited, but they forget that unlimited fortunes means underpay for 99%.
Opening the gates to unlimited wealth for self is opening the gates to unlimited fortunes for others.
Unlimited overpay means unlimited underpay, because no one contributes unlimited amounts of wealth by their work. New technology has built-in scarcity, high demand and low supply, prices way above costs, till factories meet demand in maybe two decades.
People trust that common sense will prevail, and that they don't have to do anything. But has common sense prevailed for 3000 years? Tyranny, slavery, conquering, being conquered, every empire falling, ceaseless growth of war, crime and weaponry?
The golden rule is ironhard: don't hit people, they hit back! As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
Pay justice is the only escape hatch for homo sapiens, and after 3000 years of following pay injustice to super-super-extreme pay injustice, pay justice seems very strange, very foreign, very unlikely to be true or necessary.
People cannot believe in extinction, because it has never happened before.
We humans are sorcerer's apprentices, smart enough to get ourselves into giant technological trouble, unable to get ourselves out by common sense.
Head-in-the-sand we have lived and head-in-the-sand we will die.
Yet the way out is easy.
Thinking about losers
Thinking about losers. If you have a running race with ten people, you have nine losers. By having a race, you *create* nine losers.
America seems to be *very* hierarchical. I applied for a job with Encyclopedia Britannica [despite the name, American] and the pay *doubled* at every rise in level. Which looks good while you are imagining yourself rising, but of course most cannot rise. Thus loser means an enormous amount in America.
Richard Semler of Semco, Brazil wrote a book Maverick, in which he describes greatly lowering the hierarchy. His company made huge profits at a time when Brazilian profits were very poor.
I have read that mental illness is high in competitive societies, low in cooperative societies.
I think of Hitler, loser. 40% or 60% [I can't remember] of Nazis were primary school teachers, ie 'losers'. The Nazi thing was anti-intellectual, because the intellectuals had collared the winnings. Same thing in China, with the 'cultural revolution', in which the powergrab of the mandarins [the brainier, the winners, and the more aggressive, pushy] was broken up. What happened to liberty, equality and fraternity? The more unequal the 'rewards', the deeper the 'loserness' is, and the deeper the hell, hopelessness and humiliation.
An old Readers Digest article praised Sweden for having learned that: **None enjoy unless all enjoy**. People are too dangerous to annoy. Witness putting the Palestinians in refugee camps for 50 years, stealing their land, giving them no opportunity even to start again from scratch. Poverty, underpay, underpower, is the mother of explosives.
I was surprised to find that most American universities have fewer than a million volumes in the library, while Harvard has 90 million.
Society puts up a ladder, and everyone thoughtlessly eagerly tries to climb the ladder. No one thinks about not climbing the ladder, thinks about making the ladder horizontal, a seat for everyone. Never thinks about whether it is unjust, unliberty, undemocratic, tyrannous to have the ladder. Everyone hanging onto the ladder, struggling to get past others, kicking down at others trying to get up, till the ladder breaks under the weight.
America was based on prevention of wealth concentration. Wealth is power, inequality of wealth is inequality of power, is tyranny-slavery, nondemocracy. 'Liberty and justice for all'. Pay justice. But where are the philosophers of pay justice? Who is asking what precisely, numerically, is pay justice? Our economic systems contain many wideopen legal thefts, pay for no work [overpay], causing work for no pay [underpay] for others. The ladder system was okay as long as there was mobility. [Although mobility is a poor substitute for pay justice.] But now mobility has gridlocked, immobility has hardened.
Inequality has triumphed, and unliberty and unfraternity. Americans don't look globally, but hey, after 200 years of transport technology reducing distance so that a day away has gone from 50 miles to 12,500 miles, it's a global reality. Just look at your shop shelves. And what do we have globally, that is, what do we have in the real picture? Pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of *one billion*. Which means violence, weaponry, terrorism, chaos, misery, torture, genocide, disinformation factor of one billion.
The war between winners and losers, first casualty of war is truth. The dumbing down of America, keeping you ignorant of the world. The more inequality, the more power to steal, and the more money needed to fight all the wars of offence and defence. America $9 trillion in debt.
Where is Britain's empire? Spain's Inca plunder? Wealth concentration means everyone attacks the wealth heap. Everyone in the world is on the ladder. And this time, with 60 times PDC [planet death capability].
Time to move away from plunder, towards cooperation, recognition that people are too dangerous to annoy?
At any time, there are Hitlers gathering the losers in a reverse push against plunder. Unfortunately, the mindset of losers is to revenge the humiliation by becoming plunderers. Hitler plundered Europe, and Europe plundered back. The humiliation made a pride that doomed itself.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and climbing 10% every 30 years. And heading for 98% of population by 2100. The 500 years of first-world plundering is heading for a big reverse plunder. Like Rome. With atomic weapons.
Reality check is: liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness] now, or nuclear extinction very soon, say, 30 years. Pay/year from $10 to $10,000,000,000. That is, pay/year from 10,000th to 100,000 times world average of $40/hour, $100,000/yr, for every worker including housewives and students. That is, family pay/year of $200,000 without student. For every family in the world.
Which will mean 100 times faster progress, with 90% of scientists not tied up in inequality-violence, in military-industrial complex, universities, government, hospitals, business, and 90% of potential scientists not too poor to become scientists [innovators, etc]. If we had had equality instead of the ladder, we would have been among the stars by now.
And global average life expectancy would be over 100, maybe over 120 or 150. [Since the legal definition of murder means shortening the life of anyone alive, we are murdering everyone, including ourselves.]
Is liberty, equality, fraternity beginning to look like worth a look?
The ancient Israelites [ideally, anyway] cancelled all debt every 7 years, to prevent inequality growing monstrous. Six years of ratracing, one year of everyone re-equalised. [Handicaps for 'losers' removed.] 99% of people are underpaid, are paid less than the world average, of $40 an hour [2007 dollars, which I better mention, before the US dollar takes a nosedive.]
Globally, we have had 3000 years of inequality growing monstrous. And the violence gets to everyone, richest to poorest. Common sense, anyone? Doing yourself the biggest favour in history, anyone?
The change can be achieved gently in two generations by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. [The private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the goods that money buys, so this is just. A tiny bureaucracy to settle the estates and distribute electronically.]
Or making everyone equal receivers of a 1% per month increase in the money supply. [An even smaller bureaucracy. A computer could do it.]
Justice, equal pay for equal work, means peace, order, democracy, freedom, friendliness, safety, noncorruption, truth, etc - everything good. Inequality, of which we have giga amounts, means warmongering and cannonfoddering, disorder, distress, disinformation, brutality, global disaster, and, soon, nuclear extinction.
Make Daddy proud and choose inequality, as I know you will, and blow yourselves to fook! Pursuit of happiness, pah!
[No, son, equality doesn't mean paying slackers, it means adjusting for the many pays-for-no-work, overpays, in commerce.]
America seems to be *very* hierarchical. I applied for a job with Encyclopedia Britannica [despite the name, American] and the pay *doubled* at every rise in level. Which looks good while you are imagining yourself rising, but of course most cannot rise. Thus loser means an enormous amount in America.
Richard Semler of Semco, Brazil wrote a book Maverick, in which he describes greatly lowering the hierarchy. His company made huge profits at a time when Brazilian profits were very poor.
I have read that mental illness is high in competitive societies, low in cooperative societies.
I think of Hitler, loser. 40% or 60% [I can't remember] of Nazis were primary school teachers, ie 'losers'. The Nazi thing was anti-intellectual, because the intellectuals had collared the winnings. Same thing in China, with the 'cultural revolution', in which the powergrab of the mandarins [the brainier, the winners, and the more aggressive, pushy] was broken up. What happened to liberty, equality and fraternity? The more unequal the 'rewards', the deeper the 'loserness' is, and the deeper the hell, hopelessness and humiliation.
An old Readers Digest article praised Sweden for having learned that: **None enjoy unless all enjoy**. People are too dangerous to annoy. Witness putting the Palestinians in refugee camps for 50 years, stealing their land, giving them no opportunity even to start again from scratch. Poverty, underpay, underpower, is the mother of explosives.
I was surprised to find that most American universities have fewer than a million volumes in the library, while Harvard has 90 million.
Society puts up a ladder, and everyone thoughtlessly eagerly tries to climb the ladder. No one thinks about not climbing the ladder, thinks about making the ladder horizontal, a seat for everyone. Never thinks about whether it is unjust, unliberty, undemocratic, tyrannous to have the ladder. Everyone hanging onto the ladder, struggling to get past others, kicking down at others trying to get up, till the ladder breaks under the weight.
America was based on prevention of wealth concentration. Wealth is power, inequality of wealth is inequality of power, is tyranny-slavery, nondemocracy. 'Liberty and justice for all'. Pay justice. But where are the philosophers of pay justice? Who is asking what precisely, numerically, is pay justice? Our economic systems contain many wideopen legal thefts, pay for no work [overpay], causing work for no pay [underpay] for others. The ladder system was okay as long as there was mobility. [Although mobility is a poor substitute for pay justice.] But now mobility has gridlocked, immobility has hardened.
Inequality has triumphed, and unliberty and unfraternity. Americans don't look globally, but hey, after 200 years of transport technology reducing distance so that a day away has gone from 50 miles to 12,500 miles, it's a global reality. Just look at your shop shelves. And what do we have globally, that is, what do we have in the real picture? Pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of *one billion*. Which means violence, weaponry, terrorism, chaos, misery, torture, genocide, disinformation factor of one billion.
The war between winners and losers, first casualty of war is truth. The dumbing down of America, keeping you ignorant of the world. The more inequality, the more power to steal, and the more money needed to fight all the wars of offence and defence. America $9 trillion in debt.
Where is Britain's empire? Spain's Inca plunder? Wealth concentration means everyone attacks the wealth heap. Everyone in the world is on the ladder. And this time, with 60 times PDC [planet death capability].
Time to move away from plunder, towards cooperation, recognition that people are too dangerous to annoy?
At any time, there are Hitlers gathering the losers in a reverse push against plunder. Unfortunately, the mindset of losers is to revenge the humiliation by becoming plunderers. Hitler plundered Europe, and Europe plundered back. The humiliation made a pride that doomed itself.
The third world is at 51% of world wealth now, and climbing 10% every 30 years. And heading for 98% of population by 2100. The 500 years of first-world plundering is heading for a big reverse plunder. Like Rome. With atomic weapons.
Reality check is: liberty, equality and fraternity [friendliness] now, or nuclear extinction very soon, say, 30 years. Pay/year from $10 to $10,000,000,000. That is, pay/year from 10,000th to 100,000 times world average of $40/hour, $100,000/yr, for every worker including housewives and students. That is, family pay/year of $200,000 without student. For every family in the world.
Which will mean 100 times faster progress, with 90% of scientists not tied up in inequality-violence, in military-industrial complex, universities, government, hospitals, business, and 90% of potential scientists not too poor to become scientists [innovators, etc]. If we had had equality instead of the ladder, we would have been among the stars by now.
And global average life expectancy would be over 100, maybe over 120 or 150. [Since the legal definition of murder means shortening the life of anyone alive, we are murdering everyone, including ourselves.]
Is liberty, equality, fraternity beginning to look like worth a look?
The ancient Israelites [ideally, anyway] cancelled all debt every 7 years, to prevent inequality growing monstrous. Six years of ratracing, one year of everyone re-equalised. [Handicaps for 'losers' removed.] 99% of people are underpaid, are paid less than the world average, of $40 an hour [2007 dollars, which I better mention, before the US dollar takes a nosedive.]
Globally, we have had 3000 years of inequality growing monstrous. And the violence gets to everyone, richest to poorest. Common sense, anyone? Doing yourself the biggest favour in history, anyone?
The change can be achieved gently in two generations by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. [The private heir has done nothing to make that money, and everyone has done everything to make the goods that money buys, so this is just. A tiny bureaucracy to settle the estates and distribute electronically.]
Or making everyone equal receivers of a 1% per month increase in the money supply. [An even smaller bureaucracy. A computer could do it.]
Justice, equal pay for equal work, means peace, order, democracy, freedom, friendliness, safety, noncorruption, truth, etc - everything good. Inequality, of which we have giga amounts, means warmongering and cannonfoddering, disorder, distress, disinformation, brutality, global disaster, and, soon, nuclear extinction.
