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.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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.
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
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.
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.
Confused ideas, confused society
'An economy in which everyone shares the good times'. 'Liberty and justice for all'. D H Lawrence calls the people 'the eternal dupe'. Try this on for size: you don't have a right to be underpaid, you have a duty, to yourself, your family, children, parents, friends, community, state, nation and planet to not be underpaid. If a group of people give up some of their earnings, the people they give it to: use it to buy whips and chains and ropes of laws for you, and if you complain, use it to buy policemen to keep you down, and if you won't stay down, use your money to legalise torture. Allowing yourself to be underpaid is the source of all evils in states. The state built on injustice cannot stand: hence permitting yourself to be underpaid is unpatriotic, is traitorous, is acting as an enemy of the state. The purpose of government is justice, James Madison. Hence permitting yourself to be underpaid is failing in your duty as a citizen, your duty to yourself, your family, friends, children, community, nation, planet. The most important justice is pay justice, because money buys just about everything, and money is also power. Nowhere is there a specification of where exactly pay justice lies, in money terms. There is no thought of where overpay-underpay starts. The overpaid have been feeding lies to you forever. So that many lies have become custom, have become accepted ideas. The pile of lies is so deep, and your ability to detect them is so weak, that you maybe remove one or two layers, and never get down to the bedrock of justice, of survival of the state, of liberty and justice for all. 'In which everyone shares the good times': that is, in which the handouts are a little more 'generous', in which the 'generous' handouts are still far from justice. Without a specific, detailed, close determination of actual pay justice, you have no idea where justice lies, and you are unable to prevent underpay, which allows overpay, which is overpower, which is tyranny, which is full of evils, and which goes on growing in the production of evils, which has grown to present 60 times PDC [planet death capability], the extermination of everyone, underpaid and overpaid. You have a most urgent, vital, fundamental duty to dig through the lies to bedrock, pay justice, the root of all good. The overpaid, often without effort, constantly pour forth false arguments in support of their super-overpay. They have done so for centuries, and so successfully, that the lies have become the custom, the never-questioned 'certainties' of societies, though their illogic is simple. Little work has been done to clear the track of these nonsenses, and 'the eternal dupe' has done less work to mentally absorb these exposures of the nonsenses. I have collected and discovered I think all the untruths that buttress overpay, at happinessfinneganswake.blogspot.com. I give them to you, for my sake, your sake, everyone's sake. If you are to survive, to have any society, to have the best society, you must work very hard to judge these untruths by standards of good sense alone, not by custom. Pay justice is, according to my calculations, US$40 an hour for every working person *in the world*, **including housewives and students**. That is what every working person actually earns. That is how much wealth every working person creates. Judge my reasoning. Examine closely. No justice equals no nation, globe, happiness, peace, family, anything. We have to walk a way many times to make a [new] [mental] path, Thoreau. Don't distract yourself with whether I am a boaster. Examine, test, prove for your life. Be slow to indulge your modern attention span, to scoff, dismiss, brush off. You need truth. There may be some here. Happiness lives on Reality Street.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
You can easily be much happier, safer, better off
You can easily be much happier, safer, better off.
Why?
Because things have got really bad, relative to what they could be, and because this can all be enormously changed just by learning some things and teaching them to two people, your friends or family.
What things?
Well, for instance, people are creating enough wealth for every working person in the world, including housewives and students, to be paid US$100,000 a year. Instead we have 99% of people being paid less than that, and 1% being paid all the earnings that those 99% are earning and aren't getting. And there is an easy, free, do-in-your-own-home, no-politics, no-religion way to change that.
And the violence in the world is almost all caused by the super-super-extreme overpay and underpay. And that violence is never-ending and is always growing. And that obviously has a huge effect on happiness. For everyone. Violence [war and crime] gets to everyone, rich and poor. Violence is localised and temporary, but it is also unconfined, it can pop up anywhere, on a plane, in the street, in the home. A nation can be peaceful for a long time, and then suddenly it is war. Or some form of crime [which is just a small war]. The golden carrot of super-super-extreme overpay is a constant stimulus to crime and war, and so is underpay. And overpay and underpay are super-super-extreme. Everyone is submerged in an environment of danger instead of an environment of peace. Everyone is engaged in protecting themselves instead of feeling free and safe, in an environment of friends and happy people.
