Global Happiness

The greatest opportunity

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If you don’t want your life to be better, I’m not talking to you

Author:  P.O.Box 40352, Glenfield 1310, North Shore City, New Zealand.   dawn@orcon.co.nz

               http://www.orcon.co.nz/dawn

               Ph: +64(0)9 444 3567     Fax: +64(0)9 444 4474

Copyright  Peter Nigel Best (Nigel Woodhouse)  January 2000

First Edition  January 2000

Dedicated to Helen and Seeby:  they suffered my writing (O.H.M.S.)

Introduction

Fiscal inequity.  Who cares about it?  The cause of 99% of human misery.  Yet, who thinks of it, who discusses it?  The reward for a day’s work in this sad, mad world ranges from - stop there and think up what you would guess - less than $1 to more that $10,000,000.  (Bill Gates 1997: $72,000,000.) Who knows about this?  Who teaches it?  Who studies it?  Who knows what every schoolchild should be well taught: injustice causes disturbance?

Such hyperextreme inequality (that is, fiscal inequity) causes vast misery and endless tension.  Yet humanity speaks not of it.  Like a person with a truck on his foot who lights a cigarette and looks about.  Not trying to hide the pain.  Unaware of it.  For centuries, for millennia, we have had superrich and superpoor.  And yet those who are deemed wisest of all centuries hardly mention it, certainly do not make it their central concern.

What is absent from a child’s education will normally remain absent from his/her consciousness through life.  There is a subtle but effective suppression of data about wealth and poverty.  We are ruled by subtlety, so that the world’s bandits live among us, rarely challenged, often respected.  The world’s most overpaid, who receive over 1,000,000 times the fair hourly rate, are receiving the pay of 1,000,000 people, or one tenth of the pay of 10,000,000 people, and that sentence does not make us indignant or sad.  It only takes 2000 such people to impoverish and enslave 2 billion.  There are not 2000 people receiving 1,000,000 times the fair hourly pay.  But it would only take twice that number receiving between 1,000,000 times and 2 times as much (on a sliding scale declining in equal steps from 1,000,000 to 2) to take the pay of 2 billion workers.  And there is something like that in the world.  (The graph of incomes from most overpaid to most underpaid curves below a straight line for the overpaid - that is to say, none of the overpaid receive quite as much as a straight line (except the richest) - but on the other hand, none of the 99.9% of the world’s workers who are underpaid receive as little as nothing, they receive between 99% of a fair pay and less than 1% of a fair pay.)

In other words, we have a third world, and the fourth world of the starving, simply because we have a few tens of thousands superrich.  Who knows this?  Who publishes this?  Who objects to this?

There is private or individual knowledge and there is public or establishment knowledge.  Those who do not trust their own minds trust establishment minds, and these, who maintain or join the establishment mind, can never know what the establishment, in its partiality, cannot know.  It is in public knowledge that the above most blatant, relevant fact cannot be known.  The erroneous perception of their own interests, the interests of the half-million (0.01% of the world’s population) who are overpaid, is the erroneous perception, the extreme blindness of the 99%.

The extreme inequity, the fact that this is responsible for the extreme disturbance (wars and crime) in the human world, the fact that world quality of life will improve 100-fold if the 99% are paid more (up to over 100 times as much), that is, are paid what they earn  - the greatest opportunity in history - are the most unknowable facts. 

Fear is a great misunderstander.  The world believes the opinion of misers.  The fearful misunderstanding of the half a million overpaid controls the thought of 99.99%.  If this thought of the 100-fold happiness is to be got into the public consciousness, it can only be by grassroots communication on a one-to-one basis outside all establishment media systems.  If Harrods of England can be so energetic (and humourless) in its perception of its interests as to send a team of lawyers to a small town on the other side of the world to stop a Mr Harrod from calling his shop Harrod’s, then how many 1000s of times more will the establishment do to defend its overpay?

Clearly there will be many to challenge this, to discredit this, to diminish the reputation of this data, though there can be none to refute it.  Clearly if someone has stolen your money, you will be richer if you get it back.  The present world income (1998) is US$40,000 per worker, US$50,000 per family if you pay housewives directly $25,000 instead of, as now, through the paid worker.  There is enough income, now, to pay every worker, including housewives, US$10 an hour for average hardness of work.

The stronger the interest in such data (that is, the more underpaid the person) the weaker the position to get hold of it and to act on it.  The stronger the position to get hold of such data, the less (erroneous) interest in acting on it.  About 99% will benefit financially from greater fiscal equity (100% of humanity will benefit greatly from greater fiscal equity) but that 99% is in the weakest position to know and to pursue its own advantage.  The relatively less wise are eternally soon parted from their money, and all but the money-wisest are relatively less wise.  It is quixotic (and chivalrous) of me to attempt to make the weaker stronger than the stronger.  That dream has always been around, the Superman to sort out the crooks (though Superman comics teach that the crooks are distinct from the city respectables), the white knight who is mightier than the mighty and also has justice in his or her heart, the Che Guevera, the Kennedy.  But I do not intend to take sides.

As I see it, the world is in the situation of two children who destroy the toy or cake they are fighting over.  (Perhaps if we focussed greatly on getting the idea of win-win by sharing into every tiny tot that is born, we could accomplish this aim.) That is to say, both overpaid and underpaid lose out dramatically.  Galbraith smugly wrote his quoted line that the arguments against wealth have not proved persuasive, but there are most serious disadvantages to wealth.  The inverse of ‘beggars need fear no thieves’ (only violence-for-fun hooligans and psychopaths) applies to the rich.  Though the defences of the wealthy are today often subtle and hidden (castles no longer work) they are there and they have their costs and their imperfections.  Kidnapping, assassination, revolution, plots, take-overs, coups, overthrow, paranoia, distrust, fear and defense have costs in time, money, health and quality of life.

The situation of the world is that of bandits continually raiding the industry of the peasants.  The situation in the world today is the same as the situation in Britain in the 19th Century, or France in the 18th Century.  The will of the people grinds slow but sure.  Worms always turn.  One thinks, how could anyone with any money not have relieved the poor, who were being worked to death while the well-off rode through it all without a blink?  And yet we today in the first world have our peasants, our peons, our slaves in the third world and fourth world in the same unblinking way.  Public consciousness, public conscience, erected and maintained by the victims of avarice (an understudied psychopathology I guess most of us could catch as soon as we got money), the 0.01% overpaid, blinds us.

I invite people to change this situation in their own interest.  This situation makes society false in so many ways, unstable, volatile, explosive, depressing, unattractive, something that decimates our self-esteem, because we can take so little pride in it, something that overtempts many against their goodwill to shady deeds of all shades.

The traditional appeal to kindness and love is misguided as well as ineffective.  Self-interest is fundamental to morality.  How can people be strong in the pursuit of happiness through morality, the art of behaviour, if they are weakened in self-interest?  If something is against a person’s interest, how can anyone lovingly promote it?  Self-sacrifice has been promoted by people whose misunderstanding of their own interest led them to believe they would profit by other people’s self-sacrifice.  The principle of self-sacrifice has been misunderstood and misapplied by people who have exploited it in their own ‘mis-interest’.  One is supposed to sacrifice the parts of oneself that inhibit the pursuit of happiness, the parts that are against one’s interest.

The golden rule, treat others as you want to be treated, is not a principle of self-sacrificing love, but of self-interest.  It is time self-interest is restored to its rightful place of honour, so that morality, which has languished, become odious to the ears, cut off from its root in self-interest, can proceed strongly on to a better life for all.

Sacrificing oneself, which is clearly pure self-destruction, total frustration of self, has begun a life of destruction and frustration for others.  The fact is that as long as parts of the world are connected by telephones and planes, we cannot hurt others without hurting ourselves.  I cannot afford to injure in any way any being capable of retaliation.  It was possible to make self-sacrifice seem sensible when people believed in heaven.  As long as ‘treat others as you want to be treated’ is considered soft-nosed, it will be rejected.  But is it soft-nosed?  It is realpolitik, and should be respected and used.  People who try to be rational are ashamed to use a principle that has become associated with superstition, though in this case the principle is rational.

The Versailles Treaty, the consequent economic collapse of Germany and the depression, leading to WW II, versus the Marshall Plan and the following prosperity and cold war (better than a hot one) should teach us not to do what we are doing to the third world.  If Sicily had been a planet that we could have pushed off into the universe after impoverishing it, we could have safely left Sicily to its great poverty.  But poverty makes hard and mean, and poverty is attracted to wealth - greatest poverty very highly attracted to greatest wealth - and the hardness of poverty conquers the softness of wealth with a logical certainty, so that the Mafia now sits on America, larger and more powerful than the five largest corporations, causing I don’t know what percentage of the drug addiction, prostitution, other crime and violence, owning Senators and police forces, writing laws and assassinating Presidents.  (The rest of the drug trade done by Mafias of other continents.) Poverty is too expensive.  The world cannot afford it.  Every spot of poverty, of underpay, in the world is breeding a Mafia, every Mafia in the world is highly attracted to the greatest wealth.  We cannot afford wealth.  President Kennedy said: The cost of defense is such-and-such, we don’t want to raise taxes, we will borrow it.  The cost of defense (including immigration, customs and hospitalisation of victims) of America is proportional to how much richer it is.  It cannot afford, it has to go into debt to pay, the costs of being as richer as it is.  Its wealth is draining it to death.  The greater the opposite electric charge on plates, the greater the attraction and the greater the energy needed to keep them apart, and the greater the sparks.  Wealth and poverty are the opposite plates.  Technologies are making world distances ever smaller, bringing the plates ever closer together.  Wars, violence and crime are the sparks of the world.  They annihilate human quality of life.  Peace is as close as the mental mastery of money.

Money is not yet in our control.  Prometheus did not bring fire.  There is always fire.  1,000 lightning bolts strike our planet every second.  Animals still flee from fire.  People reached the Promethean point when we looked in the face of fire, with scientific coolness, and learned how to handle it, how to keep the fire small and useful, not large and uncontrollable.  Fire was a terror, it became a god, and then a good servant.  Prometheus means foresight.  We have yet to learn how to make money stay small, and stop it leaping up in our faces.

The most a person can earn and save in a lifetime is around $1 million.  (40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 50 years in a working life, doubled by assuming a person can work 80 hours a week average for 50 years, assuming no such person can work harder than average doing those hours, assuming living costs for those years at $400 a week, taking the average hourly rate of pay at a world average hardness of US$10, and taking it that a person working less than 80 hours a week average over 50 years could work harder than the world average hardness of work, that the multiplication of the ratios of hours worked to world average hours worked and hardness of work to world average of hardness of working cannot exceed two.)

The largest fortune (fire) in the world is about 50,000 times this approximate maximum.  What cannot have been earned by the legal owner must have been earned by others.  What has been overpaid to one must have been underpaid to those who earned it.  Businesspeople seem to feel such ‘success’ is a magic power to create wealth out of the air.  Every dollar a person receives comes across a counter from customer’s pockets.

We have a principle of private property which is invoked by those (wealthy) in power who resist (very effectively) moves for redistribution.  Those who have little property also support the principle of private property.  Understandably.  No distinction - a vital one - between overpaid, underearned private property and underpaid, overearned private property has been allowed to enter public consciousness.