Make Daddy proud and choose inequality, as I know you will, and blow yourselves to fook! Pursuit of happiness, pah!
[No, son, equality doesn't mean paying slackers, it means adjusting for the many pays-for-no-work, overpays, in commerce.]
The cause of all our miseries and danger: the stupefying love of inequality
The amazing thing that the egalitarian discovers is that no one wants equality.
Some people, sometimes, to some degree, want less inequality, but the passion for pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no overpay and no underpay, is very rare.
99% are paid less than the world average, so 99% would be paid more if overpay was reduced, but this generates no enthusiasm, no interest, no support.
Everyone assures the egalitarian that people are too greedy for equality, as if equality would make everyone poorer. The egalitarian is regarded as an opponent of society, an outsider, a dreamer, a danger. Apparently people identify with wealth. The fact that they don't have the wealth doesn't seem to bother them. They are defensive towards the rich. Apparently they think that an attack on wealth is an attack on them, as though they thought: If wealth is taken away, we will be poor. The notions of overpay and underpay are non-existent. The superrich are not quite liked, but they are far from being thought of as just plain thieves, with money that belongs to others. Yet pay per workhour now goes up to 100,000 times world average, and down to 10,000th of average. And still there is no general idea of overpay and underpay.
The people I am talking about are the people in the middle, the less underpaid. The more underpaid people are, the stronger their feelings for a better share can be. And yet even most of the severely underpaid are not certain that they deserve more, that they have been robbed.
Reading history of efforts to reduce inequality, one is struck by the great weakness of the efforts. In times of war, the attitude is: If people are going to be asked to risk their lives, the least the rich can do is give some money. No one thinks of making the rich do the most they can do. Here people are risking their lives, giving their lives, and the extent of their will against the rich is to expect them to do the least they can do. Their valuation of the rich is far greater than their valuation of themselves, and they see nothing odd in this.
People seem to participate in the idea that wealth proves the wealthy are better and more deserving than themselves. Is this just ignorance of the ways that money is stolen [transferred from earners to non-earners of it] legally? Even when ways of legal theft are pointed out to people, the people do not become clear that the wealthy have money that belongs to the people.
People build a city, and land values go up, and landowners get the added value of the city, produced by others' labour. A person can buy land before the city is built, wait till the city is built, and be rich for no work. The rich are buying up wherever infrastraucture growith is greatest and getting a freebie in proportion to their fortune. Henry George pointed this out, and indeed groups sprang up in support of the correction of this theft. But then they faded away.
Twice in the 20th century, in America, the rich have been able to quell pushes to equality by raising the 'spectre' of communism. And yet the concept people had of communism was egalitarian. In fact egalitarian communism had been hijacked by thugs, and was totalitarian, and the idealistic pro-worker communists agitating among workers for greater equality were dupes of the thugs who had stolen the communist egalitarian dream, but this does not come into the matter here. The rich were easily able to make people fear and loathe communism, although communists were agitating on behalf of the workers. It was easy to make people feel that communism would destroy the nation, and to make the people close ranks with the rich against the enemy, the foreigners. People have always inclined to fear outsiders far more than their 'upsiders'. When the people were gathering their wits against the rich, the rich were able, in the two Red scares, to shout: Look, the bogeyman! and slip away.
The realism of Anatole France's You think you die for your country, you die for some industrialists, has never penetrated the general mind. The US General, Smedley Butler, said that the only way to stop war is to send the rich to war, but this has never found support among the people, although the people have made some grumblings about the rich avoiding military service, and the people approve of politicians who have been to war. D H Lawrence said the people are the eternal dupe. Is it just ignorance, falling easily for tricks?
It seems to be inconceivable to people that an hour's work by a rich man is the same amount of work as an hour's work by a poor person, deserving the same compensation. There seems to be a circular argument: The rich man deserves more because he is better, is more productive. How do we know he is better? Because he is paid more.
And there is the assumption that if something is legal, it is just. This ignores the obvious fact that the rich have written the laws.
Money is the joker good. It is good for just about everything. So the theft of it is the theft of just about everything, including democracy and social status. So inequality causes violence: war, crime and weaponry. Violence and inequality have been growing for 3000 years. Violence grows, as both sides try to prevail, and throw ever bigger weaponry at each other. Money is power, power to make money, power to warmonger and to cannonfodder the people. The League of Nations was founded to try to stop arms manufacturers fomenting wars. As Ambrose Bierce put it: An arms dealer sells you rifles to protect yourself against someone to whom he has sold cannon. Jefferson, another realist, said: Merchants have no country. And he talked of the preying by the rich on the poor.
America was founded by people who had fled tyrannies. And it is surely obvious that money is power and so overpay is tyranny. The warning that laws can stop the poor but not the rich goes back to the Greeks. And yet the resistance to overpay, to limitless, unjust concentrations of wealth is not yet strong, is still very weak. During the 19th century in America, the idea that freedom depended on prevention of wealth concentration was dominant, but ineffective.
All through history, there have been cries for liberty, and obviously this is against tyranny, and obviously tyranny cannot exist without unjust concentration of wealth, and yet the identificaton of tyranny and extreme wealth is very weak.
People who grumble about being wageslaves still think they are in a democracy. At the very least, if the superrich were to be tolerated, they should have been forbidden to go anywhere near the government. But this idea has never been suggested. Instead, the rich are all over the government, and people just look at things that are happening and maybe say they aren't right.
Even if the rich had earned the money they have [which they haven't, couldn't possibly], there should have been a strong will to prevent wealth, which is tyranny.
Part of the problem is that everyone is greedy, everyone wants to be rich. No one wants to be restricted to taking out no more than they put in. Clearly it doesn't occur to people that freedom to be limitlessly rich, to take out more than you put in, without limit, opens the door to getting out less than you put in, without limit. Freedom for self to be limitlessly rich is freedom for others to be limitlessly rich.
All the money equals all the owrk equals all the workproducts. So if someone gets out more money than they put in work, others have to get out less money [workproducts]. And violence is proportional to the overpay-underpay. People still see prevention of overwealth as restriction of freedom, although 99% are underpaid. The net effect of everyone having free grabs on the social pool of wealth is that 99% are underpaid, 90% are paid between 100th and 10,000th of world-average pay per hour.
People really believe that riches come out of thin air, or out of the productivity of the rich, although the bulk of the money comes over the counter from people's pockets. People really believe that rich people make money, create wealth, although wealth is created only by mother nature and by work. And they think that the rich provide jobs, and investment capital. People feel dependent on the rich. They think they need the rich. The only thing that provides jobs is demand for goods and the ability to pay for them, nature's bounty and human work.
And the only thing that provides capital is savings, excess of income over outgoes. There is no need for savings to be concentrated with the rich. Savings can be with the people who earned them.
People think that if the rich go, the wealth goes. Back into thin air. People believe more in concentration of wealth than in pay justice. Wealth cannot disappear. Wealth exists by nature's bounty and people's work. Pay justice would not reduce wealth, it would spread it. Justly. Pay justice would undo theft. The rich would come down to just pay, and the underpaid would come up to just pay. And the vast costs of violence would disappear. A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day. Warmongering and cannonfoddering. War yields high profits because the products are being destroyed. Along with many people.
Even with progressive taxation, there still seems to be a feeling that this is stealing from the rich. In war-necessity, it is okay to steal from the rich, but not at other times. The people have found the will to take something from the rich in time of war, and after war this will has weakened. And all the time, the wars are caused by the power of the rich, in their pursuit of profits or in their wars with other rich people trying to steal from each other. Concentrations of wealth attract thieves. And the rich raid the public treasury to fight their wars. And raid the populace for cannonfodder. And rake vast profits from the war. And are hailed as great patriots for mobilising the war effort.
People prefer wealth to be visible. They prefer wealth amassed than in their own pockets. One is reminded of the golden calf. People reveled in it. And could not see their now empty pockets. The Israelites had got the jewellery and gold of the Egyptians, and had given them up to make the golden calf, and they felt richer with the golden calf. With emptier pockets. No wonder Moses was so frustrated with them. [I'm not saying the story is true or false, just an illustration.]
Even when people go for taking from the rich, they let the money go to the government, and are not vigilant to see that the government gives it all to them. And the government is in the hands of the rich.
It is obvious that if a person was alone in the world, he could amass nothing more than by nature's bounty and his own work. In society, nature's bounty belongs equally to all living humans, as nature's bounty does to all living animals. There is no reason that nature's bounty should belong to anyone more than another. In society, there is also the efficiency of job specialisation, but this factor, whatever it is, belongs equally to all who participate in the job specialisation. So there is nothing in society that justifies anyone having more than arises from his equal share of nature's bounty, his own work, and the efficiency of job specialisation factor.
As it is, all of nature's bounty goes to landowners, and in proportion to their holdings. Although everyone has birthright to equal share of nature's bounty, landowners get it all, and as unequally as their holdings. No one notices this. Most people don't suffer from greed, they suffer from the opposite vice, uncontrollable senseless dangerous selfharming impulse to let others have wealth and power.
It is extraordinary that the community allows a landowner to take all of nature's bounty on his property, when that bounty may be billions of dollars of oil or diamonds. Even if the land is nationalised, the people allow the government to have it all. People have no notion of justice for themselves. And yet the oil has no value except by the community's demand for it. That is, the community makes the oil valuable. People seem to have no self-esteem: It can't belong to me.
And an investment at 10% doubles every seven years and multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. That is a huge sucking straw at national and global wealth, a straw which grows with every suck. The size of the straw is proportional to the size of the fortune. Basically, the rich are sitting sucking the wealth. 1% get 98% of world income. There is enough income for every working person, including housewives and students, to have US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. That is, every working person, including housewives and students, is producing US$100,000 worth of wealth by a fulltime year's work. And 99% are underpaid, are stolen from, and 90% get between 100th and 10,000th of the wealth they make, by their own work. And the violence is proportional.
Interest or usury used to be regarded as bad. Interest is based on profits, and there is nothing to stop profits being in excess of work, being 'pure profit'. Somehow people don't have the power to realise this reality, although it is mad as mad.
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, and we have pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of one billion. There is the unhappiness of not having one's earnings, and one's fair share of political power, and there is the unhappiness of the violence, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. We have had inequality growing, and war, crime and weaponry growing, for 3000 years, since commerce began.
People let their earnings slip away, and then get mad when they are really poor and go to a lot of trouble and danger getting it back.
Everyone loves profit when they are making it. People don't realise that opening that gate to getting something for nothing is not egalitarian: the gate is as large as the fortune, very unequal. Money makes money sounds great, and so everyone supports it, not realising that the net effect, since the money made by money has to come from others, is super-super-extreme inequality and violence. Little money makes little money for nothing, big money makes big money for nothing. Underpay for 99% and super-super-underpay for 90%. And violence for everyone. And money is power, so it also means inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, undemocracy, unfreedom, state terrorism.
The richest are murdering millions at will, quite above the law. And people can see this as evil only in leaders of other countries. Russians in the 1970s were even nostalgic for the Stalin era. Wealthpower is an umbrella for people, even though that wealthpower preys on them too. The more other nations have wealthpower concentrated, the more they want their wealthpower concentrated, which is understandable. But it is the wealthpower that is causing the wars. And the wealthpower concentration makes the nation weak, underproductive. Inequality violence destroys the nation from inside and outside. Governments grow fat and stupid from all the money they get to try to solve the problems caused by the inequality, and the bigger the government, the smaller the production. And the rich feed on the government.
Even the 'radical' measures of the Huey Long movement were far from justice. No fortune was to be more than 100 times the average. But most people are below the average, most fortunes go well below average. And how is anyone supposed to truly earn, by own work, 100 times the average? We seem to have quite lost sight of equal pay for equal work. The average person works over 50 hours a week, no one can work more than 100 hours a week longterm, and the working rich probably work less than 100 hours a week, more like 70 hours a week. Give people the same tools, materials, time, data, etc, and how different will the production be?
There is no magic in accumulation of wealth with leaders of companies. The merchant buys cheap and sells dear, as the Greeks said. It is the easiest thing in the world to make prices 10% above costs, including cost of leaders' work. All that surplus funnels from many transactions onto the table of the leaders. A company is a funnel. Sell millions of 4c and 8c items for 5c and 10c, and you get Woolworth millions. Who can tell the exact cost of anything? How can the customer tell that he is overpaying 10%?