Obviously a community in which everyone works, and produces plenty, can be made very unhappy, without destroying goods, just by extreme overpay and underpay. If an imp takes everyone's property and puts it in someone's house, things have gone a long way downhill as long as those things are not given back. We can learn that there is an imp in human society, and that we are such a community, in which most people have lost the happiness of having all the goods they create by their own work, and everyone is embroiled in the endless violence of what the imp has done.
One only needs to get clear that there is an imp, and he has moved goods to extreme misdistribution, and that has caused a sharp decline in happiness for everyone, and learn how to get it back without struggle or danger, for our happiness, safety and financial situation to improve greatly. If one person has the goods of 1000, he has only got 1000 times more goods than he can use, and has got 1000 enemies and lost 1000 friends. If overpay makes you unhappier, and underpay makes you unhappier, and everyone can get clear about these things [and there are strong proofs that they are true], then everyone can be happier by removing overpay and underpay. Can be super-super-extremely happier, because we have super-super-extreme overpay and underpay.
There are things we have to get unconfused about. There are things that are increasing confusion. But if we can conquer these confusions, by reading and thinking, the way is clear and simple. Like being lost in the bush, if we can just get high enough to see a landmark, we can soon get out.
Part of the problem is that we pack up our troubles in an old kitbag and stick it in a cupboard or attic, and our house looks better. We get used to the level of happiness that is available, and put the bad things out of mind, and don't study them to really get rid of them. We cannot begin to imagine them really being gone. We have marked them insoluble, and forgotten about them, but they are still around. We can't solve problems we have marked insoluble. So it seems that we cannot be much happier than we are. We have to pull out the problems and really get rid of them.
There has been an imp in the system which has quietly, slowly moved earnings from all to few over a very long time. And it has created super-super-extreme overpay and underpay, super-super-extreme violence, millions of problems, and super-super-extreme unhappiness. Just by seeing this, and identifying the imp, and removing it, we can go back to the level of happiness we had before all this started, long, long ago.
If happiness declined 1% every 30 years, the decline would be imperceptible, and everyone would accept the new lower level of happiness as being normal, and yet 100% of happiness would be lost in 3000 years. We are in such a situation. This imp was born about 3000 years ago, and we are in fact in our last 1% of happiness. This is very very good news, in that we can be 100 times happier just by removing the imp, and it is easy to remove the imp, once people see the reality. The imp has been invisible. Once the imp is visible, the problem is nearly solved. His little thefts, over a very long time, have got us into a very bad situation. Which we have come to think of as normal. But spray paint on the imp, and make him visible, and so come to see what he is up to, and the right way is very easy to see and to go.
In the absence of seeing the imp, millions of explanations have sprung up to try to explain the things that have been happening. All these things have to be cleared away in the course of coming to see clearly. Life is so complex, that there are things to support a million different theories. And the theories then blind us to things that contradict the theory.
Let us meet the imp.
For perhaps as much as millions of years, everyone mostly produced and consumed their own goods. Thousands of years ago, job specialisation, division of labour, started to grow. And that necessitated trade, to remix the goods separated by job specialisation. and that is when the imp came in. It is impossible to determine the exact workvalue of a trade item. We have some idea of the workvalue, but not a precise idea. And our valuation is influenced by our desire. The chances of the two things in a trade being of exactly equal value are minute, infinitesimal. The two things are going to be of different value. So one person will end up with a little less, and the other with a little more. They will both be pleased with the trade, losing something they don't want, and getting something they do want, but a little impish theft will have occurred. And this little theft will not even out over many trades. As with tossing a coin a trillion times, there will be many times that there will be strings of two gains in a row, three gains, and, more and more rarely, but still definitely, longer and longer strings of gains or losses. A few people will make large net gain, a few will make large net loss, many will make less extreme net gain or loss. A bell-shaped curve of net gain and loss will grow up, and will everwiden with every transaction. A few making large net gain, a large number making smaller net gain, a large number making smaller net loss, and a few making large net loss. A graph of this, with the quantity of people on the vertical y-axis, and the gain or loss on the horizontal x-axis, will have a bell-shaped curve. Trade causes overpay and underpay, ever-increasing. And this is just by accident, by statistical necessity. Toss a coin a trillion times, and of course you won't get heads tails heads tails all the way. There will be billions of cases of strings of two heads or tails in a row, fewer of three, and so on, till there will be rare but definite cases of strings of hundreds of heads or tails in a row. Every transaction has a drop of pay injustice in it, and this drop will grow an ocean. One of the two traders will go away with a little bit more wealth or workvalue, the other with a little bit less. Or quite a bit more or less. And money is the joker good, it is good for just about everything, so the loss of it is felt keenly, the loss of it is the loss of just about everything. As long as wealth items were perishable, saving was more or less impossible. But slowly nonperishable items of trade, like oil and money, came along, and with it saving. Those who made gains could buy the labour of those who made losses. The two groups could have been working equally hard, and yet one group will have to work some more to get as much wealth in goods as the other group.