Efforts to promote redistribution have always been based on kindness, humanitarianism, which has always kept redistribution marginal, because all fiscal kindness is by implication unjust.  Redistribution has never been promoted as justice, and justice has never been promoted as a peacemaker and as the only available peacemaker.

I would base redistribution on the principles of earned private property and self-interest.  We depart from rationality when we depart from self-interest because we are ourselves.  The promotion of self-sacrifice has robbed us of sanity.

Richard III is a story of a man trying to make himself stronger and more powerful by destroying every strength and power in his vicinity.  The western world is in the same delirium.  The cost of wealth in quality of human life is enormous.  If the Pacific Ocean was as rough as the world fiscal sea of maldistribution, of inequity, the Pacific would be wetting the moon.  (Greatest income: 1,000,000 times the average; common depth of the Pacific Ocean: 2.5miles distance to the moon: 250,000 miles.) What is the quality of life when the ocean is pacific?  Saying that our quality of life would be improved 100-fold seems far too little.

Living on the crests of such a sea is no more fun than living in its troughs, since it is so mobile and unstable.  Money is good (it buys many things which we value) and therefore love of money is as right and proper and sane as love of the things it buys; but wealth is our destroyer.  The asset level at which people begin to be regarded as wealthy is above the level at which a fortune is unearned, so we can say that wealth is always unearned (earned by others) so wealth is always unjust.  It is also extreme.  Extremes are vicious (‘nothing in excess’, ‘moderation in all things’) and extremes of money are extremely anti-happiness.

The definition of good in terms of what god approves, the appeal to authority (a projection of the infantile autocratic id) is utterly non-rational and has brought goodness into bad repute.  People are obliged to be rebellious in order to be sane.  Wealth I say is bad, not because God said so (he is in two minds himself and no one ever listened to him who didn’t want to) but because it hurts everybody so very much.

It is extraordinary how blind people have been to the damaging effects for so many millennia.  I hope to convince people to make it illegal.  We give up the right to murder to gain the legal protection against murder.  We can give up the right to other-earned wealth to gain the advantage of legal protection against earning for others (slavery.) The world average income for world average number of hours work a week (around 40) at world average hardness of work (not slacking, not busting a boiler) is around US$25,000 if housewives are paid, US$40,000 if housewives are not paid (directly.) A family income of US$50,000 p.a.  The world income is so extremely skewed to maldistribution that a very high percentage (around 99.9%) are underpaid, are earning for others to some extent.

Wealth is always theft and injustice; and injustice can be defined as what people fight forever to destroy.  (The underpaid never struggle unjustly.) The disturbance which wrecks human happiness will last as long as wealth lasts.  Let us say that the evil of wealth is zero at assets of $1 million and increases as wealth increases.  The full force of our opposition should not be directed towards those with $2 million or $10 million but towards those with $10,000 million and more.  The responsibility for world misery of fortunes of $10,000 million (of fortunes, not of the individuals with fortunes, because the individuals may be innocent of any malice) is obviously 1,000 times that of fortunes of $10 million.

It is not by attacking the wealthy physically or legally that wealth will end but by making more and more people clearer and clearer about the extreme harmfulness of wealth, an idea which is at once so obvious and familiar and yet so unlearned and strange to the multipersonality of the human psyche.  It is not just into the cortical brain that the idea has to be got, but into the reptilian, primitive brain of instincts and social responses.  To attack the wealthy physically would imply that wealth is not in itself an extreme misery.  The rich are inured to their suffering as the poor are to theirs.  It is the envy towards the rich that brainwashes the rich that they are happy.  The psyche has powerful mechanisms to help us bear pains we are powerless to remove; mechanisms like denial, and affirmation of the contrary.  The public consciousness, where it is wrong as when it is right, is a constant propaganda.

Jesus seems to have been an economist, or been someone who could think impartially about fiscal inequity.  ‘Those who have will have more added and those with little will have that little taken away’ seems to be a clumsy statement of ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.’ It seems his economic solution (naive like that of a later Jewish economist) was for everyone to give all their money to the poor.  The sense of this is that if everyone throws their money out the window, the streets will be paved with gold; sensational acts of detachment from money will help others to be more rational and objective, less obsessive and miserly (miserable); if all money peaks were turned into money troughs, money will flow to a pacific level; perhaps Jesus thought even so far as that the more people give up their wealth, the greater the example for the more reluctant.  The weakness comes if the force of the example is insufficient to overcome the attachment; then the domino effect stops, and the still-attached can pick up money thrown away.  Jesus was too fond of extremes, of theatricality and the sensational, to see that extreme poverty, willed or not, was as dangerous to fiscal peace as extreme wealth.  Moderation was as repugnant to Jesus as it is to the modern moviegoer.  The gravitational pull on crests creates troughs; the rush of water into troughs creates crests.  Crests are troughs.  The opposite of crests and troughs is moderation, proportion of reward to work, which is much more equal.

Let us imagine economics as a tub of money, with people grabbing personal fortunes from the tub.  Primitive Christianity encouraged people to throw their money back in the tub.  Secondary Christianity - political Christianity, state Christianity, (which was the state with ‘Christianity’ written on its brow) - encouraged the same thing - for others.  State Christianity placed itself in the tub, where it is today, in the Pharisees’ position.

In the Middle Ages, when such wealth (and the license that the word Christianity on its brow bestowed) had made the church as corrupt as it could be (Lord Acton’s famous dictum was framed in the study of the medieval church) a reaction started to grow, where people began to throw their money into tubs of their own, whether Protestant religions, sects, or private fortunes.  The moral of this is that reduction of fortunes has to be done on a global as well as on a personal moral basis.  As Aristotle put it (I paraphrase): teach those who can understand, not to want more, and prevent those who cannot understand, from getting more.

To give up money while others retain it is to put oneself in their power, to make oneself more vulnerable, to put one’s family into worse health, worse misery, which cannot be moral.  We have to limit fortunes together, as a race, to save the human race, to save ourselves by saving humanity.  And fortunes have to be reduced in regular order, so that relative power does not change as fortunes diminish, or there will be horizontal power shifts which will be an unnecessary extra history, which may endanger the essential vertical power change.

Let us have always in mind from this day on, what is the beginning of the most important point for your happiness, (which is everything to you, what you spend every moment of your life pursuing), the graph of world injustice (which equals world violence, world instability, world madness, world stress, world misery, world danger.) On the vertical axis, the size of personal fortunes or hourly pay rate.  On the horizontal axis, individuals from richest to poorest.  The world average point, the level at which every worker would be paid if all were paid equally, which is about US$10 an hour, or $20,000 a year, is represented by a horizontal dotted line one centimetre above the horizontal axis.  If the amount of work people do is calculated in dollar terms, the work line is up and down from person to person, but broadly is higher at the poverty, underpaid end.  (We cannot measure work by productivity because machines do a lot more of the work in the West.) Doing harder work, in more dangerous conditions, for longer hours even than the workaholic executive or slavedriven Japanese white-collar worker, is typical of the third world.  And the rich work in comfort, their work is optional, chosen for pleasure.

With the world average at one centimetre, for the top income we have to go up ten kilometres to graph (1,000,000 centimetres.) The graph of income comes down rapidly, turns at the corner of the two axes, and skids along above the X-axis underneath the dotted, world average line, getting closer to zero.  The shape of the graph is hyperboloid, or quasi-hyperbolic.

The difference between the money line and the work line is the portrait of world injustice, world disturbance, world disorder, world ungovernment, world disease, world sleep, world stupidity, world madness, world horrors, world terrors, world cruelty, world shame, world dishonour; and the difference is as great as it can be.  And the most responsible, sensitive, disinterested, awake, and caring people are hardly aware of it, hardly discussing it.

If we double the image by reflection in the vertical axis, we have the world economic tack, which is stuck in the foot of every human being, rich or poor, old or young.  Children are kidnapped because of it, genocide is attempted over and over because of it.  Millions starve, millions go blind, millions fight and die in wars every year because of it.  Not one person who daily hauls on its ropes to keep this international juggernaut rolling and crushing lives, not presidents or kings or sultans or billionaires, feel there is anything they can do, or even want to do, to stop it.  It kills 100 million a year, 2%, one in fifty, mostly in the third and fourth worlds but still millions in the first and second worlds, and psychopathology (not looking at the source of pain) forbids us to see.

If we multiply the tack image, we have the world fiscal ocean, whose crests rise so high that the troughs expose the ocean floor.  To feed the crests, we hurl down our trees everywhere and let the rain wash away the soil.  At the present rate of soil loss, we will have no topsoil by 2080 AD.  What newspaper lets the people know this?  What book howls it abroad?  What future does a species deserve that is too stupid to preserve its soil?  A person who raves on about the soil is suspected of having a soil engineering degree; as if soil is not every bit of food we eat, bar seafood.  And our environmentalists spend their funding, time and energy on whales and pandas.  Who will there be to enjoy the animals?  A person awake is a person who sees the big picture.

The money machine is more powerful than any leader, any government, any number of leaders and governments, more powerful than the Pax Mafiosa, the federation of Mafias.  It is only less powerful than all of us.  It generates its own propaganda, its own unconsciousness, disabling us from free speech and free thought on the vital matter, disabling us from distinguishing the vital issues from the nonvital.  ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’

Very few people have an instinct to choose the most vital issue.  Most are happy to attach themselves to any issue, however small, that gives them some identity.  This error, which comes under the heading ‘fiddling while Rome burns’, will destroy the human race.  (A comedian joked: ‘Why is it called the human race; does somebody win?’ We all win.  It is a race to conquer all the ways we have of being less than realistic, before realism has us for breakfast, like a blind person walking into a ditch - planted with stakes - with poison tips.)

What solution do I suggest?  Capitalism?  Communism?  Fascism?  Power in the hands of the few is fascism.  Capitalism is the lesser fascism.  Communism is the greater fascism.  On a spectrum scale between 0 (perfect equal power) and 100 (perfect unequal power), communism is 95, capitalism is 75.  My solution is 15.  If power corrupts, why aren’t we doing something about it?  I say, as Francis Bacon said of money, that like dung it is best spread.  Why do we permit giants, and then have to spend our lives trying to prevent them from stepping on us?  0 would be unjust, and would undermine the incentive element.  Idealistic, theoretical communism was a response to the horrendous inequities and indecencies of raw capitalism.  It naively thought that taking private property off everyone and giving it to the state would not be giving it to the few at the top of the power pyramid or tack.  Communism accelerated inequity.  The features of inequity are victimisation, ‘ignorantisation’, and sneaky petty criminalisation of the underlings (60 million Russians killed by Stalin), and paranoia and extreme overreaction (cruelty, spying, KGB torture) of the overlings.

Communism did have some egalitarian features.  The number of doctors per 1,000 people reached equality for all the Russian republics over the communist period.  The people (elite and black market millionaires aside) were more equal among themselves than in the West.  If one lumps the first world with the third world (which it feeds off), the second communist world has done better in infant mortality, etc.  Since the break up of the Soviet Union, the rich republics are rebelling against subsidising the poor republics and asserting their right to be richer, not realising that being richer costs more (in money, security, quality of life) than subsidising the poor republics.  The fact that nature localises various benefits should not make us feel the benefit belongs to the locals; from the point of view of justice and therefore peace, it does not.  Wealth or peace?