If demand is high relative to supply, prices can be well above costs. In new technology, there is built-in scarcity. We won't know how much computers actually cost until competition finishes forcing the price down. It takes only a 36% annual average personal profit rate to turn Bill Gates's $5,000,000 start-up money into $50 billion in 30 years. And he wasn't the only Microsoft multi-millionaire. New technology simply taxes people for their demand. Demand is not work by Bill Gates.
And the first in the field gets a head start, and so builds up financial muscle to lean on competitors, preserving the monopoly longer. And patents are monopolies. The ones who profit by the situation aren't complaining, and the ones who actually pay for this free money hardly know they are robbed, and are greatly uninterested in the fact. The poor man pays for all, Ambrose Bierce. Inequality grows, and violence, till we all fall down.
The immaturity of believing in this hocuspocus is beyond belief.
The two things in a trade can hardly be of equal workvalue. What is invisible in one trade is clear in the real stories of trading up from a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. So there is a tiny drop of inequality in every trade, which, with trillions of trades, grows an ocean of inequality. A very stormy ocean, in which all drown.
The state: that fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else, Frederic Bastiat.
One can imagine a small community in which, if someone managed by some means to amass a fortune significantly larger than others, the leader or the group of leaders would go to that person and say: Look, I don't know how it happened, but there is no way you could have earned that much more than everyone else, you'll have to give it up, spread it around everyone.
A sane community would have no trouble seeing that person as having too much, as having somehow got more than his rightful wealth. The moral force of that clear idea in the community would be overwhelming. The person would have no choice but to agree. The moral force of that idea in the community would incline his own attitude towards agreement, if he was inclined to disagree. It is obvious the person hasn't worked significantly harder than anyone else. There would be this clear idea in the community even if they didn't know how the accumulation happened. If they had the explanation, say, that the overpay came from being a merchant, and making a little on a lot of transactions, their opinion would only be stronger.
In ancient Israel, the idea was to cancel all debt every seven years. Clearly the community saw the obvious.
Somehow this sanity has been lost in our communities. Even with the explanations.
We pay people for their natural gifts. Yet these are no work of the person, but of nature. We should pay Pablo Casals for every bit of practice he did, but not for having a gift. By paying for gifts, not work, we have to work for no pay. We see nothing wrong in paying Paul McCartney half a billion for 'his' lovely songs. How many people can we pay for no work before running out of money? We allow superfortune to Bill Gates for his genius. But who assessed his genius? We merely assume it from 'his' money. And who provided the genius? Not Bill Gates.
The person being paid $10 an hour is giving, or allowing to be taken from him or her, $30 an hour. Each person is producing $40 worth of workproducts an hour. It has to be so. All the annual world income divided by all the annual workhours has to be the wealth production of each hour. Annual income $300 trillion, 3 billion workers, is $100,000 a year, or $40 an hour.
But the tendency of most people is to oppose pay justice, to support the status quo. I suspect they think pursuit of justice is naughty. Is there a psychological hangover from the family dynamic, the rich are Daddy, and we want to please Daddy, and the child who is against Daddy is way out of line? [Think Sugar Daddy, Daddy Warbucks.]
We allow higher pay per hour for having studied. But there is no work in having studied. [There is work in studying, and so that should be paid for by the whole community, which benefits, not parents or scholarships or loans.] And we never enquire who pays for this unjust largesse of paying for the no-work of having studied. And we go on overpaying for health services, lawyers, government, etc.
And that theory explains why we trust 'Daddy' with the money. The trouble is, it isn't Daddy, it is some fellow who crawled in the window. In USA, Britain, and most other countries, we have given private citizens the license to print money. The American Federal Reserve Bank is privately owned. The government has to *borrow* money from this bank.
This is tear-your-hair-out stupidity.
Even when people notice, the word doesn't spread. Apparently, most adults aren't even adolescent. They are innocents. It looks as though we should educate our children from a young age in the family finances.
Some people, sometimes, to some degree, want less inequality, but the passion for pay justice, equal pay for equal work, no overpay and no underpay, is very rare.
99% are paid less than the world average, so 99% would be paid more if overpay was reduced, but this generates no enthusiasm, no interest, no support.
Everyone assures the egalitarian that people are too greedy for equality, as if equality would make everyone poorer. The egalitarian is regarded as an opponent of society, an outsider, a dreamer, a danger. Apparently people identify with wealth. The fact that they don't have the wealth doesn't seem to bother them. They are defensive towards the rich. Apparently they think that an attack on wealth is an attack on them, as though they thought: If wealth is taken away, we will be poor. The notions of overpay and underpay are non-existent. The superrich are not quite liked, but they are far from being thought of as just plain thieves, with money that belongs to others. Yet pay per workhour now goes up to 100,000 times world average, and down to 10,000th of average. And still there is no general idea of overpay and underpay.
The people I am talking about are the people in the middle, the less underpaid. The more underpaid people are, the stronger their feelings for a better share can be. And yet even most of the severely underpaid are not certain that they deserve more, that they have been robbed.
Reading history of efforts to reduce inequality, one is struck by the great weakness of the efforts. In times of war, the attitude is: If people are going to be asked to risk their lives, the least the rich can do is give some money. No one thinks of making the rich do the most they can do. Here people are risking their lives, giving their lives, and the extent of their will against the rich is to expect them to do the least they can do. Their valuation of the rich is far greater than their valuation of themselves, and they see nothing odd in this.
People seem to participate in the idea that wealth proves the wealthy are better and more deserving than themselves. Is this just ignorance of the ways that money is stolen [transferred from earners to non-earners of it] legally? Even when ways of legal theft are pointed out to people, the people do not become clear that the wealthy have money that belongs to the people.
People build a city, and land values go up, and landowners get the added value of the city, produced by others' labour. A person can buy land before the city is built, wait till the city is built, and be rich for no work. The rich are buying up wherever infrastraucture growith is greatest and getting a freebie in proportion to their fortune. Henry George pointed this out, and indeed groups sprang up in support of the correction of this theft. But then they faded away.
Twice in the 20th century, in America, the rich have been able to quell pushes to equality by raising the 'spectre' of communism. And yet the concept people had of communism was egalitarian. In fact egalitarian communism had been hijacked by thugs, and was totalitarian, and the idealistic pro-worker communists agitating among workers for greater equality were dupes of the thugs who had stolen the communist egalitarian dream, but this does not come into the matter here. The rich were easily able to make people fear and loathe communism, although communists were agitating on behalf of the workers. It was easy to make people feel that communism would destroy the nation, and to make the people close ranks with the rich against the enemy, the foreigners. People have always inclined to fear outsiders far more than their 'upsiders'. When the people were gathering their wits against the rich, the rich were able, in the two Red scares, to shout: Look, the bogeyman! and slip away.
The realism of Anatole France's You think you die for your country, you die for some industrialists, has never penetrated the general mind. The US General, Smedley Butler, said that the only way to stop war is to send the rich to war, but this has never found support among the people, although the people have made some grumblings about the rich avoiding military service, and the people approve of politicians who have been to war. D H Lawrence said the people are the eternal dupe. Is it just ignorance, falling easily for tricks?
It seems to be inconceivable to people that an hour's work by a rich man is the same amount of work as an hour's work by a poor person, deserving the same compensation. There seems to be a circular argument: The rich man deserves more because he is better, is more productive. How do we know he is better? Because he is paid more.
And there is the assumption that if something is legal, it is just. This ignores the obvious fact that the rich have written the laws.
Money is the joker good. It is good for just about everything. So the theft of it is the theft of just about everything, including democracy and social status. So inequality causes violence: war, crime and weaponry. Violence and inequality have been growing for 3000 years. Violence grows, as both sides try to prevail, and throw ever bigger weaponry at each other. Money is power, power to make money, power to warmonger and to cannonfodder the people. The League of Nations was founded to try to stop arms manufacturers fomenting wars. As Ambrose Bierce put it: An arms dealer sells you rifles to protect yourself against someone to whom he has sold cannon. Jefferson, another realist, said: Merchants have no country. And he talked of the preying by the rich on the poor.
America was founded by people who had fled tyrannies. And it is surely obvious that money is power and so overpay is tyranny. The warning that laws can stop the poor but not the rich goes back to the Greeks. And yet the resistance to overpay, to limitless, unjust concentrations of wealth is not yet strong, is still very weak. During the 19th century in America, the idea that freedom depended on prevention of wealth concentration was dominant, but ineffective.
All through history, there have been cries for liberty, and obviously this is against tyranny, and obviously tyranny cannot exist without unjust concentration of wealth, and yet the identificaton of tyranny and extreme wealth is very weak.
People who grumble about being wageslaves still think they are in a democracy. At the very least, if the superrich were to be tolerated, they should have been forbidden to go anywhere near the government. But this idea has never been suggested. Instead, the rich are all over the government, and people just look at things that are happening and maybe say they aren't right.
Even if the rich had earned the money they have [which they haven't, couldn't possibly], there should have been a strong will to prevent wealth, which is tyranny.
Part of the problem is that everyone is greedy, everyone wants to be rich. No one wants to be restricted to taking out no more than they put in. Clearly it doesn't occur to people that freedom to be limitlessly rich, to take out more than you put in, without limit, opens the door to getting out less than you put in, without limit. Freedom for self to be limitlessly rich is freedom for others to be limitlessly rich.
All the money equals all the owrk equals all the workproducts. So if someone gets out more money than they put in work, others have to get out less money [workproducts]. And violence is proportional to the overpay-underpay. People still see prevention of overwealth as restriction of freedom, although 99% are underpaid. The net effect of everyone having free grabs on the social pool of wealth is that 99% are underpaid, 90% are paid between 100th and 10,000th of world-average pay per hour.
People really believe that riches come out of thin air, or out of the productivity of the rich, although the bulk of the money comes over the counter from people's pockets. People really believe that rich people make money, create wealth, although wealth is created only by mother nature and by work. And they think that the rich provide jobs, and investment capital. People feel dependent on the rich. They think they need the rich. The only thing that provides jobs is demand for goods and the ability to pay for them, nature's bounty and human work.
And the only thing that provides capital is savings, excess of income over outgoes. There is no need for savings to be concentrated with the rich. Savings can be with the people who earned them.
People think that if the rich go, the wealth goes. Back into thin air. People believe more in concentration of wealth than in pay justice. Wealth cannot disappear. Wealth exists by nature's bounty and people's work. Pay justice would not reduce wealth, it would spread it. Justly. Pay justice would undo theft. The rich would come down to just pay, and the underpaid would come up to just pay. And the vast costs of violence would disappear. A person with a billion can hire a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day. Warmongering and cannonfoddering. War yields high profits because the products are being destroyed. Along with many people.
Even with progressive taxation, there still seems to be a feeling that this is stealing from the rich. In war-necessity, it is okay to steal from the rich, but not at other times. The people have found the will to take something from the rich in time of war, and after war this will has weakened. And all the time, the wars are caused by the power of the rich, in their pursuit of profits or in their wars with other rich people trying to steal from each other. Concentrations of wealth attract thieves. And the rich raid the public treasury to fight their wars. And raid the populace for cannonfodder. And rake vast profits from the war. And are hailed as great patriots for mobilising the war effort.
People prefer wealth to be visible. They prefer wealth amassed than in their own pockets. One is reminded of the golden calf. People reveled in it. And could not see their now empty pockets. The Israelites had got the jewellery and gold of the Egyptians, and had given them up to make the golden calf, and they felt richer with the golden calf. With emptier pockets. No wonder Moses was so frustrated with them. [I'm not saying the story is true or false, just an illustration.]
Even when people go for taking from the rich, they let the money go to the government, and are not vigilant to see that the government gives it all to them. And the government is in the hands of the rich.
It is obvious that if a person was alone in the world, he could amass nothing more than by nature's bounty and his own work. In society, nature's bounty belongs equally to all living humans, as nature's bounty does to all living animals. There is no reason that nature's bounty should belong to anyone more than another. In society, there is also the efficiency of job specialisation, but this factor, whatever it is, belongs equally to all who participate in the job specialisation. So there is nothing in society that justifies anyone having more than arises from his equal share of nature's bounty, his own work, and the efficiency of job specialisation factor.