And this is all happening without adding in conquest, coercion, bullying, and the natural range of gullibility or 'business acumen' in people. The merchant buys cheap and sells dear. Business is just selling for more than you paid for it. Giving as little, getting as much, as possible. What is undetectable in one transaction is clear in many. The real stories of trading up from a $2 item to a house in 50 trades. And the real stories of a shop in a prisoner-of-war camp for the trading of Red Cross items, and the shopkeeper building up a small fortune in cigarettes. Who can tell how many cigarettes a can of sardines is worth? The shopkeeper can buy at 15 cigarettes and sell at 20 cigarettes. The shopkeeper in justice is paid for his work, but who can tell how much the service of buying and selling a can of sardines is worth?
From such small undetectable beginnings, the monster has grown and grown. And once detectable, it has generated righteous illfeeling.
And money is power, power to rake more money. And so it has gone on, growing pay injustice, power inequality, social status inequality, war, crime, weaponry. So that now we have pay from $30 billion a year to $30 a year, from 100,000 times average pay per hour, to 10,000th of average pay per hour, and weapons capable of blocking out the sun permanently, lowering the temperature 25 degrees, three times colder than an ice-age, and irradiating the planet for a million years. Death camps, torture, state terrorism, fascism, dictatorship, undemocracy, leaders above the law, genocide, murder of millions, starvation of 1% of humanity every year, 2 million going blind each year for lack of just 4c of vitamin A a year, one million girls sold into an incredibly miserable, hard life of sexual slavery every year, billions living in slums, favelas, under brutal police, 99% underpaid, 90% paid between 100th and 10,000th of average, although we have enough wealth to pay every working person, including housewives and students, US$100,000 a year.
Just because of the imp, as little, but as ceaseless, as a drip on a tap.
Even most of the conquest and plunder has been because of the accumulation of power from the accumulation of wealth. The underpaid have been forced to hire themselves out as soldiers to the ones with the money and power to coerce them. And the conquest and plunder have aggravated the pay injustice, aggravating the violence.
The 99% underpaid are obviously worse off with overpay-underpay. Are the overpaid better off? To the underpaid, struggling along with undersatisfaction, overpay seems like oasis and mecca. But satisfaction waits on desire, and desire is limited. Overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, a 1000 rooms for one body. And overpay is the object of attack from both overpaid and underpaid. Overpay can afford more defense, but it has more attackers. And the attack goes on until the overpay is gone. Every empire has fallen, every plutocracy has fallen. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown. Beggars fear no thieves. Honey attracts bears. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. People are too dangerous to annoy. None enjoy unless all enjoy, because everyone feels equal, everyone wants to enjoy. The overpaid are constantly falling all through history. Justice is a virtue, a cause of happiness, because injured, robbed people never stop attacking overpay. Injury energises. Pay injustice, theft of earnings, theft of just about everything, is the biggest injury. Unfortunately there are a few people who have too little imagination to grasp this, and sometimes they get hold of power, and then we all have to be dragged into their hopeless mission to get and hold super-overpay.