In addition, poverty anywhere drags wealth down, as Germany’s post-Versailles poverty caused the depression and WW II.  Poverty lifted becomes markets for wealthy companies.

Maximisation of the freedom of the individual is an obvious positive value.  Freedom of the individual will be greatly increased if we accept a dampening of the fiscal inequality closer to fiscal equity; that is, no one having tens of thousands times more money than they can possibly have earned.  Accepting this just restriction on wealth will free all individuals from the extreme restriction of their freedom involved in war, crime, torture, civil unrest, child, female and aged abuse, competition stress, etc, etc.  Money has, unfortunately an inbuilt tendency to inequity.  Cost never equals price, so every transaction contributes a drop of inequality.  Control inequity, and far fewer other things need to be controlled.  Many of our regulations are drop-in-the-bucket efforts to counter the effects of inequity.

The symbol of fascism, the fasces (sticks bound together), is a true one.  Pulling together makes for strength.  Anyone in a position of weakness should band together with others in a similar position on a thoroughly cooperative basis.  Single mothers in a ghetto, third-world countries, workers paid little in a society with much.  The 21st Century will see the rise of Third World, cashcrop unions as the 19th Century saw the rise of First world trade unions.  And in the 22nd Century the cashcrop unions will reach the point of being too strong for national and international wellbeing as certainly as the 20th Century saw the same with trade unions.  The weak become poor, poverty makes hard, hardness makes strength, strength makes rich.  And some disgusting attacks of the power-and-wealth group on the weak trying to unite will occur, just as the establishment attacked any and all signs of unity among the poor (the ripped-off) with horrible brutality in the 19th & 20th centuries.  One thinks of the opposition to trade unions in England in the 19th Century, the attacks of police special forces thugs on the camps of the families of striking miners in America, but every nation has its examples.

Co-operation, then, is a strength.  It is also a sacrifice of individuality.  Fascism and the fascist sides of communism and capitalism are co-operation imposed from above.  The essential co-operation is fiscal co-operation.  On the competitive side, society should be viewed as a number of bandits stealing from each other.  The more successful bandits regard social welfare as the banditry of the poor.  So any society striving to survive tries to balance the pros and cons of individual freedom (competition) and co-operation, to maximise freedom without creating so much strife that individual freedom is often and greatly impaired (eg.  brutal military rule, concentration camps, rising crime rate generated by inequities, executive stress, slavery, economic instability, insecurity, war trauma, stress-related violence and disease mental and physical, sudden losses of assets by fraud or corruption, false imprisonment.)

What balance of co-operation, competition, strife and freedom does humanity want?  If one judges from history, one might suspect that humanity is happy with the balance that exists, that war, genocide, the crime level, the constant turmoil and disturbance, the mere millions of premature deaths, the pains and sufferings, the horrors, the barbarities, the victimisations, are a small price to pay for the freedom to plunder, to compete, to strive, to pursue the pot of gold.  There are paintings of peaceful scenes and there are paintings of sea storms.  War is one of the most popular spectator sports.  Sports are miniwars.  Smashing things is smashing.

Freedom is regarded as an absolute positive value.  The trouble is that maximum freedom is minimum freedom.  That is the history of the United States.  A people under European tyranny fled to New World freedom, but with unlimited freedom to make money, the U.S.  in two centuries has recreated every feature of European tyranny.  If every individual was allowed total freedom to keep everything he/she earned, and restricted from keeping everything that others have earned (some practical approximation to that) then the amount of freedom enjoyed would be greatly increased for everyone.  The loss of the fiscal freedom of a few thousand to be (unjustly) superrich would be amply compensated by the freedom to live with much less distrust, suspicion, backstabbing, plotting and power struggling (which are, however, probably addictive and hard to give up.) Imagine a world in which one could walk through all suburbs of all cities, and through all countries, with much less to fear.  If the inequity factor were reduced by a factor of 100 from 10,000,000 to 100,000, world disturbance would be diminished proportionally, in intensity and quantity, say one tenth as intense, and one tenth of the quantity.  An inequity factor of 1000 (1000 times as much for equal work) will result in disturbance, say one hundredth as intense, and quantity of incidents one hundredth.  The game of competing may be freed up by greater equity as there are, in the present situation of extreme inequity, small pickings among the great majority, who have been pretty well robbed out, and off-putting extreme danger in competition among or against the rich.  If the world is a stadium in which the sport of competition is played, one may think that one game is nearly over, with very little money left in the tub to fight for, and a few winners in almost impregnable positions, as in the end of a Monopoly game.  The difficulty of course, is getting the superrich and superpowerful to see their own interest.

My idea is simple, but the world is many many faceted, and to give my idea penetration, it is necessary to apply it to many cases, and express it in the many many ‘languages’ that people think with in the many many specialities and focuses of interest.  Any newspaper has many items which exist because of fiscal inequity, and not just in the fields of politics, economics and crime.

An item in June 1996 concerns the Group of Seven (G7) summit (Japan, America, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.) One point was problems of the freer international trade, the second was terrorism (American soldiers had just been bombed in Saudi Arabia) and the third was Cuba.  The writer viewed freer trade as a problem, a threat to jobs and stability, which is unfortunate as economists are in general agreement on the benefits of freer trade.  The first point I take from this article is the implied admission that powerful countries have been holding down these countries, these ‘tigers’, which now with freer trade are surging ahead.  That then was bullying, which is obviously bad for the bullied and less obviously bad for the bulliers, who are obliged to spend their time being bullies, and defending their ill-gotten gains (which are still smaller that what they would make with free trade.) Which brings us to the second point, terrorism.  The Seven were sitting down to discuss what they could do about it.  They will not come up with any answer until they come up with justice.  The Asian Tigers, who have been freed from their constraints, are not terrorising America.  It is not likely the Seven will think of the correct answer, especially when terrorism produces such strong rhetoric.  A nation or group that uses terrorism is held in such contempt, that no distinction between terrorists of bullied nations and terrorists of unbullied nations is ever made.  No nation says: they have attacked us, but then, on the other hand, we robbed them blind, so I guess that’s okay.  The bully lands a punch.  The small weedy boy kicks the bully in the shins.  Now the bully is very angry, and feeling very justified in his bullying.  No national leader interested in votes, no newspaper interested in circulation figures, is going to mention the possible justice of the terrorist retaliation.  Which tells us that, unfortunately, voters and readers are more often than not on the emotional level of bullies, not on the rational level of people interested in peace, the fruit of the tree of justice.  The third item mentioned was the American President’s desire to ‘punish’ foreign companies doing business with Cuba.  What are the unforgivable sins of Cuba?  ‘Stealing’ American companies in Cuba, and yet an impartial observer would think of to what degree America could be said to have stolen the companies in the first place.  I suppose if you forced your neighbour at gunpoint to grow cashcrops for your benefit, you would have enough shame to feel it was only justice - part of justice - if your neighbour threw you out and kept the property you had had in his house.  Although the history books are in the South Americans’ favour, somehow the conquerors’ children are not widely informed until they are old enough to know not to plague their parents with the point, the point of humanity, decency and justice.  Obviously the nation that is indecent enough to do the deed is going to be indecent enough not to own up to it.  But I do not think Americans are worse than any other people.  I wonder if bullies can be convinced, not to get strong so they can bully, but by their greater numbers and by organisation to control bullying.

A nation that has so lost even a mask of righteousness that it openly arrogates to itself the right to punish sovereign nations, that sits down at a table with other world major traders and considers whether to allow sovereign nations to grow freely, which does not see its interest, its executive duty in making friends with a country of such strategic significance and value, has lost its head.

The righteousness of the powerful is the right to do wrong.  You do not often - or often enough - hear of the wrongdoing of the powerful since the mouse is forbidden to squeak.  If people protest despite prohibition you know how much people would howl if they were free to.  Treason never prospers; and what is the reason?  If treason prosper, none dare call it treason.  Power is of interest to us all.  If others have power relative to us, we have powerlessness relative to them.  To vote someone into power, is to vote yourself into powerlessness.  Guns are hard to make, but so easy to turn around.  American citizens have the right to arms in order to protect themselves against their own army, because they remembered how vulnerable they were in Europe against the armies of their own countries.  If we have power relative to others, we are under challenge, and criticised before we have done anything wrong (but the powerful cannot see themselves do wrong). Relative power always increases.  The powerful are in a position to make the less powerful ever less powerful.  Extremes of power have not worked for humanity for millennia.  The only alternative is moderation; globally legislated moderation of power (wealth) is the only salvation from the hell of endless disturbance, trauma, tragedy, waste, pain, shock, crisis, danger and cruelty we have been in for so long.  Think of how many houses there would be on earth if none had been destroyed in war.

The problem of solving this great problem is that talking to humanity about it is more difficult than talking about the value of seatbelts to someone who has just been injured for lack of one.  Humanity is always having accidents.  Humanity is so harried, they have no room to take on board a new problem.  This prime problem is so fruitful of problems in every aspect of human life down to the most intimate that there is hardly a space long enough between accidents and between work periods to get good quality attention.  People at the top are very engaged in staying at the top which is now so knife-edge narrow and the way down so steep and far, people in the middle are totally engaged in clinging to the side of the fiscal wave, which is now so steep; and people in the trough are very keen to get up from the trough which is so deep.  Try talking to a Palestinian or a Burundian about moderation.  (An example of obliviousness of the powerful to the pain they cause: according to Dean Inge, when Balfour launched his scheme for peopling Palestine with Jews, he did not know there were Arabs in the country.  This is quoted in the Penguin dictionary of modern quotations; I suspect, as an amusing anecdote.) The situation is so extreme, that everyone is a partisan, and a voice that speaks for everyone is likely to be hanged as an enemy by everyone.  If every drop in the sea wanted to be just one millimetre higher than some other drop, the sea would be as wild as the fiscal sea.  On the fiscal sea, everyone wants to be as rich as the top drop (except the top drop, who wants to be richer). Extremity is unfortunately an extreme incentive for extremity.  Contrast moderation, in which the peaks are broad, the troughs miles above the bottom, and the wave sides are gently sloping.

Cost never equals price.  It would take infinite energy to determine exact cost, and that energy would have to be built into the costs, like all accounting costs.  A non-profit organisation makes a profit and then distributes it among its members.  Of course the profit motive is pushing costs and price as far apart as possible.  It is very hard for a company to get $1 for nothing, but very easy to get $11 for something worth $10.  (In this discussion, cost means total costs, including reasonable directors’ fees; the unearned part of directors’ fees are part of profits.) In the second case it is far less visible (quite invisible to partial witnesses, and everyone is partial to money, and quite rightly so) but the essential situation is the same: begging; a subtraction of $1 from the buyer in return for nothing.  If the buyer got something for the dollar, the dollar would be part of costs.  Profit is pure pickpocketing.  In a non-profit organisation, everyone gets paid, so what are profits?  In the second case, the begging or pickpocketing is joined to a fair and equal exchange.  Profits would not be the fun they are if they were earned.  Profits are impossible in the larger picture, because in the larger picture, the seller is the buyer.  Humanity is seller and buyer.  In the larger picture, humanity buys all its work from itself, and pays for it with its work.  So profit is impossible.  In the end, all profits have to dissolve into nothing.  If one person had all the money in the world, no one else would be in any position to sell that person anything.  Extremes meet.  Total money is zero money.  An approach to that is made by the present hyperextreme misdistribution.  Four-fifths of humanity has too little money to be in a position to sell very much to the first world.  The economy of all of Africa is the size of the economy of Italy.