As it is, all of nature's bounty goes to landowners, and in proportion to their holdings. Although everyone has birthright to equal share of nature's bounty, landowners get it all, and as unequally as their holdings. No one notices this. Most people don't suffer from greed, they suffer from the opposite vice, uncontrollable senseless dangerous selfharming impulse to let others have wealth and power.
It is extraordinary that the community allows a landowner to take all of nature's bounty on his property, when that bounty may be billions of dollars of oil or diamonds. Even if the land is nationalised, the people allow the government to have it all. People have no notion of justice for themselves. And yet the oil has no value except by the community's demand for it. That is, the community makes the oil valuable. People seem to have no self-esteem: It can't belong to me.
And an investment at 10% doubles every seven years and multiplies by 1000 every 70 years. That is a huge sucking straw at national and global wealth, a straw which grows with every suck. The size of the straw is proportional to the size of the fortune. Basically, the rich are sitting sucking the wealth. 1% get 98% of world income. There is enough income for every working person, including housewives and students, to have US$100,000 a year, US$40 an hour. That is, every working person, including housewives and students, is producing US$100,000 worth of wealth by a fulltime year's work. And 99% are underpaid, are stolen from, and 90% get between 100th and 10,000th of the wealth they make, by their own work. And the violence is proportional.
Interest or usury used to be regarded as bad. Interest is based on profits, and there is nothing to stop profits being in excess of work, being 'pure profit'. Somehow people don't have the power to realise this reality, although it is mad as mad.
Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, and we have pay for a year's work from $10 to $10,000,000,000. An inequality factor of one billion. There is the unhappiness of not having one's earnings, and one's fair share of political power, and there is the unhappiness of the violence, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. We have had inequality growing, and war, crime and weaponry growing, for 3000 years, since commerce began.
People let their earnings slip away, and then get mad when they are really poor and go to a lot of trouble and danger getting it back.
Everyone loves profit when they are making it. People don't realise that opening that gate to getting something for nothing is not egalitarian: the gate is as large as the fortune, very unequal. Money makes money sounds great, and so everyone supports it, not realising that the net effect, since the money made by money has to come from others, is super-super-extreme inequality and violence. Little money makes little money for nothing, big money makes big money for nothing. Underpay for 99% and super-super-underpay for 90%. And violence for everyone. And money is power, so it also means inequality of power, tyranny-slavery, undemocracy, unfreedom, state terrorism.
The richest are murdering millions at will, quite above the law. And people can see this as evil only in leaders of other countries. Russians in the 1970s were even nostalgic for the Stalin era. Wealthpower is an umbrella for people, even though that wealthpower preys on them too. The more other nations have wealthpower concentrated, the more they want their wealthpower concentrated, which is understandable. But it is the wealthpower that is causing the wars. And the wealthpower concentration makes the nation weak, underproductive. Inequality violence destroys the nation from inside and outside. Governments grow fat and stupid from all the money they get to try to solve the problems caused by the inequality, and the bigger the government, the smaller the production. And the rich feed on the government.
Even the 'radical' measures of the Huey Long movement were far from justice. No fortune was to be more than 100 times the average. But most people are below the average, most fortunes go well below average. And how is anyone supposed to truly earn, by own work, 100 times the average? We seem to have quite lost sight of equal pay for equal work. The average person works over 50 hours a week, no one can work more than 100 hours a week longterm, and the working rich probably work less than 100 hours a week, more like 70 hours a week. Give people the same tools, materials, time, data, etc, and how different will the production be?
There is no magic in accumulation of wealth with leaders of companies. The merchant buys cheap and sells dear, as the Greeks said. It is the easiest thing in the world to make prices 10% above costs, including cost of leaders' work. All that surplus funnels from many transactions onto the table of the leaders. A company is a funnel. Sell millions of 4c and 8c items for 5c and 10c, and you get Woolworth millions. Who can tell the exact cost of anything? How can the customer tell that he is overpaying 10%?
If demand is high relative to supply, prices can be well above costs. In new technology, there is built-in scarcity. We won't know how much computers actually cost until competition finishes forcing the price down. It takes only a 36% annual average personal profit rate to turn Bill Gates's $5,000,000 start-up money into $50 billion in 30 years. And he wasn't the only Microsoft multi-millionaire. New technology simply taxes people for their demand. Demand is not work by Bill Gates.
And the first in the field gets a head start, and so builds up financial muscle to lean on competitors, preserving the monopoly longer. And patents are monopolies. The ones who profit by the situation aren't complaining, and the ones who actually pay for this free money hardly know they are robbed, and are greatly uninterested in the fact. The poor man pays for all, Ambrose Bierce. Inequality grows, and violence, till we all fall down.
The immaturity of believing in this hocuspocus is beyond belief.
The two things in a trade can hardly be of equal workvalue. What is invisible in one trade is clear in the real stories of trading up from a $2 item to a house in 100 trades. So there is a tiny drop of inequality in every trade, which, with trillions of trades, grows an ocean of inequality. A very stormy ocean, in which all drown.
The state: that fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else, Frederic Bastiat.
One can imagine a small community in which, if someone managed by some means to amass a fortune significantly larger than others, the leader or the group of leaders would go to that person and say: Look, I don't know how it happened, but there is no way you could have earned that much more than everyone else, you'll have to give it up, spread it around everyone.
A sane community would have no trouble seeing that person as having too much, as having somehow got more than his rightful wealth. The moral force of that clear idea in the community would be overwhelming. The person would have no choice but to agree. The moral force of that idea in the community would incline his own attitude towards agreement, if he was inclined to disagree. It is obvious the person hasn't worked significantly harder than anyone else. There would be this clear idea in the community even if they didn't know how the accumulation happened. If they had the explanation, say, that the overpay came from being a merchant, and making a little on a lot of transactions, their opinion would only be stronger.
In ancient Israel, the idea was to cancel all debt every seven years. Clearly the community saw the obvious.
Somehow this sanity has been lost in our communities. Even with the explanations.
We pay people for their natural gifts. Yet these are no work of the person, but of nature. We should pay Pablo Casals for every bit of practice he did, but not for having a gift. By paying for gifts, not work, we have to work for no pay. We see nothing wrong in paying Paul McCartney half a billion for 'his' lovely songs. How many people can we pay for no work before running out of money? We allow superfortune to Bill Gates for his genius. But who assessed his genius? We merely assume it from 'his' money. And who provided the genius? Not Bill Gates.
The person being paid $10 an hour is giving, or allowing to be taken from him or her, $30 an hour. Each person is producing $40 worth of workproducts an hour. It has to be so. All the annual world income divided by all the annual workhours has to be the wealth production of each hour. Annual income $300 trillion, 3 billion workers, is $100,000 a year, or $40 an hour.
But the tendency of most people is to oppose pay justice, to support the status quo. I suspect they think pursuit of justice is naughty. Is there a psychological hangover from the family dynamic, the rich are Daddy, and we want to please Daddy, and the child who is against Daddy is way out of line? [Think Sugar Daddy, Daddy Warbucks.]
We allow higher pay per hour for having studied. But there is no work in having studied. [There is work in studying, and so that should be paid for by the whole community, which benefits, not parents or scholarships or loans.] And we never enquire who pays for this unjust largesse of paying for the no-work of having studied. And we go on overpaying for health services, lawyers, government, etc.
And that theory explains why we trust 'Daddy' with the money. The trouble is, it isn't Daddy, it is some fellow who crawled in the window. In USA, Britain, and most other countries, we have given private citizens the license to print money. The American Federal Reserve Bank is privately owned. The government has to *borrow* money from this bank.
This is tear-your-hair-out stupidity.
Even when people notice, the word doesn't spread. Apparently, most adults aren't even adolescent. They are innocents. It looks as though we should educate our children from a young age in the family finances.
Re Chomsky re South America
Re Chomsky talking about the growing independence of South America
Perspective is truth, unperspective isn't.
To put Chomsky in the bigger perspective, the third world is at 51% of world wealth now and climbing 10% every 30 years, and no doubt with acceleration. That's like 98% by 2100. [Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258.]
Empires plunder and then get plundered. Every time. Steal a heap, meet the neighbours. If I steal the neighbours' property, they will come around. I can keep them off with all the guns I bought with what I stole, for a while, but I'm busy at every window. What I steal is limited, but the energy of the neighbours goes on and on till I'm gone. Infinite attack beats finite plunder every time. The first world stole the world for 500 years. American superwealth steals from American citizens to pay defense costs, so the plunderers are attacked from within the house too. Lesson of history.
Plundering is a mug's game. Eg, Hitler. Spain stole Inca gold. Where is the Spanish empire of the 17th C? The Dutch of the 18th? Ditto British empire of the 19th C. Ditto America, 20th C. And ditto Chinese empire of the 21st century. Justice is a virtue because it delivers happiness.
99% of people are decent enough, but they let a few steal the world, and warmonger and cannonfodder their way to extinction. Selfearned money is good, and love of selfearned money is fine. Otherearned money comes with an angry person attached, is the root of all unnecessary social evils, and is fatal. The robbed can only throw grains of sand, but sand erodes rocks. The robbers get soft, and the robbed get busy. Injury energises. People are too dangerous to annoy. The sense of equality is stronger than plunder. As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
The whites in South Africa, the thieves of Russia, got a century of grief and selfbrutalisation. Inequality grows and then collapses. We have pay/yr from $10 to $10 billion. Pay justice is $100,000 /yr for every working person, including housewives and students. World income is $300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion working people. 99% are underpaid. Pay injustice means superpoverty, means emptying the market.
With pay justice, we would have 100 times faster progress, because now 90% of scientists are tied up in pay inequality, in the military-industrial complex etc, and 90% of potential scientists are too poor to become scientists [and inventors, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, innovators, etc]. Allow all the blood to go to the head, and the whole body dies. Sicily conquered America. Underpay is constantly attacking overpay. Overpay is hell. The only reason anyone thinks overpay is good is lack of perspective. Hitler stole Europe, Europe hit back. Duh. Ceausescu stole Rumania, Rumania hit back. Overpay is overpower to rake money, but it falls to underpower. Marie Antoinette.
No one is more than about 30% more productive than the average person. Set 100 people to create wealth by work, with equal tools, materials, data, time, etc, and no one will produce more than about 30% more than the average. We allow pay for many things that are not work, which equals theft, equals violence, evergrowing.
Awake, aware selfinterest will energetically act to avoid injuring others. Overpay is pollution of your own nest/environment. Don't be moral, or altruistic, educate your selfinterest. Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to earn that money. Everyone has done the work to make the goods that money buys. 1% get 98% of world income and do less than 1% of the work. The golden rule is the real thing: don't hit people, they hit back! Duh.
Be afraid, be very afraid of stealing, of taking out more than you put in. Money is good for everything, so theft of money is theft of everything. China is now gungho for limitless overpay. If it knew, it is consequently already falling.
By allowing a little overpay for yourself, you allow limitless overpay for others.
Money doesn't trickle down like healing water, it gushes up like burning fire. Make everyone equal heirs of large deceased fortunes and thus water your garden, the world.
Attack your faith in just going for limitlessly more with the question: Dude, where's my happiness?!
Perspective is truth, unperspective isn't.
To put Chomsky in the bigger perspective, the third world is at 51% of world wealth now and climbing 10% every 30 years, and no doubt with acceleration. That's like 98% by 2100. [Sprout and Weaver, International distribution of income 1960-1987, Kyklos, v45, 1992, pp237-258.]
Empires plunder and then get plundered. Every time. Steal a heap, meet the neighbours. If I steal the neighbours' property, they will come around. I can keep them off with all the guns I bought with what I stole, for a while, but I'm busy at every window. What I steal is limited, but the energy of the neighbours goes on and on till I'm gone. Infinite attack beats finite plunder every time. The first world stole the world for 500 years. American superwealth steals from American citizens to pay defense costs, so the plunderers are attacked from within the house too. Lesson of history.
Plundering is a mug's game. Eg, Hitler. Spain stole Inca gold. Where is the Spanish empire of the 17th C? The Dutch of the 18th? Ditto British empire of the 19th C. Ditto America, 20th C. And ditto Chinese empire of the 21st century. Justice is a virtue because it delivers happiness.
99% of people are decent enough, but they let a few steal the world, and warmonger and cannonfodder their way to extinction. Selfearned money is good, and love of selfearned money is fine. Otherearned money comes with an angry person attached, is the root of all unnecessary social evils, and is fatal. The robbed can only throw grains of sand, but sand erodes rocks. The robbers get soft, and the robbed get busy. Injury energises. People are too dangerous to annoy. The sense of equality is stronger than plunder. As doormats, people are totally unreliable.