The effect of money on happiness falls to zero below $100,000 a year per family, because of the limits of the desires money can satisfy, but we are all producing $200,000 worth of goods per family, because of the overwealthy driving us to produce and consume through underpay, advertising and warmongering, so that they can draw profits from it. We could all now, with all the technology working for us, work half the day, and be no less happy, as far as satisfaction from goods goes. And we could be far more happy, from the equality, safety, and freedom from overpower. Instead of a society in equality, pay justice, enjoying one another, trusting one another, safe with one another, we are all divided along the extreme range from poorest to richest. Instead of being on a plateau together, a happy party, we are apart at different heights up a useless ladder of inequality that tortures both overpaid and underpaid.
Instead of an equality of motivation, equal work for equal pay, we have the super-super-extreme motivation of super-super-extreme underpay and overpay. For 99%, the ladder sinks lower faster than they can climb. And for the 1% overpaid, there is far more trouble, danger and loss of community, and no more satisfaction.
No one is aiming for pay justice. The underpaid are just trying to make more money, by working harder, or stealing, or whatever. The overpaid have been in power, and have made society as they like it, which is a way in which they are freest to rake money. There was a time when interest was looked down on. Now a billion will pull in $100 million, every year, for no work, doubling the billion every 7 years, multiplying it by a 1000 every 70 years. The overpaid have a free, giant rake. And the rake grows with every rake. Inequality grows, violence grows, unhappiness grows, tyranny grows, slavery grows, disorder grows, brutality grows, injury grows, retaliation grows, weaponry grows, illhealth grows, lying grows.
It is possible to look at life and conclude that everything is fairly all right. Most people do. They trust what their eyes tell them, which is so little of the reality. To get to real happiness we have to go from unreal happiness through real unhappiness to real happiness.
Here-now bullets, bombs, battles and burglaries are very rare, we don't have the power to grasp that we have a global bomb, a cut on our finger is of more concern to us than the abject slavery of 90% of humanity. But it is a no-brainer that we would prefer to live in a world where everyone was paid US$40 an hour, US$100,000 per worker, US$200,000 per family, rather than what we have now. Even without realising that we would have 100 times faster progress than now, with 90% of scientists, brains, inventors etc tied up in the consequences of inequality, in the legal system, military-industrial complex, universities, government, business, hospitals etc, and 90% of scientist minds too poor to become scientists. We are using inequality to put off enjoying. None enjoy unless all enjoy.
Assuming we form a will to enjoy, what do we do? We act to bring everyone to the same will. This is easier than it sounds. If each person teaches this will to just two people, so that they also teach it to two, every adult will have that will in just 31 times the time to teach two. Just by word of mouth. The doubling reaches 2000 in ten steps, 2,000,000 in 20 steps, 2,000,000,000 in 30 steps. There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their resources and energies.
When there is a universal will to enjoy, we only have to pass a law making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. This will re-spread the wealth back over all the earners of it. The private heir has done nothing to earn that wealth, and everyone has done everything to earn that wealth, by making the goods that the wealth buys and represents, so such a law is just. Which, incidentally, shows that the overwealth is unjust. This is non-bureaucratic, since it only takes the settling of the estate, and the electronic dispersal of the money. Of course, such a 'radical' act is inconceivable in the present state of understanding. Home is very foreign when you've been away a long time. The super-overpay, the 98% of world income the 1% get now, the earnings of 1000s of years, will gently shower down on the earners over two generations, lifting the underpaid from starvation, illhealth, uneducation, slavery and anger, and lowering the overpaid out of overpower, danger and isolation from the human tribe. A person who has the property of 1000 has 1000 times what he can use, 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends, an extremely hunted life. Another even simpler way is to write equal shares of a 1% per month increase in the money supply into every account. This automatically lowers overpay and lifts underpay, without any invasion of individual's affairs. This inflation is not bad, because everyone is getting the money from it. We give equal shares both to 1% overpaid and 99% underpaid only because it saves the enormous cost in bureaucratic labour and money of distinguishing the two.
