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.