The whites in South Africa, the thieves of Russia, got a century of grief and selfbrutalisation. Inequality grows and then collapses. We have pay/yr from $10 to $10 billion. Pay justice is $100,000 /yr for every working person, including housewives and students. World income is $300 trillion, and there are about 3 billion working people. 99% are underpaid. Pay injustice means superpoverty, means emptying the market.
With pay justice, we would have 100 times faster progress, because now 90% of scientists are tied up in pay inequality, in the military-industrial complex etc, and 90% of potential scientists are too poor to become scientists [and inventors, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, innovators, etc]. Allow all the blood to go to the head, and the whole body dies. Sicily conquered America. Underpay is constantly attacking overpay. Overpay is hell. The only reason anyone thinks overpay is good is lack of perspective. Hitler stole Europe, Europe hit back. Duh. Ceausescu stole Rumania, Rumania hit back. Overpay is overpower to rake money, but it falls to underpower. Marie Antoinette.
No one is more than about 30% more productive than the average person. Set 100 people to create wealth by work, with equal tools, materials, data, time, etc, and no one will produce more than about 30% more than the average. We allow pay for many things that are not work, which equals theft, equals violence, evergrowing.
Awake, aware selfinterest will energetically act to avoid injuring others. Overpay is pollution of your own nest/environment. Don't be moral, or altruistic, educate your selfinterest. Make everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to earn that money. Everyone has done the work to make the goods that money buys. 1% get 98% of world income and do less than 1% of the work. The golden rule is the real thing: don't hit people, they hit back! Duh.
Be afraid, be very afraid of stealing, of taking out more than you put in. Money is good for everything, so theft of money is theft of everything. China is now gungho for limitless overpay. If it knew, it is consequently already falling.
By allowing a little overpay for yourself, you allow limitless overpay for others.
Money doesn't trickle down like healing water, it gushes up like burning fire. Make everyone equal heirs of large deceased fortunes and thus water your garden, the world.
Attack your faith in just going for limitlessly more with the question: Dude, where's my happiness?!
Total downside
Total downside is: Study, learn, absorb the plan and the facts, and tell two friends till they are at the point of telling two friends.
[Doubling and doubling, it reaches 1000 in ten steps, 1,000,000 in 20 steps, 1,000,000,000 in 30 steps. And all the people who come before the one billion add up to another billion. This a big job, but it is spread over billions of people, so it is little per person. And when everyone sees, there's a will and a clear short way, explained in writings below. So it's education only. All people needed to start using fire was education.]
Upside is: US$40 an hour for every working person in the world, including housewives and students, world peace, liberty and justice for all, dramatic [like, 99% plus] reduction of war, crime and weaponry, end of the super-overpaid and super-overpowered running and controlling everything to their selfdestructive and other-destructive wishes, lying their heads off, not caring a bit about ordinary folk, end of miseries and angers of super-underpay, prevention of continuing escalation of violence from the present super-super-extreme level to using the atomic bomb, automatic solution of millions of problems in all areas of human living that are offshoots of the present super-super-extreme overpay and underpay.
How possible? The world average pay is US$40 an hour for all working people including housewives and students. We have pay from 100,000 time that, to 10,000th of that. That causes super-super-extreme disorder and violence, compared to what we could have, and it causes millions of insoluble problems. By studying the reality, seeing what we have and what we could have, and so becoming clear what we want, and then teaching it to two people so that the word spreads to everyone, a universal human will is formed to have the change, and then there are simple non-bureaucratic small law changes that can make the huge difference. Our problems have grown for 1000s of years, and are now very big, but the cause is not big, but small, but left unfixed for a very long time. So although the problem is big, the solution is small. Like all the problems a dripping tap could cause over a long time, which is fixed by fixing the tap.
We have been attacking the symptoms for 1000s of years, and the disease hasn't gone away, but has gone on growing, slowly and imperceptibly eroding happiness, so we have lost a lot [like 99% plus] of the natural level of happiness, so a lot of lost and forgotten happiness can be recovered by a small correction in the right place.
It is a matter of learning to see the reality, and a matter of unlearning all the answers we have come up with, that haven't identified the source of the problem, haven't fixed the dripping tap.
So what we have, the downside, is education of ourselves, and two others. This is sufficient to spread the word to everyone quickly. Once everyone is clear that this is the answer, it is easy to fix the root problem, and then all the offshoot problems disappear.
It is small in one way: Just learning and teaching it to two. It is large in another: Reaching everyone in the world. It is small again in another way: When everyone is clear, fixing the problem is easy. It is big in one way: Striking at the root of all the problems. It is small in another way: It is far easier to chop a tree of problems down at the root than the branches. We have been hacking at the branch problems, and the tree has been growing faster than we have removed problems.
Of course all this depends on whether it is correct or not. That is for you to decide. To decide correctly, people have to judge it by comparison with reality alone, not by comparison with accepted ideas, which have got us into this giant mess.
We have to learn how big a mess it is, because we all block out unpleasant stuff. But to find a solution, you have to see the problem. So a bit of courage, cool thinking, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, is necessary.
And one has to allow the new idea to settle in to our thinking. We have to ponder, and consider fairly whether it may indeed agree with reality. We have to ponder it many times, from every angle, go over it again and again, to get clear. To give it time to wash out all the erroneous thinking.
It is an investment, a risk, to choose to spend time considering a new idea, to see if it is true. But there is no other way to learn anything new that is good.
Once upon a time, fire was a new idea, and in great conflict with accepted ideas about fire, which were simply to run like heck whenever you saw fire. People had to make an investment of time to judge the new idea, handling and using fire.
The world is very complex, and a million theories about it can arise, and there is some support in the huge complexity of life for millions of theories. It took us till 1500 or so to figure out what the planets were doing, and all they were doing was going round and round. It didn't help that we also were going round and round, in two ways.
This idea is essentially very simple: overpay and underpay have, after 1000s of years, got very extreme, and are producing extreme effects, like violence, millions of offshoot problems and extreme unhappiness. We quantify pay justice, and aim towards it. Everyone without exception is much, much better off with pay justice [we show this] so almost everyone will want it. And what everyone wants, everyone quickly gets. Like fire. Pay injustice makes everything behave in such a way to increase pay injustice, but we explain the reality, and people see how we are actually hurting ourselves, not helping ourselves, as we think we are doing.
If everyone teaches just two people, and they teach two people each, well, doubling and doubling, word quickly gets around. Especially as the benefits are extreme, far greater than the benefits of fire, for example, or of insurance.
Basically, we have been sucked into letting people have unlimited fortunes, although individual contribution to wealth is limited. And now they wander around, bossing the roost, stealing and murdering, warmongering and cannonfoddering, at will. Not good.
By educating ourselves, we come to a clarity. From this clarity, we have moral force. When over 99% of people are perfectly clear that super-overpay is just plain theft, as we don't think now, it is pretty hard for superoverpay to carry on. Besides, with over 99% with this clarity, most of the 'muscle' of the super-overpaid is for this change. So the super-overpaid who can't get clear it is to their very great advantage to have pay justice have no muscle. It's one against a 1000. There is no fight, because there is no chance of winning. The super-overpaid have been able to maintain their position because enough people have been supportive of their position. The super-overpaid have constantly put out their version of reality, and it has prevailed sufficiently to permit them to hold position and power. It may seem to you that super-overpay is not plain theft, and that there is no way people can be made to change their minds about that, whatever the arguments. There is a temptation to think that what has been held to be true by most people for 1000s of years can't be wrong. But of course we have been wrong before, and it is no shame that we have been wrong: It is a very big, complex world, and we can see very little of it, and we remember very little of what we have experienced. It is natural that it will take time to get a clear picture. Someone said that what we learn from history is that we never learn the lesson of history. Well, maybe this is that lesson. Sometimes it is hard to see a pattern in things. But once you see that patten, you can never not see it ever again. The structure of a tree can be quite hidden by leaves. Once you see it, you are very certain it is there. You see it all the time, 'everything' illustrates it, confirms it. So this plan is just getting to that point. It is about doing some thinking, but it isn't about social struggle, conflict, upheaval.
As I say, this idea is essentially simple: If one person takes the property of 1000 people, that person is going to be worse off, much worse off, not better off, as we tend to think: They are going to have, merely 1000 times more than they can use, and they are have 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends, and those enemies are going to be a very unpleasant environment, uneducated, unhealthy, unattractive.
We have to learn to see that this is the way it is. Both the overpaid and the underpaid are worse off. Pay injustice isn't good for anybody. Which is good news, if people can learn to see it, because there is a simple way to get rid of both overpay and underpay. We can all have fairpay, and everyone is far happier. It is just a matter of seeing it. It doesn't involve any sacrifice for anyone, it is a win-win situation.
The underpaid have also thought that overpay is good, so everyone has been supporting a system that hurts us all. We have to look hard, with fresh, clean vision, at the reality, and see that the truth is otherwise.
Overpay is no good, because the underpaid do not take underpay lightly. Money is the joker good, good for just about everything, so the theft of it is the theft of just about everything, and so is not taken lightly. The underpaid may be fooled for a while, that somehow overpay is right, but when it pinches too hard, they get mad, and their power has always overcome the greatest overpay and overpower. Every empire has fallen, every plutocracy has been brought down. Injury energises. The underpaid have lost many battles, but have always won the war. The attacks on overpay have gone on until the overpay is gone. People are too dangerous to rob from. Overpay is self-defeating. It has always fallen. The heap of wealth, however large, is finite, and the attacks are endless, so the costs of defending the overpay are endless, so all heaps of overpay must fall.
The overpaid have put forward heaps of rationalisations for their overpay, as part of their self-defense, and the underpaid have bought into them, because the underpaid have wished to use them to reduce their underpay, but this has left the overpaid free to get richer far faster, and so pay injustice has grown, until the underpaid have got mad and got even. But then they have let overpay get away again. And so through history no real change has occurred. Overpay-underpay has grown, got extreme, been overturned, and then grown again.
When we see through this pattern, the miserable pattern will stop. The happy pattern, prevention of overpay, will replace it.
The ways the overpaid have got overpaid have not all been obvious, like conquest and plunder. There are subtler ways the overpay has increased. As soon as we see these subtler ways also, we will be in a position of control over them.
We have not been able to see the most extreme overpay as plain theft. The very word overpay is hardly in our list of ideas. This is what we have to learn. How overpay occurs, where it begins. When we know where it begins, we can stop it right there. Instead of overpay-underpay growing extreme, making everyone very unhappy, we know where to act, and what to do to stop it.
What we have done is seen that some people got rich, and then we have thought up explanations to justify it. And then we have been unable to get rid of overpay. We have felt obliged to put up with it, to accept it. Actually, all the explanations to justify it are, I think you will agree, false. And when we see instead how overpay really happens, we can see our way clear to seeing that overpay is actually bad not good, even for the overpaid, and so get rid of it. As long as we lacked a clear explanation of how overpay occurs, and that it occurs unjustly, we have been driven to support it, and to think it is good.
We ought to have thought that, if you gave the overpaid and underpaid equal tools, information, materials, intelligence and faculties, the overpaid would not produce any more than anyone else. We have pay from 100,000 times average to 10,000th of average. We ought to have been able to see this has to be nonsense, but, lacking an explanation for it, we have been driven to accept overpay, and not even call it overpay, and so our societies have, over and over again, got more overpaid and underpaid and more and more violent, till they have fallen apart. And then grown up from nothing again. This time, the falling apart will happen with bombs capable of destroying all planet life, so we simply cannot afford another falling apart. We have to learn the truth of the matter, or perish all.
Unfortunately, many people are very excited by the possibility of unlimited wealth, and totally uninclined to listen to anything that seems to lead to the stopping of play. The greater overpay and underpay are, the more people are driven blindly to get overpay or just more pay, instead of fairpay, getting out as much as you put in. Both overpay and underpay are stimuli to just climb, climb to get more. And overpay and underpay are super-super-extreme now. How do you tell a gambler totally focussed on the game, that, even if he wins, he will lose bigtime? the underpaid want the game to continue, because they are naturally wishing their underpay to be destroyed, and the overpaid have such endless defense costs, they want the game to continue also. Overpay-underpay greatly encourages the game that drives overpay-underpay to increase, increasing violence and misery for everyone. The overpaid see underpay all around them, this stimulates them to get further away from underpay. The underpaid live underpay, and naturally want to get away from it. But the whole game increases overpay-underpay.