Is there a will to misery? Everyone works, and we produce plenty. And yet we have aided and abetted the ceaseless growth of pay injustice for 3000 years, with only rare and brief partial corrections towards justice. The inequality has always produced misery for all. Equality has always produced happiness. Nations have been founded on equality, liberty and justice, and we have ignored the foundational principles, and gone hell for leather to try to get unlimited fortunes out of an abundant but limited pool of wealth, provided by nature's bounty and human work. Every heap of overpay has fallen, and has been temporarily maintained only with excruciating labour and danger. We have never attempted to close the many wide-open legal ways by which money moves from earners to non-earners. We let the government rob us by increasing the money supply and lending it back to us to buy back at interest. Women could get equal pay in a week by going on a national women's strike. We let individuals pull millions and billions out of the wealth pool although we know they can't work much harder than us. We have equal share in all of nature's bounty and we give it all away to landowners. We all increase value of land by building cities around it and we give it away to landowners. We give millions to gifted people, although natural gifts are no work of theirs. We don't pay students for studying, although that is work, and all society benefits from it, and we then pay them unlimited amounts for having studied, although that isn't work. And then the people with billions foment wars and we go and fight and die for them. Stop giving tens of thousands from every household every year to the superrich, and thus make them happier, safer, more human.
Equality equals quality. Equality [pay justice, noninjury] is love, and love [noninjury] is the only practical way. Everyone will readily grant that it will utterly catastrophic for one person to have all the wealth in the world, so we ought to understand that what we have now, with 1% having 98% of world income, is almost as catastrophic. If we open our eyes, we can see catastrophe, for both overpaid and underpaid, everywhere. That monster, free to roam, has had till recently only small feet, able to kill only millions a year, but has, thanks to e=mc2, recently acquired the ability to kill us all. And anger and tyranny are super-super-extreme, and rising. We need only educate ourselves in reality, how bad it is, how good it can be, with just tiny effort to educate ourselves and two friends, to create the universal human will to make the change.
Why?
Because things have got really bad, relative to what they could be, and because this can all be enormously changed just by learning some things and teaching them to two people, your friends or family.
What things?
Well, for instance, people are creating enough wealth for every working person in the world, including housewives and students, to be paid US$100,000 a year. Instead we have 99% of people being paid less than that, and 1% being paid all the earnings that those 99% are earning and aren't getting. And there is an easy, free, do-in-your-own-home, no-politics, no-religion way to change that.
And the violence in the world is almost all caused by the super-super-extreme overpay and underpay. And that violence is never-ending and is always growing. And that obviously has a huge effect on happiness. For everyone. Violence [war and crime] gets to everyone, rich and poor. Violence is localised and temporary, but it is also unconfined, it can pop up anywhere, on a plane, in the street, in the home. A nation can be peaceful for a long time, and then suddenly it is war. Or some form of crime [which is just a small war]. The golden carrot of super-super-extreme overpay is a constant stimulus to crime and war, and so is underpay. And overpay and underpay are super-super-extreme. Everyone is submerged in an environment of danger instead of an environment of peace. Everyone is engaged in protecting themselves instead of feeling free and safe, in an environment of friends and happy people.
Obviously a community in which everyone works, and produces plenty, can be made very unhappy, without destroying goods, just by extreme overpay and underpay. If an imp takes everyone's property and puts it in someone's house, things have gone a long way downhill as long as those things are not given back. We can learn that there is an imp in human society, and that we are such a community, in which most people have lost the happiness of having all the goods they create by their own work, and everyone is embroiled in the endless violence of what the imp has done.
One only needs to get clear that there is an imp, and he has moved goods to extreme misdistribution, and that has caused a sharp decline in happiness for everyone, and learn how to get it back without struggle or danger, for our happiness, safety and financial situation to improve greatly. If one person has the goods of 1000, he has only got 1000 times more goods than he can use, and has got 1000 enemies and lost 1000 friends. If overpay makes you unhappier, and underpay makes you unhappier, and everyone can get clear about these things [and there are strong proofs that they are true], then everyone can be happier by removing overpay and underpay. Can be super-super-extremely happier, because we have super-super-extreme overpay and underpay.
There are things we have to get unconfused about. There are things that are increasing confusion. But if we can conquer these confusions, by reading and thinking, the way is clear and simple. Like being lost in the bush, if we can just get high enough to see a landmark, we can soon get out.
Part of the problem is that we pack up our troubles in an old kitbag and stick it in a cupboard or attic, and our house looks better. We get used to the level of happiness that is available, and put the bad things out of mind, and don't study them to really get rid of them. We cannot begin to imagine them really being gone. We have marked them insoluble, and forgotten about them, but they are still around. We can't solve problems we have marked insoluble. So it seems that we cannot be much happier than we are. We have to pull out the problems and really get rid of them.
