Why

Why do you care how much others have? It doesn't matter how much someone else has. All that matters is what you have.

How much each of us gets is related to how much others get. If one takes all, there is nothing left for others. It isn't that we all scrabble at a cornucopia and what each gets depends just on how hard each scrabbles. The cornucopia is each other's work plus nature's bounty. If some get overpay, others have to get underpay. Is there overpay [pay injustice, legal theft] in our system? Is there pay for no work [overpay], meaning work for no pay [underpay] for others? You only have to look at 'money makes money'. You only have to look at pay/year from 100,000 times average to 10,000th of average. You only have to look at 'the rich get richer' etc. You only have to look at a billion at 10%: $100 million a year for no work, doubling every 7 years for no work, times 1000 every 70 years for no work. Pay justice is taking out as much as you put in, creating x wealth and taking out x wealth. You only have to look at paying people for nature's gifts, which is not work. Or at paying unlimited amounts for having studied, although having studied is not work. [Studying is work.] Or paying for owning land which others build around. Or giving all of nature's bounty to landowners instead of recognising birthright to equal shares for everyone. [Of nature's bounty, not of the value added by the work in extracting nature's bounty.] Or private inheritance, when the heir has done nothing: has put nothing in, and yet gets a legal license to take out wealth. Or pay for scarcity, for high demand/supply ratio, which is not work.