Also, if the underpaid are not too badly off, they often settle for underpay, but this unfortunately makes it easier for overpay to increase. And then all are overwhelmed in the general fall, in revolutions.
And so it has gone on, for 1000s of years.
When we just see that the rationalisations for overpay are false, we are free to see clearly that overpay is nonsense, is unjust, is theft, and when we see that overpay is actually necessarily always miserable for the overpaid, well, the game falls apart. It is inconceivable to us that overpay, wealth, could be necessarily always extreme misery, but so I feel confident I can show, both from logic and from the unanimous evidence of history.
When overpay is seen as not in the self-interest of anyone, the way is clear to get rid of it, thus getting rid of underpay, and thus getting rid of the miseries of both. Since 99% are underpaid, we can expect that 99% will be somewhat willing to have their opinions changed, and we can expect that some of the 1% overpaid will be able to look at the facts objectively, so the majority will be overwhelming, and the incorrigible among the 1% will be a small, pitied minority, who will have no recourse but to fall in with the general opinion.
I think the arguments against the happiness of overpay are very compelling.
There is a reason the underpaid, the great majority, think that overpay is good. They have significant desires left unsatisfied by their underpay. They naturally look at overpay as allowing the satisfaction of these significant large desires. Overpay is to the underpaid as an oasis to the thirsty. The greater the underpay, the more desires are unsatisfied, and the more overpay seems the mecca and heaven of things. The greater the overpay, the greater the heaven it seems. If the underpaid get the chance, they just rush up the ladder to greater and greater overpay. But desires are limited. The needs and desires of the body are finite. Satisfaction waits on desire. However much the overpay, there is still only one stomach for food, two feet for shoes, one body for bed, and so on. overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, 1000 rooms for one body. Maybe people don't want to hear that, but the overpaid experience it, if they are honest and thoughtful.
The overpaid who have been underpaid, and suffered from feeling ignored, invisible, unloved, despised, rejected, underpowered, etc, like Joseph Kennedy, Hitler and so on, may feel a vindictive joy in being on top, may revel vengefully in having a superfluity, but satisfaction is limited by the finity of desires.
And the overpaid have to deal with everyone wanting to be on top. The way for everyone to be on top of course, is to have everyone on an equal footing. When some are above others, the feeling of equality drives those below to strive to rise as high as the highest. So the ones on top have to suffer the constant efforts of invasion of all those below. Or to constantly fear that invasion.
The ones on top are put into a hopeless bind: They have to strengthen their subordinates to enable them to defend them, and have to weaken them to prevent their climbing up. The more they strengthen them, the more they must fear them. And the more they weaken them, the more they must fear that their subordinates cannot protect them. They are forced to weaken them and to strengthen them. The same applies to slaves. They must weaken them to keep them slaves, and must strengthen them to keep them productive and a defense. A hopelessly painful situation. Just no fun at all. They must read their subordinates with impossible exactitude, to know their degree of ambition and humility, their willingness to be subordinate, and their ambition to be on top. The man with a strong will to be on top finds it hard to imagine anything else from his subordinates. He projects his own will and wish on them, and suspects them of plotting against him. They in turn fear he plots their destruction, which may drive them to destroy him to save themselves. If the man on top dies a natural death or not, he has a hard life. And a person in such a situation can hardly govern well, so insubordination further down in the hierarchy of society grows.
Whether at the top of a business, a nation or an empire, such must be the pattern of life for the leader. Caesar was good for the empire's strength, but his very strength made him feared. Both strength and weakness in the leader will tend to his removal. It is hardly a wonder that so many settle for underpay and underpower! You have to have a great blindness to wish to be on top.
The sense of equality in people is very strong. Being under drives people to rise. We know we have as much right to be on top as any other person. This ensures that inequality will always be desperately unstable, a turmoil, a nightmare. Not everyone cares greatly to be the equal of the one on top, but enough people to make being on top extremely precarious. Even the ones who do not greatly care to take the risks to be on top will do something to harm when they can with safety. Like the butler who spat in the rich man's soup. Or the disaffected ones who open the gates of the city to another conqueror in hope of reward.
The king can strengthen the barons so they will keep the people down, but them he has to fear they will take over. The stronger they are, the more he has to please them and become their servant. If he tries to weaken them, they may revolt and replace him, or go over to the enemy. Stalin uses the KGB to terrorise the populace, but then they may decide they want the top place. If Stalin purges his subordinates, they rise in resistance. If the barons are weak, the people may attack the king. Every leader craves loyalty, but gets treachery in time. Leaaders use divine right, divinity, or man of destiny to try to put themselves above attack, but the power of this illusion is limited, some may be quite untaken in by it.
With equality, everyone is near to the top, and the drive to rise is least. And the lust or desperation to hold on to the top position is least, because the fall is least. And everyone is strongly activated to hold others to equality. With equality, the advantages of being on the top are smallest, and so the best for the job have the easiest path to get to the top, and government is most satisfactory, and therefore disaffection is smallest. Inequality intensifies the competition for top spot.
People are too dangerous to annoy. The sense of justice, of equality, is of enormous power. Yes, there is a store of humility, of forbearance, of longsuffering, of meekness, of acceptance of lower position, but it is not unlimited, it is not reliable, dependable. You can never be sure where it exists and where it doesn't. One day the battered wife sets fire to your bed.
It is lonely at the top. Belonging to the tribe, the sense of being accepted, of being a peer among peers, is one of the most powerful elements of happiness. We are a social animal. We need the feeling of being protected by others. The fiercest dictators have their muscle round up people to 'show' their affection under threat. Or just imagine the people love them.
Every super-underpay contains super-energetic people who will climb to the top, and challenge every holder of that position. The Sicilian Mafia rise to the top of America. Every poverty is constantly sending up challengers for top position. The person on top must fight them all, a never-ending tide. Every plunderer attracts plunderers. Poverty goes where the money is. With equality, with fairpay, with pay justice, with no one taking out more than they put in, there will be no poor and no heap of wealth to attract them.
People could be educated in the miseries of overpay and overpower. History would provide enough examples to bore everyone. And logic or common sense will quickly support the same conclusion. No one likes being under. The only way we can all be on top is with equality.
The fool and his money are soon parted. And we think: Haha, serves him right, who cares. We don't think: This parting is theft. We don't think: This fool is me. But we are all somewhere along a spectrum from least to most money-foolish. Can we afford to allow this theft? Does this theft help anyone? The mandarins, the brains, of China took more and more money to themselves. And so came the Cultural Revolution, and the break-up of the mandarins. The same in Germany, the brainier took advantage, and then along came Hitler, humiliated, vengeful, and his army of Nazis, attacking the intellectuals, the brains who took advantage. 40% of Nazis were primary-school teachers. We think so lightly of paying primary-school teachers less. But they don't think less of themselves, they do not accept our estimation of them. They live the humiliation, in poorer homes, in lack of social respect, every day. The will to equality is fierce. From humiliation, they bobbed up and were glad to indulge their new-found positions of power over others, to take that demonstration to the limit without mercy. The English Rothschild has the wit to see the value of getting information on the victor of Waterloo before anyone else, and then has the further wit to pretend that England has lost, so that everyone sells their English shares cheap, and Rothschild has his agents secretly buy them up, and the shares go through the roof when the truth comes through.
This is a great deal of money, and hence power, for very little work. Which means a lot of work and very little money and power for others. Which creates violence proportional to the overpay-underpay, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. And the overpower-underpower assists more stealing. The underpaid get less satisfaction, and the overpaid get no more satisfaction. And everyone gets more violence. Everyone is somewhere along the spectrum from least to most money-foolish. So everyone is being stolen from, all along the spectrum. Theft. Injury. Anger. Violence. Weaponry. Ever-increasing.
We say: Buyer beware. In other words: Let the seller be free to try to fleece, and let the onus be all on the buyer to try to defeat this effort. [to be continued]
[Doubling and doubling, it reaches 1000 in ten steps, 1,000,000 in 20 steps, 1,000,000,000 in 30 steps. And all the people who come before the one billion add up to another billion. This a big job, but it is spread over billions of people, so it is little per person. And when everyone sees, there's a will and a clear short way, explained in writings below. So it's education only. All people needed to start using fire was education.]
Upside is: US$40 an hour for every working person in the world, including housewives and students, world peace, liberty and justice for all, dramatic [like, 99% plus] reduction of war, crime and weaponry, end of the super-overpaid and super-overpowered running and controlling everything to their selfdestructive and other-destructive wishes, lying their heads off, not caring a bit about ordinary folk, end of miseries and angers of super-underpay, prevention of continuing escalation of violence from the present super-super-extreme level to using the atomic bomb, automatic solution of millions of problems in all areas of human living that are offshoots of the present super-super-extreme overpay and underpay.
How possible? The world average pay is US$40 an hour for all working people including housewives and students. We have pay from 100,000 time that, to 10,000th of that. That causes super-super-extreme disorder and violence, compared to what we could have, and it causes millions of insoluble problems. By studying the reality, seeing what we have and what we could have, and so becoming clear what we want, and then teaching it to two people so that the word spreads to everyone, a universal human will is formed to have the change, and then there are simple non-bureaucratic small law changes that can make the huge difference. Our problems have grown for 1000s of years, and are now very big, but the cause is not big, but small, but left unfixed for a very long time. So although the problem is big, the solution is small. Like all the problems a dripping tap could cause over a long time, which is fixed by fixing the tap.
We have been attacking the symptoms for 1000s of years, and the disease hasn't gone away, but has gone on growing, slowly and imperceptibly eroding happiness, so we have lost a lot [like 99% plus] of the natural level of happiness, so a lot of lost and forgotten happiness can be recovered by a small correction in the right place.
It is a matter of learning to see the reality, and a matter of unlearning all the answers we have come up with, that haven't identified the source of the problem, haven't fixed the dripping tap.
So what we have, the downside, is education of ourselves, and two others. This is sufficient to spread the word to everyone quickly. Once everyone is clear that this is the answer, it is easy to fix the root problem, and then all the offshoot problems disappear.
It is small in one way: Just learning and teaching it to two. It is large in another: Reaching everyone in the world. It is small again in another way: When everyone is clear, fixing the problem is easy. It is big in one way: Striking at the root of all the problems. It is small in another way: It is far easier to chop a tree of problems down at the root than the branches. We have been hacking at the branch problems, and the tree has been growing faster than we have removed problems.
Of course all this depends on whether it is correct or not. That is for you to decide. To decide correctly, people have to judge it by comparison with reality alone, not by comparison with accepted ideas, which have got us into this giant mess.
We have to learn how big a mess it is, because we all block out unpleasant stuff. But to find a solution, you have to see the problem. So a bit of courage, cool thinking, objectivity, impartiality, fairness, is necessary.
And one has to allow the new idea to settle in to our thinking. We have to ponder, and consider fairly whether it may indeed agree with reality. We have to ponder it many times, from every angle, go over it again and again, to get clear. To give it time to wash out all the erroneous thinking.
It is an investment, a risk, to choose to spend time considering a new idea, to see if it is true. But there is no other way to learn anything new that is good.
Once upon a time, fire was a new idea, and in great conflict with accepted ideas about fire, which were simply to run like heck whenever you saw fire. People had to make an investment of time to judge the new idea, handling and using fire.
The world is very complex, and a million theories about it can arise, and there is some support in the huge complexity of life for millions of theories. It took us till 1500 or so to figure out what the planets were doing, and all they were doing was going round and round. It didn't help that we also were going round and round, in two ways.
This idea is essentially very simple: overpay and underpay have, after 1000s of years, got very extreme, and are producing extreme effects, like violence, millions of offshoot problems and extreme unhappiness. We quantify pay justice, and aim towards it. Everyone without exception is much, much better off with pay justice [we show this] so almost everyone will want it. And what everyone wants, everyone quickly gets. Like fire. Pay injustice makes everything behave in such a way to increase pay injustice, but we explain the reality, and people see how we are actually hurting ourselves, not helping ourselves, as we think we are doing.