There has been an imp in the system which has quietly, slowly moved earnings from all to few over a very long time. And it has created super-super-extreme overpay and underpay, super-super-extreme violence, millions of problems, and super-super-extreme unhappiness. Just by seeing this, and identifying the imp, and removing it, we can go back to the level of happiness we had before all this started, long, long ago.
If happiness declined 1% every 30 years, the decline would be imperceptible, and everyone would accept the new lower level of happiness as being normal, and yet 100% of happiness would be lost in 3000 years. We are in such a situation. This imp was born about 3000 years ago, and we are in fact in our last 1% of happiness. This is very very good news, in that we can be 100 times happier just by removing the imp, and it is easy to remove the imp, once people see the reality. The imp has been invisible. Once the imp is visible, the problem is nearly solved. His little thefts, over a very long time, have got us into a very bad situation. Which we have come to think of as normal. But spray paint on the imp, and make him visible, and so come to see what he is up to, and the right way is very easy to see and to go.
In the absence of seeing the imp, millions of explanations have sprung up to try to explain the things that have been happening. All these things have to be cleared away in the course of coming to see clearly. Life is so complex, that there are things to support a million different theories. And the theories then blind us to things that contradict the theory.
Let us meet the imp.
For perhaps as much as millions of years, everyone mostly produced and consumed their own goods. Thousands of years ago, job specialisation, division of labour, started to grow. And that necessitated trade, to remix the goods separated by job specialisation. and that is when the imp came in. It is impossible to determine the exact workvalue of a trade item. We have some idea of the workvalue, but not a precise idea. And our valuation is influenced by our desire. The chances of the two things in a trade being of exactly equal value are minute, infinitesimal. The two things are going to be of different value. So one person will end up with a little less, and the other with a little more. They will both be pleased with the trade, losing something they don't want, and getting something they do want, but a little impish theft will have occurred. And this little theft will not even out over many trades. As with tossing a coin a trillion times, there will be many times that there will be strings of two gains in a row, three gains, and, more and more rarely, but still definitely, longer and longer strings of gains or losses. A few people will make large net gain, a few will make large net loss, many will make less extreme net gain or loss. A bell-shaped curve of net gain and loss will grow up, and will everwiden with every transaction. A few making large net gain, a large number making smaller net gain, a large number making smaller net loss, and a few making large net loss. A graph of this, with the quantity of people on the vertical y-axis, and the gain or loss on the horizontal x-axis, will have a bell-shaped curve. Trade causes overpay and underpay, ever-increasing. And this is just by accident, by statistical necessity. Toss a coin a trillion times, and of course you won't get heads tails heads tails all the way. There will be billions of cases of strings of two heads or tails in a row, fewer of three, and so on, till there will be rare but definite cases of strings of hundreds of heads or tails in a row. Every transaction has a drop of pay injustice in it, and this drop will grow an ocean. One of the two traders will go away with a little bit more wealth or workvalue, the other with a little bit less. Or quite a bit more or less. And money is the joker good, it is good for just about everything, so the loss of it is felt keenly, the loss of it is the loss of just about everything. As long as wealth items were perishable, saving was more or less impossible. But slowly nonperishable items of trade, like oil and money, came along, and with it saving. Those who made gains could buy the labour of those who made losses. The two groups could have been working equally hard, and yet one group will have to work some more to get as much wealth in goods as the other group.
And this is all happening without adding in conquest, coercion, bullying, and the natural range of gullibility or 'business acumen' in people. The merchant buys cheap and sells dear. Business is just selling for more than you paid for it. Giving as little, getting as much, as possible. What is undetectable in one transaction is clear in many. The real stories of trading up from a $2 item to a house in 50 trades. And the real stories of a shop in a prisoner-of-war camp for the trading of Red Cross items, and the shopkeeper building up a small fortune in cigarettes. Who can tell how many cigarettes a can of sardines is worth? The shopkeeper can buy at 15 cigarettes and sell at 20 cigarettes. The shopkeeper in justice is paid for his work, but who can tell how much the service of buying and selling a can of sardines is worth?