Riddle: What is useless for one to have, useless for anyone else to have, and useful only in passing from one hand to another?  Money is a curious stuff.  It should be regarded as a lubricant for transactions, an accounting device.  Unfortunately, every transaction carries, like an unwelcome insect, a germ of inequity, of profit, of theft.  Often enough, as people are buyers and sellers, as price is higher and lower than cost, the inequalities will cancel.  But like a penny that is tossed, that will, in time, rarely but inevitably produce a succession of heads, so transactions will rarely but inevitably for some individuals produce profit when they sell and when they buy.  This is prior to any consideration of skill.  Skill will increase the effect already produced by statistical luck.  Then money will begin to make money.  Money itself will act as a magnet for money.  It has been said that after the first million, money multiplies like rabbits.  And it has been said, it is often easier to make the second million than the first thousand.  Which is one reason money-making is a buzz.  Each higher level is a relief from the difficulty of the lower level.  Every entrepreneur is dreaming of that breakthrough level when he/she is cruising.  The entrepreneur is getting peace and energy from that like a meditator from a candle.

For every profit there is an equal loss, just like a theft.  Therefore there cannot be a global profit.  The world has to be a non-profit organisation.  Therefore increased profits must make increased losses.  And there has to be tension between the thieves and the victims.  Imagine a workplace in which the workers do the same work - a typing pool or a sewing factory.  If you say: all the people on the left will be paid 10% more for the same amount of work, there is going to be tension.  Imagine a group travelling together as a unity, say, the Mormons moving to Utah, or a group going to the North Pole; if you gave preferential treatment to some subgroup, you would undermine radically the unity of the group.  You could not ask for loyalty or expect it.  In other words, fiscal inequity is anti-social, is an offence against community.  It is divisive and insulting.  And yet the people who take more are at the top of society.  It is astounding how little protest there is against the rich, how long and how deep the people can be oppressed without a murmur.  In fact, revolutions seem to be inspired and organised by the middle classes, which makes some sense, as the people are oppressed and kept in ignorance too much to see their way clear, (though it is clear enough in great houses and back-breaking labour), and oppressed too much to have time or money to organise themselves.  And people lose the habit of thinking when thinking is proscribed.  (One could cause a revolution by forbidding parents from stopping their children from asking why.  Ask why often enough and you come alive, and you eventually begin to see what’s what.  Which tells us that oppression penetrates to the psychological level and causes mind-death.  Most people are mind-dead! This is one fruit of universal inequity.)  The feeble level of protest through history is perhaps connected to the instinct to give way to the alpha male.  It is an instinct we should fight.

Can a people who are naturally unprotestant against hyper-extreme inequity, against something which has produced horror monsters of barbarity daily for thousands of years, be changed?  Where there is no will, can there be a way?  I was for forty years unastounded by inequity.  Reading of matchgirls freezing in the snow while middle-class people walked past her into warm Christmas parties, I was not struck by the enormity, the insanity, the mindlessness.  Books on inequality often take a tone of minimising it, of explaining it away.  Statistics which aggregate the rich into percentages and averages (‘10% have 30% of the material wealth’) go far to conceal the range of inequity.  ‘The top 5% have 60% and the bottom 20% have 5%.’ Why are the bottom people lumped in a bigger percentage, except to fudge the disparity?  One compares 60% and 5% and it doesn’t seem too bad: 12 times as much.  The bottom 5% have something like 1%: 60 times as much.  And again, these figures conceal more than they reveal.  Implicit in them is that the disparity between the top 1% and the bottom 1% must be much greater, say 600 times.  But 1% of a country’s population may be a million people.  What of the top and bottom 0.1%?  6000 times?  The 0.01% (10,000 people)?  60,000 times?  What of the top and bottom individual?  A disparity of 60,000,000 times?  One grows up thinking people are keen on justice.  People demand it, march for it, pay for it.  Heads are broken over a few per cent pay rise.  And yet pay disparity of 1,000,000,000% is invisible.  The great majority (over 99%) will benefit financially from greater equity but there is no movement to demand it.  A fool and money are soon parted; it appears we are all fools enough to be hoodwinked out of a fair share and the world peace that would go with it.  The people with the money and the power can softsoap us every time, or when that fails, bring out the army, and in addition, so control the media that the people are convinced of their own wickedness in protesting.  The leaders in protest can be easily characterised as lazy, as enemies of the state, as enemies of law and order.  Or is it that the people accept that in order to be protected from other bandits, they have to accept being plucked by their own protector bandits?  The poor are a conquered race and must pay tribute.  Of course there is not complete acquiescence from the 99%: all the wars and half the crime are the non-acquiescence of the underpaid.  So-called religious wars and racial wars are always wealth-poverty wars.  Would there be racial tension in South Africa if blacks and whites lived in similar houses, had equal opportunity, and same pay packets?  Would Catholics and Protestants fight in Belfast if there was no fiscal discrimination?  Would the Germans have scapegoated the Jews if they hadn’t been panicked by hyperinflation?  (Which might have been a Jewish-devised plan to pay off painlessly the Versailles Treaty reparations which got Hitler so twisted up thinking about.) And if the people are not always fighting, well, sometimes you have to get your breath back.  In fact, a skirmish over 6% pay rise may be a battle in the war for equity.  After all, in the world war, the desire by the allies to drive the Germans back to their border came down to fighting for a few feet in a field.

Every empire in the world has begun in equity and ended in extreme inequity.  The moral, of course, is that any group that wants to be strong and to grow should practise equity.  In the beginning of the empire, leaders are the natural leaders, leaders by nature.  There is no money in the job of leadership because the empire is young.  Leaders rule from noble motives.  Slowly a class emerges that has made profits off the generality.  In the beginning the generality are comfortably off, their worth equal to their work.  As profits are made off them, they sink and sink and sink.  Another class emerges that sells to the first profiting class, and makes profits out of them.  And so on.  The society, the empire, starts shaped like a pancake and ends up like a tack.  As distance increases between bottom and top classes, information, understanding, sympathy and love declines, so grosser and grosser errors are made.  The sense of injustice increases, which makes the lower classes more protesting, and the higher classes more paranoid and selfprotective.  Crime increases as the lower classes see themselves working harder and harder, being paid less and less, and as the contrast with the higher classes increases.  The education differential increases, so it is more and more difficult to rise through classes that way, and there seems less and less reason for treating the lower classes as equals.  As crime increases, the state responds with greater harshness and cruelty.  (England, 18th Century, children hung for stealing over 5 shillings = $50; Middle East today, hands chopped off for theft, beheading for adultery.)  More and more abysmal poverty, more and more obscene luxury.  (Roman decadence: eating peacocks livers; Dallas today: a $1 million gold and jade pyramidal house for a cat.) As more and more classes emerge, the base of the nation, the labouring classes, shrinks.  Empire building brings in slaves.  The original people (all classes) become softer.  More and more, the fighting and defending is left to mercenaries who are less and less assimilated and loyal, and who eventually take over the state.  The higher the level of wealth, the bigger the incentive for takeovers, plots, backstabbings, poisonings, betrayals, etc.  The high levels of wealth encourage gambling, as people see no other way of reaching equity with the higher classes.  Higher levels of wealth encourage prostitution, as the lower classes sink lower and the higher go higher.  Drug use increases as societal stress, distress, absurdity, instability, hopelessness, dissatisfaction, urbanisation etc.  increases.  Nostalgia for rustic simplicity increases (Virgil’s Georgics.) Beauty and talent are more and more overpaid: film stars, pop stars, concert pianists, artists.  Instead of many small entertainers, there are a few big entertainers.  Dissatisfaction is so general that sometimes class barriers are crossed as the overrich seek satisfaction in greater extremes.  Classes become so many, that they are smaller and it becomes harder to find a good mate.  There are fewer of one’s own class to choose from, and less and less common ground between classes.  Ignorance and poverty become inbred.  Wealth mindset becomes inbred.  For the highest classes, there is actual inbreeding.  There is more risk of making a class error in a mate, with consequent miscommunication.  There is more loss of one’s class, as fiscal shifts cause people to be dropped or raised out of class.  This increases alienation, disenchantment, disidentification with society, decreases affection and loyalty to society.  More and more people are internal wanderers, looking for a home, and feeling rejected and revengeful.  The society shakes itself to pieces, with the stresses and movements induced by extreme wealth and poverty.  Both wealth and poverty are incentives for change.  What is called future shock or technology shock is in fact fiscal movement shock.  Fiscal movements are more frequent, more sudden, more massive, more swift, as the society accelerates further into injustice and self-suffering.  When the empire crumbles it falls into a chaotic heap, from which organisation and inequity re-arises.  The same thing happens on a smaller scale with revolutions and with depressions.  Wealth is always accumulating into fewer and fewer hands.  At a certain point this accumulation becomes monopolistic and therefore profits higher.  Thus money begins to be sucked out of the hands of the many, including small businesses, more quickly, the stockmarket does really well, which lists the bigger companies, which are now pulling monopolistic profits.  The wealthy, with the sudden influx of extra money, are investing on the stock market.  The stockmarket races.  This draws more people in, which sends the market higher.  The stockmarket ‘fire’ has become self-ventilating, like the Dresden firestorm which suffocated Dresden citizens who weren’t bombed or burnt.  Shares incorporate a larger and larger portion of rarity value, because demand exceeds supply.  It is also like pyramid selling, where people continue to do well because larger and larger numbers are joining in at the bottom.  Meanwhile, the monopolistic profits have made the middle and lower classes poorer, thus increasing demand for mortgages and also lowering the quality of the security for the mortgages.  The monopolies and oligopolies are gobbling up the competition.  Eventually, the increased poverty of the lower classes undermines monopolistic profits and the stockmarket companies totter.  The large numbers in the stockmarket, staying in irresistibly for the fabulous paper profits (which are an effect only of ratio of supply and demand for shares, not an effect of anything more substantial), all want out at once.  As the value of shares is pumped up by extraordinary demand, as soon as that demand disappears, the pumped up value disappears and even asset backed value goes out of the shares temporarily because demand is temporarily zero.  The further shares rise, the more attractive they are.  But also, the further they rise, the more likely the correction down.  The more experienced are cooler headed and get out ‘too soon’, that is, when a profit has been made and when the chances of a fall are still low.  They do not wait for the top of the rise, when profits are greatest and the risk of a fall is 100%.  Paul Getty said he made his money by getting out ‘too soon’.  Joseph Kennedy said that he knew it was time to get out when his barber was getting in.  (Did he tell his barber?) When an interest in stockmarkets has reached the ears of the ‘man in the street’, the stockmarket is very close to its peak.  For the cooler-headed, who have their wealth in cash at the time of the crash, there are all the shares to buy up at rock bottom prices in the following months.  Shares always recover and continue their slow steady climb in step with their asset backing after a depression.  If everyone knew this, there would not be stockmarket panics.  The later a person gets in, at a higher price, the more panicky they are entitled to be.  The ones who get in later are the ones least experienced, the ones furthest from the business world.  Therefore stockmarket bursts transfer money from the poorer to the richer and increase the poorer’s aversion to investment.  One would suspect that some of the rich would arrange a thing which is so strongly in their interests.  Of course, the banks were investing in the stockmarket, they were lending money which was being invested in the stockmarket, they were lending money against collateral which was being overvalued because of stockmarket wealth, and people were borrowing to keep afloat businesses being weakened, directly or indirectly, by the monopolistic mergers.  Banks cannot say no.  They are forced to find borrowers so they can pay interest on deposits.  If they were to set aside monies as a buffer (for a rainy day) their interest rates on deposits would not be competitive.  The bankers have limited liability.  They are not going to jail if the bank fails;  their personal fortunes are not on the line.  (A wise people might legislate to make bankers more liable and responsible.) Banks are allowed to lend something like 20 times what money they have, effectively printing more money, and getting private profits from money created ‘at the stroke of a pen’.  A bank might offer a lower interest rate on deposits and advertise its bigger safety margin.