If everyone teaches just two people, and they teach two people each, well, doubling and doubling, word quickly gets around. Especially as the benefits are extreme, far greater than the benefits of fire, for example, or of insurance.
Basically, we have been sucked into letting people have unlimited fortunes, although individual contribution to wealth is limited. And now they wander around, bossing the roost, stealing and murdering, warmongering and cannonfoddering, at will. Not good.
By educating ourselves, we come to a clarity. From this clarity, we have moral force. When over 99% of people are perfectly clear that super-overpay is just plain theft, as we don't think now, it is pretty hard for superoverpay to carry on. Besides, with over 99% with this clarity, most of the 'muscle' of the super-overpaid is for this change. So the super-overpaid who can't get clear it is to their very great advantage to have pay justice have no muscle. It's one against a 1000. There is no fight, because there is no chance of winning. The super-overpaid have been able to maintain their position because enough people have been supportive of their position. The super-overpaid have constantly put out their version of reality, and it has prevailed sufficiently to permit them to hold position and power. It may seem to you that super-overpay is not plain theft, and that there is no way people can be made to change their minds about that, whatever the arguments. There is a temptation to think that what has been held to be true by most people for 1000s of years can't be wrong. But of course we have been wrong before, and it is no shame that we have been wrong: It is a very big, complex world, and we can see very little of it, and we remember very little of what we have experienced. It is natural that it will take time to get a clear picture. Someone said that what we learn from history is that we never learn the lesson of history. Well, maybe this is that lesson. Sometimes it is hard to see a pattern in things. But once you see that patten, you can never not see it ever again. The structure of a tree can be quite hidden by leaves. Once you see it, you are very certain it is there. You see it all the time, 'everything' illustrates it, confirms it. So this plan is just getting to that point. It is about doing some thinking, but it isn't about social struggle, conflict, upheaval.
As I say, this idea is essentially simple: If one person takes the property of 1000 people, that person is going to be worse off, much worse off, not better off, as we tend to think: They are going to have, merely 1000 times more than they can use, and they are have 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends, and those enemies are going to be a very unpleasant environment, uneducated, unhealthy, unattractive.
We have to learn to see that this is the way it is. Both the overpaid and the underpaid are worse off. Pay injustice isn't good for anybody. Which is good news, if people can learn to see it, because there is a simple way to get rid of both overpay and underpay. We can all have fairpay, and everyone is far happier. It is just a matter of seeing it. It doesn't involve any sacrifice for anyone, it is a win-win situation.
The underpaid have also thought that overpay is good, so everyone has been supporting a system that hurts us all. We have to look hard, with fresh, clean vision, at the reality, and see that the truth is otherwise.
Overpay is no good, because the underpaid do not take underpay lightly. Money is the joker good, good for just about everything, so the theft of it is the theft of just about everything, and so is not taken lightly. The underpaid may be fooled for a while, that somehow overpay is right, but when it pinches too hard, they get mad, and their power has always overcome the greatest overpay and overpower. Every empire has fallen, every plutocracy has been brought down. Injury energises. The underpaid have lost many battles, but have always won the war. The attacks on overpay have gone on until the overpay is gone. People are too dangerous to rob from. Overpay is self-defeating. It has always fallen. The heap of wealth, however large, is finite, and the attacks are endless, so the costs of defending the overpay are endless, so all heaps of overpay must fall.
The overpaid have put forward heaps of rationalisations for their overpay, as part of their self-defense, and the underpaid have bought into them, because the underpaid have wished to use them to reduce their underpay, but this has left the overpaid free to get richer far faster, and so pay injustice has grown, until the underpaid have got mad and got even. But then they have let overpay get away again. And so through history no real change has occurred. Overpay-underpay has grown, got extreme, been overturned, and then grown again.
When we see through this pattern, the miserable pattern will stop. The happy pattern, prevention of overpay, will replace it.
The ways the overpaid have got overpaid have not all been obvious, like conquest and plunder. There are subtler ways the overpay has increased. As soon as we see these subtler ways also, we will be in a position of control over them.
We have not been able to see the most extreme overpay as plain theft. The very word overpay is hardly in our list of ideas. This is what we have to learn. How overpay occurs, where it begins. When we know where it begins, we can stop it right there. Instead of overpay-underpay growing extreme, making everyone very unhappy, we know where to act, and what to do to stop it.
What we have done is seen that some people got rich, and then we have thought up explanations to justify it. And then we have been unable to get rid of overpay. We have felt obliged to put up with it, to accept it. Actually, all the explanations to justify it are, I think you will agree, false. And when we see instead how overpay really happens, we can see our way clear to seeing that overpay is actually bad not good, even for the overpaid, and so get rid of it. As long as we lacked a clear explanation of how overpay occurs, and that it occurs unjustly, we have been driven to support it, and to think it is good.
We ought to have thought that, if you gave the overpaid and underpaid equal tools, information, materials, intelligence and faculties, the overpaid would not produce any more than anyone else. We have pay from 100,000 times average to 10,000th of average. We ought to have been able to see this has to be nonsense, but, lacking an explanation for it, we have been driven to accept overpay, and not even call it overpay, and so our societies have, over and over again, got more overpaid and underpaid and more and more violent, till they have fallen apart. And then grown up from nothing again. This time, the falling apart will happen with bombs capable of destroying all planet life, so we simply cannot afford another falling apart. We have to learn the truth of the matter, or perish all.
Unfortunately, many people are very excited by the possibility of unlimited wealth, and totally uninclined to listen to anything that seems to lead to the stopping of play. The greater overpay and underpay are, the more people are driven blindly to get overpay or just more pay, instead of fairpay, getting out as much as you put in. Both overpay and underpay are stimuli to just climb, climb to get more. And overpay and underpay are super-super-extreme now. How do you tell a gambler totally focussed on the game, that, even if he wins, he will lose bigtime? the underpaid want the game to continue, because they are naturally wishing their underpay to be destroyed, and the overpaid have such endless defense costs, they want the game to continue also. Overpay-underpay greatly encourages the game that drives overpay-underpay to increase, increasing violence and misery for everyone. The overpaid see underpay all around them, this stimulates them to get further away from underpay. The underpaid live underpay, and naturally want to get away from it. But the whole game increases overpay-underpay.
Also, if the underpaid are not too badly off, they often settle for underpay, but this unfortunately makes it easier for overpay to increase. And then all are overwhelmed in the general fall, in revolutions.
And so it has gone on, for 1000s of years.
When we just see that the rationalisations for overpay are false, we are free to see clearly that overpay is nonsense, is unjust, is theft, and when we see that overpay is actually necessarily always miserable for the overpaid, well, the game falls apart. It is inconceivable to us that overpay, wealth, could be necessarily always extreme misery, but so I feel confident I can show, both from logic and from the unanimous evidence of history.
When overpay is seen as not in the self-interest of anyone, the way is clear to get rid of it, thus getting rid of underpay, and thus getting rid of the miseries of both. Since 99% are underpaid, we can expect that 99% will be somewhat willing to have their opinions changed, and we can expect that some of the 1% overpaid will be able to look at the facts objectively, so the majority will be overwhelming, and the incorrigible among the 1% will be a small, pitied minority, who will have no recourse but to fall in with the general opinion.
I think the arguments against the happiness of overpay are very compelling.
There is a reason the underpaid, the great majority, think that overpay is good. They have significant desires left unsatisfied by their underpay. They naturally look at overpay as allowing the satisfaction of these significant large desires. Overpay is to the underpaid as an oasis to the thirsty. The greater the underpay, the more desires are unsatisfied, and the more overpay seems the mecca and heaven of things. The greater the overpay, the greater the heaven it seems. If the underpaid get the chance, they just rush up the ladder to greater and greater overpay. But desires are limited. The needs and desires of the body are finite. Satisfaction waits on desire. However much the overpay, there is still only one stomach for food, two feet for shoes, one body for bed, and so on. overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, 1000 rooms for one body. Maybe people don't want to hear that, but the overpaid experience it, if they are honest and thoughtful.
The overpaid who have been underpaid, and suffered from feeling ignored, invisible, unloved, despised, rejected, underpowered, etc, like Joseph Kennedy, Hitler and so on, may feel a vindictive joy in being on top, may revel vengefully in having a superfluity, but satisfaction is limited by the finity of desires.
And the overpaid have to deal with everyone wanting to be on top. The way for everyone to be on top of course, is to have everyone on an equal footing. When some are above others, the feeling of equality drives those below to strive to rise as high as the highest. So the ones on top have to suffer the constant efforts of invasion of all those below. Or to constantly fear that invasion.
The ones on top are put into a hopeless bind: They have to strengthen their subordinates to enable them to defend them, and have to weaken them to prevent their climbing up. The more they strengthen them, the more they must fear them. And the more they weaken them, the more they must fear that their subordinates cannot protect them. They are forced to weaken them and to strengthen them. The same applies to slaves. They must weaken them to keep them slaves, and must strengthen them to keep them productive and a defense. A hopelessly painful situation. Just no fun at all. They must read their subordinates with impossible exactitude, to know their degree of ambition and humility, their willingness to be subordinate, and their ambition to be on top. The man with a strong will to be on top finds it hard to imagine anything else from his subordinates. He projects his own will and wish on them, and suspects them of plotting against him. They in turn fear he plots their destruction, which may drive them to destroy him to save themselves. If the man on top dies a natural death or not, he has a hard life. And a person in such a situation can hardly govern well, so insubordination further down in the hierarchy of society grows.
Whether at the top of a business, a nation or an empire, such must be the pattern of life for the leader. Caesar was good for the empire's strength, but his very strength made him feared. Both strength and weakness in the leader will tend to his removal. It is hardly a wonder that so many settle for underpay and underpower! You have to have a great blindness to wish to be on top.
The sense of equality in people is very strong. Being under drives people to rise. We know we have as much right to be on top as any other person. This ensures that inequality will always be desperately unstable, a turmoil, a nightmare. Not everyone cares greatly to be the equal of the one on top, but enough people to make being on top extremely precarious. Even the ones who do not greatly care to take the risks to be on top will do something to harm when they can with safety. Like the butler who spat in the rich man's soup. Or the disaffected ones who open the gates of the city to another conqueror in hope of reward.
The king can strengthen the barons so they will keep the people down, but them he has to fear they will take over. The stronger they are, the more he has to please them and become their servant. If he tries to weaken them, they may revolt and replace him, or go over to the enemy. Stalin uses the KGB to terrorise the populace, but then they may decide they want the top place. If Stalin purges his subordinates, they rise in resistance. If the barons are weak, the people may attack the king. Every leader craves loyalty, but gets treachery in time. Leaaders use divine right, divinity, or man of destiny to try to put themselves above attack, but the power of this illusion is limited, some may be quite untaken in by it.
With equality, everyone is near to the top, and the drive to rise is least. And the lust or desperation to hold on to the top position is least, because the fall is least. And everyone is strongly activated to hold others to equality. With equality, the advantages of being on the top are smallest, and so the best for the job have the easiest path to get to the top, and government is most satisfactory, and therefore disaffection is smallest. Inequality intensifies the competition for top spot.
People are too dangerous to annoy. The sense of justice, of equality, is of enormous power. Yes, there is a store of humility, of forbearance, of longsuffering, of meekness, of acceptance of lower position, but it is not unlimited, it is not reliable, dependable. You can never be sure where it exists and where it doesn't. One day the battered wife sets fire to your bed.
It is lonely at the top. Belonging to the tribe, the sense of being accepted, of being a peer among peers, is one of the most powerful elements of happiness. We are a social animal. We need the feeling of being protected by others. The fiercest dictators have their muscle round up people to 'show' their affection under threat. Or just imagine the people love them.
Every super-underpay contains super-energetic people who will climb to the top, and challenge every holder of that position. The Sicilian Mafia rise to the top of America. Every poverty is constantly sending up challengers for top position. The person on top must fight them all, a never-ending tide. Every plunderer attracts plunderers. Poverty goes where the money is. With equality, with fairpay, with pay justice, with no one taking out more than they put in, there will be no poor and no heap of wealth to attract them.
People could be educated in the miseries of overpay and overpower. History would provide enough examples to bore everyone. And logic or common sense will quickly support the same conclusion. No one likes being under. The only way we can all be on top is with equality.