From such small undetectable beginnings, the monster has grown and grown. And once detectable, it has generated righteous illfeeling.
And money is power, power to rake more money. And so it has gone on, growing pay injustice, power inequality, social status inequality, war, crime, weaponry. So that now we have pay from $30 billion a year to $30 a year, from 100,000 times average pay per hour, to 10,000th of average pay per hour, and weapons capable of blocking out the sun permanently, lowering the temperature 25 degrees, three times colder than an ice-age, and irradiating the planet for a million years. Death camps, torture, state terrorism, fascism, dictatorship, undemocracy, leaders above the law, genocide, murder of millions, starvation of 1% of humanity every year, 2 million going blind each year for lack of just 4c of vitamin A a year, one million girls sold into an incredibly miserable, hard life of sexual slavery every year, billions living in slums, favelas, under brutal police, 99% underpaid, 90% paid between 100th and 10,000th of average, although we have enough wealth to pay every working person, including housewives and students, US$100,000 a year.
Just because of the imp, as little, but as ceaseless, as a drip on a tap.
Even most of the conquest and plunder has been because of the accumulation of power from the accumulation of wealth. The underpaid have been forced to hire themselves out as soldiers to the ones with the money and power to coerce them. And the conquest and plunder have aggravated the pay injustice, aggravating the violence.
The 99% underpaid are obviously worse off with overpay-underpay. Are the overpaid better off? To the underpaid, struggling along with undersatisfaction, overpay seems like oasis and mecca. But satisfaction waits on desire, and desire is limited. Overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, a 1000 rooms for one body. And overpay is the object of attack from both overpaid and underpaid. Overpay can afford more defense, but it has more attackers. And the attack goes on until the overpay is gone. Every empire has fallen, every plutocracy has fallen. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown. Beggars fear no thieves. Honey attracts bears. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. People are too dangerous to annoy. None enjoy unless all enjoy, because everyone feels equal, everyone wants to enjoy. The overpaid are constantly falling all through history. Justice is a virtue, a cause of happiness, because injured, robbed people never stop attacking overpay. Injury energises. Pay injustice, theft of earnings, theft of just about everything, is the biggest injury. Unfortunately there are a few people who have too little imagination to grasp this, and sometimes they get hold of power, and then we all have to be dragged into their hopeless mission to get and hold super-overpay.
The effect of money on happiness falls to zero below $100,000 a year per family, because of the limits of the desires money can satisfy, but we are all producing $200,000 worth of goods per family, because of the overwealthy driving us to produce and consume through underpay, advertising and warmongering, so that they can draw profits from it. We could all now, with all the technology working for us, work half the day, and be no less happy, as far as satisfaction from goods goes. And we could be far more happy, from the equality, safety, and freedom from overpower. Instead of a society in equality, pay justice, enjoying one another, trusting one another, safe with one another, we are all divided along the extreme range from poorest to richest. Instead of being on a plateau together, a happy party, we are apart at different heights up a useless ladder of inequality that tortures both overpaid and underpaid.
Instead of an equality of motivation, equal work for equal pay, we have the super-super-extreme motivation of super-super-extreme underpay and overpay. For 99%, the ladder sinks lower faster than they can climb. And for the 1% overpaid, there is far more trouble, danger and loss of community, and no more satisfaction.
No one is aiming for pay justice. The underpaid are just trying to make more money, by working harder, or stealing, or whatever. The overpaid have been in power, and have made society as they like it, which is a way in which they are freest to rake money. There was a time when interest was looked down on. Now a billion will pull in $100 million, every year, for no work, doubling the billion every 7 years, multiplying it by a 1000 every 70 years. The overpaid have a free, giant rake. And the rake grows with every rake. Inequality grows, violence grows, unhappiness grows, tyranny grows, slavery grows, disorder grows, brutality grows, injury grows, retaliation grows, weaponry grows, illhealth grows, lying grows.
It is possible to look at life and conclude that everything is fairly all right. Most people do. They trust what their eyes tell them, which is so little of the reality. To get to real happiness we have to go from unreal happiness through real unhappiness to real happiness.