A great way for the working population to collar profits is simply to buy shares.  Trade unions would accomplish their aim if they educated workers to have confidence in shares, and if they actually bought shares for the workers.  The more that workers are capitalists, the less tension there will be between classes - and less reason for tension.  It will in one stroke repair the sucking action of money that creates classes and inequity.  Money, which siphons up society, will be siphoned into workers’ pockets.  The slow steady long-term increase in the stockmarket reflects the increase in infrastructure in the country (bridges, roads, hospitals, etc.) These have been built by workers, but only the 10% that invest in the stockmarket reap the value of them - the community gives the stockmarket investors all its added value.  When the workers are reassured of the long-term rock-steady increase in the stockmarket, their right to the increase, they will more often invest.  If the unions lead the way by buying shares and showing the changing fortunes of the shares to workers, their caution will be broken down.  The unions could give shares to workers, so that workers can build up experience in having them.

Unions could concentrate their buying on certain shares, so heavily, that the shares rise in value, and then withdraw and put their money in other shares till they rise.  I am sure people do that when they can - whenever they have enough money to raise the price of the share.  One of the Rothschilds, wanting to join the French Aristocracy and being excluded, sold his shares until the aristocracy were close to being ruined.  If all the people who sold out of the stockmarket in a crash bought in again, the price would rise to the same level.  If there was a time interval introduced between the time you wanted to sell and the time you could sell, (3 days?  20 days?) stockmarket movements would be slowed below the panic level.  In short, a stockmarket rise or fall is caused by a large movement into and out of the market.  The price of a share has an asset backing element, a general and specific business confidence element (future profits) and a scarcity value element (supply and demand.) Any country should be able, by organised buying and selling, to milk money from the stockmarket.  Of course there have to be losers to the same degree.  Lotteries could give out the prizes in the form of shares.  Unions could do raffles with shares for prizes.

Children should be taught shares in school, from a young age, so they are not in awe of them.  Government transfers could be increased in the form of shares.  Shares in companies are shares in the nation, and everyone should share in the nation.  The more shares that the people have, the more profits are redirected to the people, and the more slowly the disastrous inequity rises.  Grandparents should buy shares for their grandchildren.  Companies could specialise in shares in small numbers, so people could buy them in all sizes for all occasions big and small.  If everyone had 1,000 shares it would radically increase the unity spirit of a country.

People are largely unaware of the ways in which money is extracted from their pockets, in legal ways which might not be legal if the laws were written by an impartial and money-savvy god.  So persuasive is this ignorance that the ways money is pickpocketed are unbelievable even when understood.  That is, there is a 5-billion-monkey effect: as long as 5 billion people do not know it, even the ones who know it cannot be sure they know it.  Individuals know it, but it is not in the air at all, humanity does not know it.  The winds of ignorance, of what is not considered, are always blowing out the candle of knowledge in individual minds.

Henry George noticed one way in which value was extracted from people.  It is interesting to consider the politics and history of Henry George’s insight.  Economics had been around for over a hundred years when Henry George made his realisation, and people had been dealing with money for a lot longer than that.  And economists had been perceptive enough to notice subtleties like ‘the invisible hand’ and ‘marginal utility of land’.  Yet they had ‘mislaid noticing’ or recording this simple insight.  And it, simple as it is, has not become a ‘chestnut’ of economics either, although economists acknowledge that it has not been disproved.  It became part of the understanding of ‘wackos’ like George Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy but has been ignored by economists, whose science is by no means overpopulated with chestnuts or cornerstones to boast of.  In fact, economic theories or schools to date last as long as it takes economic events to contradict them.  One ex-economist not considering going back to the teaching of economics says he wouldn’t know what to teach.

Henry George was a journalist.  A man of the people.  A person who was free to speak his mind, who had not sold his soul to the establishment.  Who had not had his eyes and heart plucked out as part of the price of being a respected, accepted and respectable economist.  He noticed that in America, a land of wealth, there was still poverty - and great riches.  With his heart, he cared about it.  It was not hard then for his eyes to see the cause.  The people build up the country, adding value, constantly.  On the other hand, a person can buy land, and receive capital gain from the proximity of cities and towns, irrespective of how much work the owner of the land does.  Of course, rich people can buy more land, and more valuable land.  And then do nothing or relatively little towards the development of the city around that land, which development, by workers, makes the land valuable.  Then, further, the people who have done most of the work building the city, may own none of the land, and must pay rents which are proportional to the value of the land - which their labour has made valuable.  So not only are they not rewarded for their work by the increased value of the land, but also they must pay for that value perpetually in rent both directly in rent, and indirectly in paying the rent of all the shopkeepers through the price of goods.  The shape of this ‘con’ is similar to the shape of the sharemarket ‘con’.  All workers create the wealth; only the maybe 10% who own (the shares, the land) reap.  Actually, the shape is the same as the entrepreneurial ‘con’ too: the workers in an entrepreneurial company are indispensable, too (else why hire them?), but the profits are arrogated to the top people only.  Fools and their money.  War will be destroyed when money wisdom destroys inequity.  There is a further effect to capital gains on land.  The attraction of the capital gains makes for speculative buying, which then gives land another price hike, from the speculation demand.  In addition, the hyped-up price of land and undeveloped spare land forces people to go out further for affordable land, which adds an extra transportation cost. 

Why did the working man never protest?  Seeing himself working and poor, and others rich and leisuring, why did the worker not protest and protest till the anomaly was destroyed?  Why did he not know it was wrong?  I think the reason is that humanity is conditioned by mother nature to an assumption that everything is alright, because everything is alright in nature.  The natural condition is ‘sleep’ and peace.  No one welcomes being told things are wrong, because it involves waking up, collecting wits, facing facts, taking responsibility for oneself and doing something till everything is alright again and one can fall asleep again, back into peace, still grumbling at having been woken up.  It has, I think truly, been said that people will put up with a tyrant for thirty years, but a saviour must deliver in three years or they will string him up.  Look at Ceaucescu.  Look at Franco.  And look at Jesus.  The reason is that the tyrant hurts the people, but he lets them sleep.  He quickly hears the tone of voice of those who try to wake the people, and leaps in mercilessly to save the people’s sleep.  Tiananmen Square.  Solzhenitsyn found that he himself did not have the heart to wake the people when he was being transported through railway stations from one prison to another: he said nothing, though he thought of telling people what was happening to him.  But the saviour, oh dear, he wakes people up.  What if the saviour learns to wake people so gently that they do not know who woke them, do not know they have been woken; only know that they know, they feel, and they can see the hurt.  ‘A saviour’ is brave, and therefore far too merry and casual about pain.  A tyrant is much more sympathetic and sensitive and protective of the people’s aversion to pain, and leaps in energetically to assist in the production and maintenance of, for instance, fictions to help the people get their natural sleep.

Henry George believed, obviously, that the capital gains created by the whole community should be returned to the community.  He believed that the money raised would do away with the need for any other form of tax, so his system was called the single tax.  Modern governments might need more money than that.  Actually in justice, the money should be returned directly to the people on the understanding that it is a pay correction, that it belongs to them.  The money should be divided by the total number of hours worked by everyone and each working person given a share in proportion to number of hours worked.  The money could be directed only at those below the national average, to compensate for other generators of inequity.  Of course we are talking about land value, not value of buildings.  Egalitarianism in land value would have the effect of decentralising cities, and preventing the raising of skyscrapers since they are viable only on the iniquitous land values and consequent rent rates.  Thus we see: skyscrapers are a mnemonic of inequity, of people being ripped off.  The city outline reproduces (much dampened by gravity) the shape of the hyperbole of inequity, the economic tack, the fiscal seastorm.  The ghettos (black and white) that accompany American cities are only the tip of the iceberg of Western poverty, because the First world exports, one may say, most of its poverty.  By the same action by which it imports its wealth.  As the cashcrops come in, at tyrannously lowered prices, the poverty goes out.  The first world will always be more sophisticated financially.  When Arab oil money was desperate for somewhere to lend itself in the 70s, the third world did not fix the interest rate, but it has since risen from around 0% to 8%.  But it is not as sophisticated or difficult as that.  Third world leaders are generally only too happy to sign anything in return for fat bribes.  It’s a bribe if received before signing, a commission if received after.  They are tyrants themselves.  The President of Zaire with $5 billion in a Swiss bank account, from a loan with no strings attached.  How did the lenders think the country was going to pay the interest without the money being used to increase national productivity?  The lenders deserve to lose the money they lent with so little security, just like any bank.  But a foolish bank does not have an army to squeeze blood money from the stone poor.  The first world does.  And the self-deception to imagine they are justified in ‘protecting their financial interest’ with guns and tyranny.  The First world will continue to pull the strings of the countries they have enslaved, pulling out unsuitable governments (populist governments that care whether the people are squeezed to death and misery) and putting in suitable governments (puppet tyrants.) Force is the resource of the brain-paralysed.  Aristotle said that a master is as good as his slaves.  This point had not been absorbed in the 19th Century American south nor in the 19th Century British Caribbean slave states, and it has not been absorbed in the third world slave states today.  If AIDS is from Africa (why would it wait till now to travel?), then isn’t it because we have created disease there?  If one is going to create badness, one should create perfect insulation from it.  Creating disease in Africa and then connecting oneself with Africa by slave boats, banana boats, cocoa boats and jumbo jet loads of African dignitaries on shopping sprees is too sophisticated intelligence for me.  In short, if the first world wants wealth, they should cultivate it in the third world, since the third world is the foundation layer of the pyramid of wealth.  If the foundations are not strong, the whole house will be cracked.  The whole human house is cracked and patched beyond belief.  How does the first world differ from a mad Southern plantation owner who starves his horses and beats them bloody in a rage for not trotting fast enough, who goes out among his neighbours in disgrace, with dirty horse gear and wild manner, with stories of beating-to-death slaves whispered by women when he goes by, (which he does increasingly seldom, for he makes enemies of his peers)?  But why would the first world not be insane with desperation?  The agony of a person dying with malnutrition, blinded with disease, feeling the bodies of his/her children dying (an hourly experience) is nothing compared to the agony of a bad manager of millions, who hourly contemplates its imminent loss.  The ratio of agonies is the same as the ratio of the height of the building the manager throws himself from, to the height of an African hut.  The poor person has had years to adjust his/her mind, has had little better to compare his/her loss with, has a lot of absolute poverty, but little relative poverty (psychologically speaking), is insulated by lack of transport and television from a painful contrast; but for the wealthy, wealth has created the contrast, and wealth throws it in his/her face.  Is not the whole first world in this position?  The Tokyo skyscrapers which will not break but will topple because the full amount of chemical to stop the ground liquefying in an earthquake has not been injected, because of competition, is a symbol of present human culture.  (Tokyo area real estate is worth (overvalued at) as much as the whole of the USA plus Western Europe.  Its earthquake, which is inevitable, and is overdue, will probably cause a world depression.)  When the foundations are strong, the house is half-built.  Preparation of the surface is nine-tenths of painting.  So Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper”, which peeled off the damp wall, is also an appropriate symbol.