What does it matter to me if others get underpaid? It is theft, injury, injustice, the greatest, because money is the joker good, good for everything: the theft of it is theft of almost everything, and injury ricochets untiringly as atoms, in a vendetta back-and-forth, and unlike atoms, accelerates, as both sides use bigger and bigger weapons. Every heap of overpay has been raided to death. Every empire has plundered and then been plundered. Where is Spanish Inca gold now? 100 children trying to get 1000 sweets each from a tub of 1000 sweets, with grabbing sweets from each other too, means endless and accelerating fighting - what we have had for 3000 years. The rich robbing rich and poor, the poor robbing rich and poor. Extreme overpay and underpay are both extreme stimuli to war and crime. The tub of social wealth is filled by nature's bounty and human work. There is no precise way of determining how much each person has contributed, so we have had a lolly scramble: whatever I get is mine, whether I worked proportionately or not. And for those who get more, and, with interest [which comes from profits], money makes money - whoever rakes more out gets a bigger rake, the rake grows with every raking. Some have bought weapons with the money, and gone on to conquest, plunder or illegal crime. Or monopoly. Or coercion of workers. Or slavery. A 10% profit after owners have been fairpaid for their work means the prices, incomes, revenues, were 10% greater than work gone into the product, or workers were underpaid. The merchant buys cheap, sells dear. It is relatively easy to sell something worth $10 for $11 - who is going to notice, to know? Who knows exactly how much workers' work is worth? The profits come from the margins, the inexactitude. In a nonprofit organisation without volunteers, everyone gets fairpay, so what are profits? The CEO may get 400 times as much as the average worker. Obviously that is not because the CEO works 400 times harder, is 400 times as productive. Pay justice is equal pay for equal work, not owners grabbing whatever money is left lying around after paying bills [outgoes, costs]. Our system is: give as little, get as much, as possible, and whatever is left is yours. But this sucks money up from underpaid to overpaid, until the customer base, the buying, from which the profits are skimmed, is exhausted. As happened at the end of the 19th century, leading to Henry Ford's high-wages economics, so his workers could afford to buy 'his' cars, so he could go on skimming. Globally, 90% are getting between 100th and 10,000th of world average pay - the customer base is exhausted, after centuries of military and economic plunder because the first world had better weapons. The money has concentrated in few hands, like the wind blowing sand up against the beachwall, and demand is a tiny fraction of what it would be with fairpay; and productivity, with 90% of people uneducated, in poor health, illiterate, desperate, starving, is a tiny fraction of what it would be - and then there is the enormous drain of the violence, which is proportional to the overpay-underpay, which is at a factor of one billion - ratio of highest to lowest pay/yr one billion - a billion times as much, a billionth as much, for the same amount of work, of sacrifice of time and life in work. The super-overpaid are funding [at public expense] the dictators and leaders of every nation to subdue, fight, torture, terrorise the underpaid of most nations, and sucking at the teat of nations through debt on loans approved by governments without full representation. But one cannot go on making the workers less productive, and making them having less and less to spend, without impairing profits. Profits [overpay] are unsustainable. One can find other markets to some extent, but globally, not. Dickering with interest rates, money supply, etc cannot make a real difference. The wealth, from nature's bounty and work, is finite - maybe growing, maybe growing fast, but always finite. Even the universe may not be infinite. Money has to circulate, pay justice is essential to sustainability. Love, respect, full acknowledgement of the wealth created by workers, nontheft, noninjury, is the only practical, longterm sustainable way. It avoids exhausting the demand base, and it avoids the defense cost waste. Getting profit is fun, but it has to be balanced by restoration of pay justice, by taking the sand piled up against the seawall, and spreading it over the beach again - then we can go on playing profits forever, without the evergrowing violence, and without interrupting the cycle of money by depleting the customer base. Thanks to e=mc2, we can't go on playing the profits, war and slavery game: we have reached the limits of violence, the death of everyone is on the horizon. 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and a violence factor of one billion to press the buttons. We have to find the maturity, the realism, the practicality, the factfacing, soon, or perish. As JFK said: end war or war will end us. And he didn't know about nuclear winter then. I would put the odds of humanity finding the maturity in time at, say, 1000 to one against, but we cannot afford to guess how much maturity is out there, we have to go on working to activate or develop that maturity, as long as life is with us. The wood seems to be green, but we have to keep trying, it may catch any time. It helps our argument that the effect of money on happiness declines to zero below $100,000 per family [while fairpay is $200,000 per two-adult family], with the decreasing marginal utility, since bodily desires are finite - overpay is just 3000 shoes for two feet, 100 rooms for one body. And that defense costs, labour and worry are proportional to the overpay. And that all fortunes are finite, and the attacks on them, with the costs and toil of defense, cease only with the end of the fortune, in finite time, as all history unanimously shows, so all overpay heaps fall. And overpay is loss of fraternity with the human tribe, which is one of the biggest factors in happiness. Since the net benefit of overpay is very negative [no extra pleasure, great extra pain] and since underpay is clearly of negative benefit, and since overpay and underpay can be destroyed by putting one into the other, the way is clear. Ambition can be bound to justice: do more work, create more wealth, and get proportionately more. Put in 20% more, get out 20% more, no theft, no injury, no violence, no shrinking of consumer base. Economics is like a community which comes together for its meals, everyone bringing some food. The unrealistic economics we have had is everyone grabbing as much as they can, treating the feast as free to anyone, whereas it belongs to all in proportion to their labour, and the nature's bounty part of it, in equal shares. Let all the legal thefts be uninterfered with, for it would be impossibly expensive to prevent them effectively, but admit they exist, and counter them with equal distribution to everyone of large deceased estates, spreading the sand back on the beach, limiting overpay-underpay, violence, and the shrinking to nothing of the consumer base. [Clearly the private heir has done nothing to create that wealth, and clearly everyone has done everything to create the goods the money buys and represents, so it is easy to show that such a move is just.] Or [or and] give everyone equal shares of a 1% per month increase in money supply, thus reducing overpay by the inflation effect [paying more for things] and lifting underpay by the equal share. Inflation is not bad when everyone gets the money thus created. By one or both of these simple, nonbureaucratic methods, overpay-underpay is prevented from increasing endlessly to our extreme misery, danger and extinction. Most war and crime is destroyed. [So-called religious and racial wars are overpay-underpay wars along religious or racial lines, as is seen from the absence of violence in all places in the world where there are religious or racial differences without overpay-underpay differences, eg, Canada, Australia, and from the presence of overpay-underpay, overpower-underpower in all places where there are so-called religious or racial wars, eg, Northern Ireland, South Africa, Rwanda, America, Middle East [Sunni/Shiite].]
Proof that we can be literally, conservatively, 100 times happier: If a govt committed the extreme pay injustice of taking 90% of aftertax income off 90% of citizens and giving all that [81% of national wealth] to 1%, there would be, first, the loss of 81% of happiness in the financial loss to the 90% of people, and second, the further unhappiness of the extreme violence [which will get to everyone, from richest to poorest, as in history], and third, the destruction of property, and fourth, the loss of productivity from so many tied up in the violence on both sides and in the repairs and hospitalisations. Which could realistically raise the loss of happiness to 99%. And everyone will readily agree with this. Therefore happiness will, in this example, increase 100 times with the removal of that pay injustice. We have in the world far worse pay injustice than this: in the real world, the 1% get, not 82 times as much, as in the example, but up to 100,000 times as much, the 9% in the middle get, not fairpay, but between fairpay and 100th of fairpay, and the 90% get, not 10th but between 100th and 10,000th of fairpay. Therefore everyone with logic with readily agree we will be literally, conservatively, 100 times happier with the removal of the super-super-extreme pay injustice we have accumulated over 3000 years. The overpaid lose nothing but the danger, violence [ever-escalating] and extreme and doomed labour of selfprotection, and the isolation from the human tribe [belonging, community, being one of the greatest determinants of happiness], the underpaid lose nothing but the underpay [undersatisfaction] and the violence [ever-escalating]. The money going to the bottom constantly rises through the ranks via profit, refreshing all ranks, and is constantly returned to the bottom from the top, thus achieving what the founding fathers aimed at, the prevention of wealthpower concentration. Money, like manure, is best when spread, Francis Bacon, Elizabethan English philosopher. Equality breeds no strife, the Athenians cried.
Since the majority of underpaid is so high, 99%, the majority will include many of the 'muscle' of the super-overpaid, so the super-overpaid who wish madly to keep on getting uselessly richer and more endangered will be robbed of muscle. And some of the 1% overpaid will prefer nonextinction and 100-fold happiness to isolation, danger and extinction. So education can achieve the aim. [Force affects only appearances.] And the 3 billion adults can be reached by word of mouth alone in just 31 times the time to reach two people [by ever-doubling]. There are 3 billion to reach, but there are 3 billion to reach them, with all their energies, talents, media and resources. And, since happiness is everyone's everything, the news [100-fold happiness! nonextinction!], will spread like wildfire, unless the mental wood be too green.
It is our only hope of survival. Whether we become aware of it or not, we stand on the brink of a golden age and of extinction. If we fail, at least all the perps will be punished and all the victims will be freed from their suffering.