The fool and his money are soon parted. And we think: Haha, serves him right, who cares. We don't think: This parting is theft. We don't think: This fool is me. But we are all somewhere along a spectrum from least to most money-foolish. Can we afford to allow this theft? Does this theft help anyone? The mandarins, the brains, of China took more and more money to themselves. And so came the Cultural Revolution, and the break-up of the mandarins. The same in Germany, the brainier took advantage, and then along came Hitler, humiliated, vengeful, and his army of Nazis, attacking the intellectuals, the brains who took advantage. 40% of Nazis were primary-school teachers. We think so lightly of paying primary-school teachers less. But they don't think less of themselves, they do not accept our estimation of them. They live the humiliation, in poorer homes, in lack of social respect, every day. The will to equality is fierce. From humiliation, they bobbed up and were glad to indulge their new-found positions of power over others, to take that demonstration to the limit without mercy. The English Rothschild has the wit to see the value of getting information on the victor of Waterloo before anyone else, and then has the further wit to pretend that England has lost, so that everyone sells their English shares cheap, and Rothschild has his agents secretly buy them up, and the shares go through the roof when the truth comes through.
This is a great deal of money, and hence power, for very little work. Which means a lot of work and very little money and power for others. Which creates violence proportional to the overpay-underpay, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. And the overpower-underpower assists more stealing. The underpaid get less satisfaction, and the overpaid get no more satisfaction. And everyone gets more violence. Everyone is somewhere along the spectrum from least to most money-foolish. So everyone is being stolen from, all along the spectrum. Theft. Injury. Anger. Violence. Weaponry. Ever-increasing.
We say: Buyer beware. In other words: Let the seller be free to try to fleece, and let the onus be all on the buyer to try to defeat this effort. [to be continued]
How can we possibly be 100 times happier? It's ridiculous, isn't it?
But what if happiness levels have been falling very slowly for a very long time, and so we have no memory of how happy we humans were a long long time ago? What if we simply, naturally assume that levels of happiness have always been about the same?
You can make a community, in which everyone works and produces plenty, very unhappy, without destruction of workproducts, just by super-extreme misdistribution. Everyone working, more or less equally, unequally within a very small range, and most getting very little, a few getting most. There is the unhappiness of doing the work creating the workproducts, and getting a fraction of the workproducts. And there is the unhappiness of the violence. And the unhappiness of the pay injustice and violence ever-increasing. The violence will increase as both sides try to prevail, with ever-bigger weapons. And the violence [war, crime and weaponry] will increase as the inequality increases.
We have super-super-extreme inequality and violence now, after 3000 years or more of them growing. so the good news is that we can be super-super-extremely happier.
If liberty and justice for all, equal pay for equal work, no one overpaid for their work, and no one underpaid for their work, was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is now 98% up in a thin needle of water going up 100,000 metres, and 90% of the pool is between 1cm and 10th of 1mm deep. Pay from 100,000 times average, to 10,000th of average. And violence and unhappiness proportional. A billion times as much pay, a billionth as much pay, for the same work, the same wealth production.
And pay buying everything, virtually, and also being power.
99% of people being underpaid. The world average pay being US$40 an hour, for every working person in the world, including housewives and students. Imagine a world in which every working person was being paid US$40 an hour. Not only would the 99% who are at the moment getting less than this be happier financially, but the 1% overpaid would also be far happier too!
Why is that? Because having overpay and therefore being surrounded by 99% of people underpaid means being under seige. If one person has the property of 1000 people, he has 1, merely 1000 times more than he can use and 2, 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends. Overpay is maintained only with ceaseless vigilance, exhausting labour and defensiveness. And one is cut off from the 1000, one is isolated. And mixing freely, safey with the human tribe is one of the great determinants of happiness. The overpaid gain nothing, because of the limitation of desires, and they lose an enormous amount, in the isolation, fear, distrust, danger, labour. Inequality, pay injustice, divides the human tribe, separates it by enmity and fear, instead of uniting it in mutual protection and support. Instead of being like a gorilla group, united against the world, the human tribe has become divided against itself. Every heap of wealth in history has been broken down, every empire has fallen, every plutocracy has been crushed. Naturally, because they have so much, and others, working harder, have so little. Wealth is power, but only the second greatest power, the power of the underpaid has always proven to be greater. And overwealth, having more than you have earned by your own work, is only having 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, is only having 1000 rooms for one body, is only having a feast for one stomach. The overpaid cannot consume more sex, drugs and rock and roll than the fairpaid, who get US$40 an hour, which is $100,000 a year, and $200,000 a year per family without student. Which is enough for plenty of shoes, rooms, etc etc.
Studies have concluded that the effect of money on happiness declines to zero somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a year per family. It is called decreasing marginal utility. 20 pairs of shoes cost twice as much, but add perhaps only 10% extra happiness, if that. For someone like Ceausescu of Rumania, with a palace 5 times the size of Versailles palace in France, and Rumanians standing in bread queues all day, the added danger and labour of trying to protect himself far outweighs the added pleasure of having 1000 rooms. The pressure of the underpay around him was so great, that even with the secret police of a whole nation to protect him, he was shot. And so it has been always in history. The late Roman Emperors, when overpay-underpay was extreme, were lasting weeks or days on the throne.
Since overpay-underpay is good for neither underpaid or overpaid, it is clear which way happiness lies: in liberty and justice for all, equal pay for equal work, taking out as much as you put in, plenty for everyone and peace with everyone. Overpay is theft, and thieves make themselves vulnerable.
Most people are happy to work and get a reasonable pay, and enjoy life. But there have, of course, always been a few who have to be on the top, who are madly infected by need to have more, to have most, who have such great pride, they must be top. So they have spent their lives fighting with the others who want to be on top. And to get more power to get or stay on top, they have used their power to steal from the underpaid. So inequality has grown and grown for 1000s of years, and weaponry has grown and grown.
So reversing this, aiming for pay justice, no overpower-underpower, tyranny-slavery, underwork-overwork, will take us back to the beginning, to happiness as it can be, humanity united by absence of theft.
The people who are just, who do not want more than they earn, who do not want to rob others, enslave others, oppress others, are in the majority. The underpaid are 99%. The underpaid gain by getting all their earnings, not part, and gain by loss of the super-super-extreme violence and danger. The overpaid gain by losing the extreme danger of overpay amid underpay. The overpaid do not lose any satisfaction, because fairpay satisfies all desires.
It is only a matter of teaching simple sanity, of waking people from a bad dream in which they are scratching their own faces. There is no selfsacrifice, there is only extremely large gain for everyone.
The amount of gain is proportional to the extremeness of the inequality. We have super-super-extreme inequality, so we can be super-super-extremely happier.
This enormously beneficial change can be effected very simply, by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to make that money, everyone has done everything to make the goods that that money buys and represents, so such a law is just. The ceaseless drift of money from all workers to few is like wind piling up sand against a seawall. We don't need to try to stop the wind, we just need to introduce regular respreading of the sand over the beach. Then inequality and violence are limited, and no longer evergrowing.
Instead of the money being up in a needle going up 100,000 metres, and most of the pool less than 1cm deep, the needle of water is forced to shower down back into the pool. And then overpaid and underpaid can both swim. Liberty and justice for all.
You can make a community, in which everyone works and produces plenty, very unhappy, without destruction of workproducts, just by super-extreme misdistribution. Everyone working, more or less equally, unequally within a very small range, and most getting very little, a few getting most. There is the unhappiness of doing the work creating the workproducts, and getting a fraction of the workproducts. And there is the unhappiness of the violence. And the unhappiness of the pay injustice and violence ever-increasing. The violence will increase as both sides try to prevail, with ever-bigger weapons. And the violence [war, crime and weaponry] will increase as the inequality increases.
We have super-super-extreme inequality and violence now, after 3000 years or more of them growing. so the good news is that we can be super-super-extremely happier.
If liberty and justice for all, equal pay for equal work, no one overpaid for their work, and no one underpaid for their work, was a swimming pool one metre deep, our pool is now 98% up in a thin needle of water going up 100,000 metres, and 90% of the pool is between 1cm and 10th of 1mm deep. Pay from 100,000 times average, to 10,000th of average. And violence and unhappiness proportional. A billion times as much pay, a billionth as much pay, for the same work, the same wealth production.
And pay buying everything, virtually, and also being power.
99% of people being underpaid. The world average pay being US$40 an hour, for every working person in the world, including housewives and students. Imagine a world in which every working person was being paid US$40 an hour. Not only would the 99% who are at the moment getting less than this be happier financially, but the 1% overpaid would also be far happier too!
Why is that? Because having overpay and therefore being surrounded by 99% of people underpaid means being under seige. If one person has the property of 1000 people, he has 1, merely 1000 times more than he can use and 2, 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends. Overpay is maintained only with ceaseless vigilance, exhausting labour and defensiveness. And one is cut off from the 1000, one is isolated. And mixing freely, safey with the human tribe is one of the great determinants of happiness. The overpaid gain nothing, because of the limitation of desires, and they lose an enormous amount, in the isolation, fear, distrust, danger, labour. Inequality, pay injustice, divides the human tribe, separates it by enmity and fear, instead of uniting it in mutual protection and support. Instead of being like a gorilla group, united against the world, the human tribe has become divided against itself. Every heap of wealth in history has been broken down, every empire has fallen, every plutocracy has been crushed. Naturally, because they have so much, and others, working harder, have so little. Wealth is power, but only the second greatest power, the power of the underpaid has always proven to be greater. And overwealth, having more than you have earned by your own work, is only having 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, is only having 1000 rooms for one body, is only having a feast for one stomach. The overpaid cannot consume more sex, drugs and rock and roll than the fairpaid, who get US$40 an hour, which is $100,000 a year, and $200,000 a year per family without student. Which is enough for plenty of shoes, rooms, etc etc.
Studies have concluded that the effect of money on happiness declines to zero somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 a year per family. It is called decreasing marginal utility. 20 pairs of shoes cost twice as much, but add perhaps only 10% extra happiness, if that. For someone like Ceausescu of Rumania, with a palace 5 times the size of Versailles palace in France, and Rumanians standing in bread queues all day, the added danger and labour of trying to protect himself far outweighs the added pleasure of having 1000 rooms. The pressure of the underpay around him was so great, that even with the secret police of a whole nation to protect him, he was shot. And so it has been always in history. The late Roman Emperors, when overpay-underpay was extreme, were lasting weeks or days on the throne.
Since overpay-underpay is good for neither underpaid or overpaid, it is clear which way happiness lies: in liberty and justice for all, equal pay for equal work, taking out as much as you put in, plenty for everyone and peace with everyone. Overpay is theft, and thieves make themselves vulnerable.
Most people are happy to work and get a reasonable pay, and enjoy life. But there have, of course, always been a few who have to be on the top, who are madly infected by need to have more, to have most, who have such great pride, they must be top. So they have spent their lives fighting with the others who want to be on top. And to get more power to get or stay on top, they have used their power to steal from the underpaid. So inequality has grown and grown for 1000s of years, and weaponry has grown and grown.
So reversing this, aiming for pay justice, no overpower-underpower, tyranny-slavery, underwork-overwork, will take us back to the beginning, to happiness as it can be, humanity united by absence of theft.
The people who are just, who do not want more than they earn, who do not want to rob others, enslave others, oppress others, are in the majority. The underpaid are 99%. The underpaid gain by getting all their earnings, not part, and gain by loss of the super-super-extreme violence and danger. The overpaid gain by losing the extreme danger of overpay amid underpay. The overpaid do not lose any satisfaction, because fairpay satisfies all desires.
It is only a matter of teaching simple sanity, of waking people from a bad dream in which they are scratching their own faces. There is no selfsacrifice, there is only extremely large gain for everyone.
The amount of gain is proportional to the extremeness of the inequality. We have super-super-extreme inequality, so we can be super-super-extremely happier.
This enormously beneficial change can be effected very simply, by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. The private heir has done nothing to make that money, everyone has done everything to make the goods that that money buys and represents, so such a law is just. The ceaseless drift of money from all workers to few is like wind piling up sand against a seawall. We don't need to try to stop the wind, we just need to introduce regular respreading of the sand over the beach. Then inequality and violence are limited, and no longer evergrowing.
Instead of the money being up in a needle going up 100,000 metres, and most of the pool less than 1cm deep, the needle of water is forced to shower down back into the pool. And then overpaid and underpaid can both swim. Liberty and justice for all.
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