Accountants have been compared to witchdoctors, for they provide the fictions that are desired.  (The story of the accountants who kept being sent back until they came back with the desired conclusion: a jet for the directors was viable.) Depressions can be considered a case of adjustment of accounting to reality.  Figures slowly get inflated; when they are forced to adjust to reality, confidence is lost, although the reality has not changed.  Rarity value should perhaps be calculated and kept separate in valuations.  For instance, a Japanese law allowing no tax to be paid on artworks has increased demand for these, so that a Japanese paid an unprecedented amount for a Van Gogh or something.  This sort of valuation (of the order of $70 million) gets incorporated in GNP.  Then financiers use these GNP figures to judge profitability of investment.  The countries with the best growth rates get a disproportionate amount of investment demand, further lifting ‘real’ GNP figures (not really real GNP) - and deflating GNP figures for countries with unspectacular, unextreme, possibly healthier and more real GNP figures.  Tokyo land values may reflect only or partly Japanese greater willingness than other nations to pack themselves in like sardines as in their commuter trains with their whitegloved ‘packers’.  70% of Japan is still forested.  GNP figures which measured only ‘solid’ product, with the ‘gaseous’, volatile and confidence-vulnerable elements as far as possible excluded, would go some way as a cautionary antidote to the unhesitant swallowing of GNP figures.  Figures acquire a quite specious reputation for accuracy deriving from the certainties of mathematics.  Economic figures are cans of worms, of inaccuracies, of every element of human psychology, including for instance, the unexplained love of gold.

So we have a situation in which many things - statistical luck, profit-taking, capital gains on land, lotteries, the power of money, plain conquest and plunder - conspire to increase inequity, and too few things operate to overcome the tendency to inequity; so that now, after so many centuries, we have an income inequity factor of 10,000,000 (assuming a lowest income of 10c an hour, which is not the lowest income; and a wealth inequity factor of 1,000,000,000, assuming the smallest fortune of someone who has worked as hard as Bill Gates and spent less is $18.)

Out of inequity like this flows the history of the world, the endless struggle to get and retain a survival share, a fair share or a great chunk of the pie, everyone caught up in one way or another in the struggle.  The demoralisation or the anger of working harder at a lower pay rate than someone else.  The danger of being caught up in someone else’s power struggle: restaurant patrons blown up; genocide victims.  The hyperincentive to bypass slow, honest methods of getting ahead and gamble on a high-risk-high-gain method of jumping the queue to a fortune: drugs, prostitution, gambling, bank holdup, theft.

A world with inequity factors like these cannot be said to be being governed.  Any reduction in inequity will reduce the levels of stress, horror, trauma, waste, fear, danger, insanity, obscenity, indecency, violence.  No one who does not oppose wealth can be said to be good.  All or many of our sufferings originate in equity struggles.  No government that does nothing or too little to reduce inequity can be a good government.  The essential element of a true world government is control of equity.  A government can at best reflect the best will of the people, so a grassroots government with a will to reduce inequity to, say, 10, is the only way to have peace on earth.  No one with more than $10,000,000.

A simple way to contribute to this goal of goals is to outlaw most of inheritance.  If most of inheritance is taken, and redirected to the poorest of the world, equity will be increased.  Inheritance is widely accepted but it is perfectly unjust.  And we have to pursue justice if we dislike genocide, holocaust, danger, corruption, violence, crime, waste, terror, trauma.  Inheritance could be limited to one year’s world average income, or to $1 million or to $10 million.  This would leave great freedom to pursue wealth, would give one’s heirs great freedom to pursue wealth, and would give many of the poorest greater opportunity to increase wealth.  The richer the poor are, the bigger the market for goods.  Just as the Marshall Plan after WW II, giving 2% of American GNP to Germany, prevented another depression and another war, by quickly making Germany a market again.  Generating equity through inheritance has the advantage that inheritances come up spread over time, so the shock to the financial structure is small.  Difficulties of getting money to the poorest are: their numbers, their ‘spreadness’, their weakness, their ignorance.  Providing water wells is an excellent first step.  Half the hospital beds in the world contain victims of waterborne diseases, so clean water will free up health funds for other projects.  (Perhaps a condition of providing water wells ought to be that national health budgets not be diminished as a consequence.) Among the poorest, so little can do so much.  Two million people go blind each year for lack of 2c of Vitamin A a year, or for lack of the knowledge to include certain greens in the diet.  (Among the richest, a great deal of money can do so little to increase satisfaction where so many desires are satisfied.)  Small-loans banks seem to work.  If a world government were to give all poor people an amount of money, prices would go up and the money would be of that much less value to the poor.  That is perhaps unavoidable, and not too important.  One is still pumping net equity to the lowest level of the money pyramid, increasing justice and peace.

Another method is a wealth tax that cycles over a hundred year cycle from 1/100th to one whole of the wealth (the excess over $1m.) A fortune of $101 million will diminish by 1 million each year.  Thus fortunes will steadily feed funds into the justice box.  It leaves people relatively free to accumulate through most of the cycle.  If the fortune increases at 10% per annum, the fortune will increase until the 90th year when the tax will be 10%.  If the fortune increases at just 3%, the fortune will increase until the 67th year, when the tax will be 3%.  After that the bites will increase to a level that ensures all fortunes are cut down to size.  An advantage of this is again its relative softness, its low level of jarring the system.  It can be used in the first century of use to cut down the largest fortunes, and every century after, to give liberty to accumulate and yet get strict control of fortunes.  By giving free play to the game of accumulation, it decreases opposition from accumulation players, and feeds the positive energies of competitiveness into society.  At the same time it disciplines everyone once a century to equity.

A variation on this would be 1% the first year, 2% the second year, and so on.  In this 3% would be reached in three years instead of 67 years as in the first system, and 10% in ten years instead of 90 years.  Justice of course demands the taking of 100% of the excess over what the individual has truly earned.  Any softening of that is a concession to pragmatics, to the demands of injustice.  But even 100% of the excess over the maximum one can conceivably earn is too little for justice.  It allows people to make a million quickly, making it more difficult and impossible for others to make a million in a lifetime.  A maximum yearly earn rate of double the world average yearly earn rate ($50,000) could be imposed.

All this is pie-in-the-sky and what is the point of thinking of what cannot be, you may think.  I think of what was said on a certain diplomatic occasion: because they cannot hear sense, does that mean you are going to talk nonsense to them?  That is, I am going to talk the best sense I can guess, not the best sense people can hear.  It is good to define the true aim even when it seems impossible to attain it.  Who knows what is impossible?  The world needs a definition of what is good, so that people of goodwill can do what is practically good (good is always practical.) There are so many bizarre and impractical ideas out there of what is best worth pursuing.  People will put their energy into whatever comes into their mind, without sobriety, without perspective.  The less a person has in their mind, the more vulnerable they are to what comes into it.

I am inclined to think that strict limitation of inheritance may be sufficient to ensure a high enough degree of equity.  As long as the bulk of the estate goes to the poorest of the poor, like trimming off the humps of the highway and putting the humps in the potholes, our fiscal road will be a smoother ride.  Until we do at least that, we are sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.

If everyone in the world was convinced that money extremeness, fiscal intemperance is the cause of most of our woes, would something be done about it?  I think so.  Therefore the work that needs to be done is to strengthen the arguments and to spread the word.  Force is not an argument.  An appeal on the basis that it is good (holy, pious) is only use of a subtler force.  Only an appeal on the basis of rational self-interest is free from force and honourable.  If it is not in a person’s interest it is not good.

My argument comes to this: Powerlessness certainly doesn’t work; power only attracts challenges to that power; the powerful in the final analysis rule only by the permission of the ‘power-less’ (those with less power); the alternative is the international legislation of the spread of power.

The material that follows this introduction falls under these headings:

1.  The need for a solution.  The magnitude of the problem.  (The problem is so vast and awful that humanity is in trauma and denial over it.  It would be cruel and only reinforce denial if description of the problem was not preceded and surrounded by suggestions of the solution.)

2. The solution and answers to its critics.

3. General comments that support the subject.

I think the subject is better served by mixing the material together.  The most powerful argument for the solution is the problem: proximity to the problem prevents aspects of the solution being treated frivolously and, as said above, proximity of the solution prevents the problem being experienced with despair and denial.  The problem is horrendous.  The solution, in terms of changing the mindset or custom of thousands of years, very difficult.  In real terms, the price is very low, and the rewards, very high.

Money extremity has killed hundreds of millions, injured tens of billions, turned all of history into a nightmare and a madhouse.  The poor have sought escape from it in wealth and in voluntary poverty; the wealthy have sought escape from it in poverty and in wealth; the only escape is in universal moderation.  The only escape is in a universal rejection of wealth, a rejection as vigorous and clear as our rejection of murder, theft and wild, mad, dangerous behaviour.

Wealth, the greatest evil by far, our failure to distinguish it from money, which is perfectly good, is creating the tensions which has led us to the doorway of nuclear winter.  Wealth is ripping out our trees and letting our soil wash away to sea.  (Like the planet ripping out its hair.)  Imagine the wars it will spark as the basis of all our landgrown food becomes scarce.  There are people who claim to have techniques to feed 1000 people per hectare - 50 square metres per family, (by trimming weeds instead of pulling them - like the wheat and tares of Jesus’ story) which means 10 billion people could be supported by 100,000 square kilometres, a country the size of New Zealand, Uganda, Cambodia or Bangladesh.  It means the world could support 1000 times the present population (for there is now one hectare of arable land per person.) Instead, thanks to wealth, we look to reap the explosiveness of money extremeness in the next hundred years.  Extrapolate the present most efficient use of land for food to the whole world’s arable land - in other words, imagine the horticulturisation of the whole world, with the recovery of deserts, and you can easily see how little we have used the world’s land.  Thanks to wealth, small farms, which are up to 14 times more efficient in food production for the many, are swallowed up in large estates for profits for the few - and slavery and starvation for the many.  Landlessness has increased from 15% to 75% in Bangladesh since partition.  With world tension as high as it is today, and arable land decreasing to zero in the next 100 years, the chances of the world being consumed by military fire in that time are very great.  As usable land decreases, all remaining fertile areas will be invaded over and over and the land will be destroyed by war and overuse.  Two thousand years ago the Romans pulled down the tree cover of North Africa and grew wheat until the soil washed away, so that now the stone walls of the Roman Harbour are a mile from the sea.  The same desertification happened earlier in the Middle East and perhaps the Sahara was once fertile, like the dustbowls of America.  We have learned nothing in 2000 years.  Or we have not mastered the fire of money, which drives us to these follies. 