Here-now bullets, bombs, battles and burglaries are very rare, we don't have the power to grasp that we have a global bomb, a cut on our finger is of more concern to us than the abject slavery of 90% of humanity. But it is a no-brainer that we would prefer to live in a world where everyone was paid US$40 an hour, US$100,000 per worker, US$200,000 per family, rather than what we have now. Even without realising that we would have 100 times faster progress than now, with 90% of scientists, brains, inventors etc tied up in the consequences of inequality, in the legal system, military-industrial complex, universities, government, business, hospitals etc, and 90% of scientist minds too poor to become scientists. We are using inequality to put off enjoying. None enjoy unless all enjoy.
Assuming we form a will to enjoy, what do we do? We act to bring everyone to the same will. This is easier than it sounds. If each person teaches this will to just two people, so that they also teach it to two, every adult will have that will in just 31 times the time to teach two. Just by word of mouth. The doubling reaches 2000 in ten steps, 2,000,000 in 20 steps, 2,000,000,000 in 30 steps. There are 3 billion adults to reach, but there are 3 billion adults to reach them, with all their resources and energies.
When there is a universal will to enjoy, we only have to pass a law making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. This will re-spread the wealth back over all the earners of it. The private heir has done nothing to earn that wealth, and everyone has done everything to earn that wealth, by making the goods that the wealth buys and represents, so such a law is just. Which, incidentally, shows that the overwealth is unjust. This is non-bureaucratic, since it only takes the settling of the estate, and the electronic dispersal of the money. Of course, such a 'radical' act is inconceivable in the present state of understanding. Home is very foreign when you've been away a long time. The super-overpay, the 98% of world income the 1% get now, the earnings of 1000s of years, will gently shower down on the earners over two generations, lifting the underpaid from starvation, illhealth, uneducation, slavery and anger, and lowering the overpaid out of overpower, danger and isolation from the human tribe. A person who has the property of 1000 has 1000 times what he can use, 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends, an extremely hunted life. Another even simpler way is to write equal shares of a 1% per month increase in the money supply into every account. This automatically lowers overpay and lifts underpay, without any invasion of individual's affairs. This inflation is not bad, because everyone is getting the money from it. We give equal shares both to 1% overpaid and 99% underpaid only because it saves the enormous cost in bureaucratic labour and money of distinguishing the two.
Is there a will to misery? Everyone works, and we produce plenty. And yet we have aided and abetted the ceaseless growth of pay injustice for 3000 years, with only rare and brief partial corrections towards justice. The inequality has always produced misery for all. Equality has always produced happiness. Nations have been founded on equality, liberty and justice, and we have ignored the foundational principles, and gone hell for leather to try to get unlimited fortunes out of an abundant but limited pool of wealth, provided by nature's bounty and human work. Every heap of overpay has fallen, and has been temporarily maintained only with excruciating labour and danger. We have never attempted to close the many wide-open legal ways by which money moves from earners to non-earners. We let the government rob us by increasing the money supply and lending it back to us to buy back at interest. Women could get equal pay in a week by going on a national women's strike. We let individuals pull millions and billions out of the wealth pool although we know they can't work much harder than us. We have equal share in all of nature's bounty and we give it all away to landowners. We all increase value of land by building cities around it and we give it away to landowners. We give millions to gifted people, although natural gifts are no work of theirs. We don't pay students for studying, although that is work, and all society benefits from it, and we then pay them unlimited amounts for having studied, although that isn't work. And then the people with billions foment wars and we go and fight and die for them. Stop giving tens of thousands from every household every year to the superrich, and thus make them happier, safer, more human.
Equality equals quality. Equality [pay justice, noninjury] is love, and love [noninjury] is the only practical way. Everyone will readily grant that it will utterly catastrophic for one person to have all the wealth in the world, so we ought to understand that what we have now, with 1% having 98% of world income, is almost as catastrophic. If we open our eyes, we can see catastrophe, for both overpaid and underpaid, everywhere. That monster, free to roam, has had till recently only small feet, able to kill only millions a year, but has, thanks to e=mc2, recently acquired the ability to kill us all. And anger and tyranny are super-super-extreme, and rising. We need only educate ourselves in reality, how bad it is, how good it can be, with just tiny effort to educate ourselves and two friends, to create the universal human will to make the change.
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