This introduction may be thought of as being structured like a round-and-round doodle over the subject area, creating overlapping circles of subject aspects and nodes of intersection of subject aspects.  The rest of this book can be thought of as a continuation of this circling doodle, over the same area and over the surrounding subject area.  This doodling can be thought of as a brass rubbing, in which the picture becomes clearer with each rendering stroke.  The rest of this book consists of a succession of points and essays.  Where they fit into the subject can be easily known once the general subject area of the book is known from this introduction.  This book structure means the book can be dipped into at random for fresh inspiration.  The book can be visited like the toothpick hors-d’oeuvres stuck in a grapefruit.  The shorter the piece, the brighter the consciousness that writes it and the brighter the consciousness that reads it.  Each piece may be considered one gadfly sting, one prod of the donkey of human unconsciousness.  It is our right to wake up and see what danger we are in, what unnecessary self-flagellation we have been practising, what an enormous opportunity for increase of happiness there is in the solution of the great problem we live in denial of, in order to eke some watery-gruel happiness from our stung lives.

2)     Some of the entries in this book are suggestions for activities, because consciousness is raised to a higher level by actions.  This first suggestion for activity, then, is to think and list, ongoingly, ways in which the rich/poor polarity affects you as an individual; this book’s concept will never penetrate very deeply as long as a voice is allowed to suggest, however quietly in the back of your head, that you are not affected, that the thesis of this book is academic as far as you are concerned.  Thus: I am continually rattled by impressions of wealth and poverty around me: I am challenged and demoralised by reminders of wealth got with less effort than it would require for me to obtain; I am saddened and challenged continuously by poverty and misery in my view.  I am under attack and under threat of attack continuously by pollutants and poisons that are made available to me from profit excitement or obsession generated by unbridledness of profit-taking.  I am in danger of receiving some output from rage, resentment and frustration from people and groups who are underpaid: theft, racist attack, religious attack.  I could be bombed, hijacked in somebody’s peacetime war.  I am restricted in where I travel, and at risk whenever I travel.  I may suffer seeing my loved ones succumb to the pressures of society via drugs, crime etc.  I must daily pay prices that have a monopolistic element, without hope of compensation.  I am subjected to numerous major distortions of common opinion generated by manipulation of common truth for gain: I must pick my way through life burdened by confusions of sense generated by falsehoods generated by hope of extreme gain.  I must go without the price benefits that would go with having another four billion people in a financial position to generate goods at the moment being generated only by the first world.  I am at present going without benefit of creativity, inventiveness and intelligence that would be active if the third world was getting a fair share.  In short, my world would not be stress, trouble, waste, craziness and danger to the same extent.  I am in a situation of reduced freedom, a situation of a degree of slavery to employers, to the policies and manipulations of those with extreme wealth and power.

3)     The state of the world breeds cynicism, and cynicism is realism; but cynicism should not exclude idealism or it becomes laziness, self-neglect.  We need realism to jostle us on and up, and idealism to refresh, sustain and lighten us for the journey.  Picture then, this idealistic idea.

    It seems that a lot of our natural charity is not stimulated by the impersonal.  When the individual is put up against the problem of world poverty en masse, it crushes charity.  It becomes a huge effort to generate the imaginative reconstruction of the concepts needed to activate charity under those conditions.  It is hard to give to the world.  There are many more who can give than there are in desperate need.  ‘Only’ 30 million starve per year against a billion in the first world who can give.  It is unfortunate that charity organisations do not emphasise this.
    My idea is this: to pair up sister cities, suburbs, towns and villages in the first and third worlds.  A non-government organisation like Oxfam could do this.  Then encourage communication between the sister communities via videocam.  A community in the first world would regularly see videos of their sister community and vice versa, and gifts would have visibility, the donee a name, place and personality.  Nations could set up peace armies for justice and charity that would organise such communication.  Such a scheme could be rationalised on a worldwide basis for maximum efficiency.  The richest billion people would be in contact with the poorest billion, the richest communities with the poorest communities, so that the greatest funds would be available for the greatest need.   
    Imagine your community of 10,000; your suburb of village.  Sooner of later everyone gets to know your sister community, say, a suburb of Kampala in Uganda.  You and your neighbours see videos of the suburb at churches, local halls, photo displays at the library.  Over time, the relationship deepens.  Gifts are sent to that particular community.  Needs are identified, responded to.  Changes occur.  Perhaps you collect for that community.  A year later, the hospital is up and running, the well is gushing clean water.  For the community to do this selflessly would be insane.  You do it for the pleasure in it, the relief.  You do it selfishly for justice, so that there will be peace, and beauty and constructiveness.
    One weakness of this idea is the disproportion in numbers between the very overpaid few and the underpaid many.  A community of 10,000 of the most overpaid would in justice have a sister community of perhaps a billion of the most underpaid.  Sister communities of equal numbers means that a billion of the richest people would have to be drawn on to watch the billion poorest.  Most of the billion richest would be little over the world average, some below it.  It would be the world middle class giving to the poorest.  One senses instinctively that if the focus was shifted onto the rich to sister the world’s underpaid, one would meet resistance.  It is a fact that the rich give less.  The rich feel that charity is just another attempt to separate a person and his money.  Perhaps a compromise is possible: the world’s richest 100,000,000 sistered with the world’s poorest billion.  Communities of 1,000 linked to communities of 10,000.  That unfortunately brings in a feeling of: one of us equals ten of them, which is hardly what you want.  The trouble is that wealth is intensive, poverty extensive.  The richest individual has 1,000,000 times the world average fair pay, the poorest worker has just 1% of one world average fair pay.  The most overpaid impoverishes many (of the order of 1,000,000 people), the most underpaid enriches just one.  To relieve the richest of as much as they should be relieved of, would have to be done politically.  If the richest could be relieved of just one share, on a one-to-one basis, under the sistering scheme, it would be something.  The dangerous temptation is to give up on trying to get something from the superrich, and depend on the ‘poorest rich’.
    One might suppose that by appealing to the world middle class, it will impoverish the rich because the middle class will have that little bit less to spend elsewhere if it is spent on the world underpaid; and the middle class will be reimbursed as the profits rise through the system from underpaid back to the middle class (the trickle-up fact). But these details and refinements aside, get deeply into imagining the life enrichment of being closely in touch with another community of people.  What did you do towards the Great Peace? 

4)     Let us consider the effects of introducing absolute equality.  Not that it is desirable or possible; but it will illustrate several things.  Since we are conditioned or brainwashed by environment to inequality and inequity, perfect fiscal equality is in some sense the beast we do not dare look in the eye.  Having looked it in the eye, we will be that much more open to a more approximate, practical and desirable equality.  
    Let us imagine the arrangements have been done secretly and one day, suddenly, with the press of a button, every man, woman and child has the world’s total assets divided equally among them.  The very act of changing ownership will have some violent effects on the value of certain things but we will ignore that.  What will be the effects?  There will go up a howl of horror and dismay from those who previously had more.  We will have to imagine the organisers of the rearrangement are safe, their modem sites electronically concealed.  99% will have more, will suddenly have a fair share.  It is true that the rich rob the poor and the poor rob each other, as Sojourner Truth said in the 19th century.  The poor rob the rich too but far less frequently as it is more difficult.  And of course, the rich rob the rich.  All this will stop.  Poverty, the greatest motivation to violence, will have gone.  The poor will not be driven to join the armies as a step up in their lives.  (The Irish and the English poor in the 19th century who were so driven by hunger they willingly or unwillingly became soldiers, and who were so hardened by suffering they won an empire, an evil empire, for the English.  The many armies of Africa today which are ‘fed’ by cannon fodder, to whom food and clothing and the risk of being killed is a big step up in the world.  The rich have a vital reason to maintain poverty: so that there is a large pool of hardened people to draw armies from to protect their wealth.  This is less true today when armies are sometimes highly technical, and therefore need educated and therefore not poor technician-soldiers.  But it was true even for Vietnam, where America depended on its redneck poor, on people too poor to care about right and wrong, to provide grunts.  They lost against people poorer and harder.)  
    Demand for luxury goods will go down and demand for necessities will go up.  Prices for luxury good will deflate, and prices for more fundamental goods will inflate; until supply of luxury goods falls to demand, and supply of more fundamental goods rises to meet demand.   
    For a person who was getting $1000 a year to suddenly have assets of say $100,000 and a family income of $50,000 a year would be like someone on $20,000 a year suddenly getting $2 million.  They will feel they have 100 years income on hand and stop working.  This effect will reduce production in the short term and raise prices.  In the longer term, people will find that the markets will be unstocked if they do not work.  Sooner or later, production will increase: people with $20,000 are in a better position to start up businesses, and to buy machinery and to learn techniques and skills.  (If equitization causes deflation in luxury goods and inflation in more necessary goods, inequity must cause inflation in luxury goods and deflation in general goods.)
    If we are going to imagine the most extreme form of equalitarianisation, all will be paid, workers and nonworkers: then no one will have any motivation to work, except wanting to work for work’s sake, and wanting to work for hunger’s sake.  People who did not work would be those who needed not to work.  Those who worked would be those healthy ones who worked out of health.  Would people who are free to work or not work, who are paid an equal share for existing, not for working, work harder or less hard?  The world pretty much assumes such people would work less hard.  One thing is sure, and that is that if they were tyrannically obliged to suffer equal wages for all without exception, people would still work hard enough to feed themselves.  What is wrong with allowing only the natural incentives to impel us?  Is not our slavery to hunger and cold enough slavery for us?  We allow ourselves to be captured by the hysterical attitudes of the most work-addicted among us.  We work 90% of the time to serve the most marginal 10% of our wants.  We are in a treadmill for the production of cigarette lighters with flashing boobs.  Meanwhile the Kalahari bushman and woman have a 12 hour work week.  It has been suggested that the south of USA lost their civil war because slavery is uneconomic: a slave is anyone who is underpaid, and an underpaid slave is like a poorly-maintained machine: the costs of maintenance escalate.  99% of the world is underpaid, are slaves, to greater or lesser degree.  At first, it looks good, to get a lot of people and underpay them and overpay yourself.  But then the slave has poor motivation, so you have the expense of motivators: whip-men and guardsmen.  And if the slave doesn’t work hard, what do you do?  The more you whip, the lower the motivation of the slave, the more escapes there are and the poorer quality of the slave.  In that relationship, it is hard to conceive improving the slave by, say, education, so productivity suffers.  If you do without the whip and the whip-man, and feed and clothe and educate your slaves, they are going to exercise their right to ease off work as long as you hold your ownership of them over them.  If you remove that, and free them, they are going to one day suggest politely you ought to take equal shares.  In short, either you whip (create fear and terror) which costs you time and energy, and the slave degenerates, or you are nice and you end up equal.  The world is in the former condition, of still believing in slavery, and suffering great poverty because of it.  The degeneration of the American south, today the laughing stock of the world, spreading ignorance and brutality through the world through religious fundamentalism and televangelism, which are just ignorance enthroned - is a metaphor for the state of the world.
    Perfect equality will be unjust, but will be enormously more just than the present condition.  If everyone is paid the same, no one will be more than one world-average annual pay from what they deserve; whereas at present, individuals are up to 1,000,000 the world average times from what they deserve.  Suddenly there will be no one more overpaid than you, for you to resent; no one more underpaid that you have to ignore or support.  Humanity will have the conscience of a guilty man lifted off it, for the first time in 1000s of years.  One brilliant effect will be that one will be paid as much for the work one loves as for the work one doesn’t love, so all will gravitate towards the work one loves.  One will be free of the tyranny of work, of loveless work.  Doing the work one loves most, or enjoying best, or feels most comfortable with, is Plato’s concept of justice: a fitness between the person and what the person does.  A job that fits like a glove.  An environment in which one is free to do what one wishes within the natural constraints of circumstances and of nature (hunger, cold etc.) We never ask ourselves in our present condition why we have to do work, why we have to be unfree in relation to our bosses.  We assume that these are natural constraints, whereas they are partly constraints imposed by the stronger position of better-off people.  Why are workers paid less the bosses?  Because supply is high relative to demand.  Why?  Because education in being your own boss is restricted.  Restricted by the boss culture in power.  It is an instinct that hardly has to be thought, to restrict others’ access to whatever one finds to be good, and what one feels may be limited in quantity.  Government could increase the supply of surgeons and decrease the supply of nurses to decrease the price of surgeons and increase the pay of nurses.  Why don’t they?  Only because governments are friends of surgeons more than nurses.  Friends of inequity, friends of wealth, friends of evil.  Paying people for existing is strange to us.  It is therefore worth conceiving it a little better.  If one says: work or I won’t pay you, one has already created a tension, a powerplay, a fear, an environment of tyranny.  If everyone has their own land, and lives largely off their own land, how hard a person works is their own affair.  A more complex society introduces the unfriendliness, the distrust of: are you working?  People begin to judge others’ work.  They judge by their standards, their tastes, their understanding, their ignorance (we are all ignorant.) The physical worker will slight mental work, the mental worker will slight physical work.  The inartistic will slight the artistic, and vice versa.  If the majority of people were more artistic than not, artists would be the rich class, and therefore the powerful class.  As soon as you pay for work, you create a line between work and nonwork.  You divide the seamlessness of being into this tyrannical, nagging discontinuity.  You suspect nature of not providing.  You create selfcoercion.  You create the fear of scarcity, the fear of inadequacy of oneself.  The social system in which we bully ourselves is initiated.  Societies which still trust themselves, which are not frenetic with the thought of scarcity, we call lazy.  We make the lion a proud symbol of energy, of courage, and forget that a lion slaps his tail in the warm dust most of the day, and that a lion is not ashamed to run away when it seems to him right.  When the British came to Tahiti, they forced the natives to cut down the breadfruit trees to encourage them to work in the sugar plantations.  In Europe today, billions of oranges are destroyed, billions of cauliflowers.  Perhaps the economic psychology of scarcity is tied to humanity’s move into cooler climates and the seasonal rhythm and danger of scarcity.  Is nature abundant or not?  It depends where you are.  Society must be judged against nature.  It must provide advantages greater than the advantages of nature it takes away.  Does nature say: who does not work shall not eat?  Nature is not so strict or precise.  Nor does nature make work so distasteful as humanity, especially mankind, does.  It seems work is more natural to the female.  The male is more likely to dislike work and impose it on others.  Lions and lionesses.  African women.  Within the tribe, all are accepted at the meal, although less active members may come under some pressure.  Are we going to extend the same tribe sense to the whole of humanity?  Or even to our local community? 
    In any group of people, abilities and energy will vary.  Are those variables to be considered as community property or personal property?  Is community-mindedness to be enshrined in community values or not?  At the moment, community-mindedness exists as a ‘poor-relative’ virtue on the margins of society, playing second fiddle to ‘virtues’ of machismo and aggression like business ‘success’.  Its devotees are retired people in voluntary organisations, people sewing up rents in the social fabric created by individuals focussed on turning their gifts of nature into money.  It is clear that in justice gifts of nature should be considered community property, just as natural handicaps are considered community burdens.  Similarly, it seems clear that mineral rights should belong to the community, not the individual who finds them or happens to have oil and minerals on their property.  Individuals should be paid, if not for existence then for work, but not for the accident of natural talents or minerals turning up on their property.  Of course  if individuals are going to be paid for work, then they should be paid for work put into developing their talent, or put into finding minerals.  The disadvantage of paying people for work is the possible wrongness in the concept of work that is built into custom.  If work is linked to productivity, what about productivity failure through no fault?  Or what about work in destruction industries?  What about machine-assisted productivity?  What about invisible work like thinking, which may be immensely productive (or destructive) yet not be quantifiable for many years?  Consider say Descartes’ contribution to science through his dreams and daydreaming.  Our definitions of work tend to favour the quantifiable and the solid, and therefore to discourage or penalise the ‘higher’ activities which are supposed to distinguish us from the animals.  We increase stupidity by under-buying thoughts. 
    Is it not conceivable that nature has made us as we ought to be, and that therefore paying people for any concept of work that differs from the nature we have been given and the natural activity we have been given is going to introduce stresses and damage and costs?  Every day as we continue in our construction of improvements on nature we find ways in which our constructions ‘cross’ nature and make our situation worse.  Work is one artificial concept very deep in custom (a second nature) - so deep that we can hardly doubt it or interrogate it - which has its costs.  It seems that we are at a point in history where technology has come to seem toylike and dangerous, and the only thing to do is to put action and manipulation aside and let nature guide and protect us.  We have to start thinking once again that nature is right and to be observed and listened to, stop thinking that nature is wrong and to be altered and tinkered with.  So far as technology has led us into a tight corner, it is those furthest from the cutting edge who will be nearest to the right way.  That being likely, who will say that inaction and thoughtfulness are not work?  The driver is something in a car, too, even when going in reverse.  When the active ones are heading in the wrong direction, those who are doing nothing are at the head of the field.  At times of transition, there are always too many Indians and not enough chiefs, too many pushing the juggernaut, and too few pulling on the steering gear.
    It is hard but we have to try to imagine the psychology of people living under fiscal equality.  The energy of the more energetic people will go into increasing the productivity of the least productive, into helping the handicapped and the criminal become productive.  Since the energetic cannot raise their own level of income except by raising the community’s income, their energy may go into helping weaker members, their tunnel vision may go into community wellbeing, not into ‘private’ personal wellbeing.  Why should people who don’t want to support the community be rewarded?  We are buying social disintegration and so increasing the supply.  
    With some form of equality, there is a level of wellbeing which is easily discerned.  And having attained that level, there is a great sense of security and of fellowship.  In present society, there is no level; no effort effects a rising to any level, any resting point.  Any success just raises one to a different set of Joneses to keep up with, who are also struggling to reach a level.  In present society, there is for all, most of all for the rich, a precipitous drop to very different levels ever yawning before one.  This must excite a lot of adrenalin, a lot of fear, a lot of stress, a lot of craziness.  There is no standard of happiness, no possibility of rest.  In a state of inequality, people are ungenerous.  Living on the slope of the economic tack, the slightest jolt could make one lose one’s foothold.  The collector at the door is perceived as an attack, to be parried, if not with anger with a token amount, 20c or a $1 or $10.  $100 would be less than 1% of annual income and the caller comes but once a year. 
    One can imagine that if we were in a society of equality, and were as accustomed to it as we are accustomed to our present society, then for one individual to stand up out of, against that society, and stand for himself or herself alone might seem very madness.  One can see that it is socially divisive, a separating that is not love of others.  One has to become indifferent to others to want to go alone.  Our present society, where everyone is individual, is not a society at all, but as many societies of one member as there are individuals.  The potential for loneliness is enormous.  Friendships often have to be against the current of competition. 
    I have tried to imagine and conceive here what equality would be like.  Try as I might I have been unable to think of much disadvantage in the most extreme form of equality.  There is no reason why nature’s uneven distribution of talents, abilities, intelligence, health, energy and resources should be taken personally.  It seems work should be rewarded, for in work something is lost and ought to be replaced, but why should a gift of nature be rewarded financially?  Though nature gives special abilities to different body organs, she does not therefore reward them with very different amounts of blood.  No person is an island, no person can get rich when quite alone.  The hunters of a village are honored but share the kill.  Arrogance is antisocial, and ultimate shortsightedness: if you pride yourself on self-sufficiency, imagine yourself without the rest of the universe.  (The mutations that drive evolution come from radiation from the galaxies.) May I suggest you try to imagine and conceive how a world under equality would be.  Would it be something like the state of a children’s party at which the children share?  Why is it moral for children to share at a party and moral for adults not to share?  Someone may answer: because at a party, it is the sharing of a gift; with adults it is the sharing of unequal work.  To which one possible answer is: have you tried to work more equally?  Virtues which involve extremes are usually virtues to the ego, not virtues in truth.  
    If the energetic person’s higher level of activity is natural, then it is a relief to work.  Why then should they be paid for it?  If it is not natural, but forced, by social pressures or by neurosis, then it is better if it is discouraged.  In calculating that the most a person can earn is around $1m, I have assumed no one can work more than 80 hours with world average hardness.  People should at least be discouraged from working more than that.  If all were paid, for existing rather than for working, there would be no stress on what nature thinks we should be doing, no distortion from the natural work within existing to an artificial idea of work that has illeffects.  If all were paid, incentive - the artificial incentive of avarice, of money tunnel-vision - would be lost.  The extreme overincentive of unlimited wealth that produces so many terrible things in human life would be avoided.  Also people would work less, until the natural incentive activated.  Would this be a bad thing?  Why are we on this terrible treadmill of overproduction?  People live on one hundredth the world average: that gives some index of overproduction.  Bushmen get by on 2 hours work per day.  The Swedes have had a 32 hours work week for decades.  ‘But we need to work harder, or more people will starve.’ But starvation is caused by extreme maldistribution, not by underwork.  Babies work.  Slaves need incentives.  If sharing - talents, energy, ideas - is such a bad idea, why do we teach it to children?  Do we in fact have any definition of work apart from the arrogator’s definition as what is profitable to him?  If everyone is paid for existing, so everyone has cash to facilitate exchange and specialisation of occupation, and everyone works much less, won’t that be freedom - the first freedom of thousands of years?  If we judge what is work, won’t we get it wrong?  If we pay for what we think is work, won’t we distort life?  (Adam and Eve - humanity - got into judging  (ate fruit from the tree of good and bad) and this created work.)

5)     ‘But we want to change peoples’ lives.  Farmworkers kill themselves working, living nowhere, travelling all the time, putting up with the pesticides because the growers want it that way.’ Dolores Huerta, La pasionaria of the farmworkers.

on to part 2 of Global Happiness...