We must define pay justice. How can we know how much people should be paid unless we have sound, fundamental ideas of pay justice? James Madison said “The purpose of government is justice”. The state built on injustice cannot stand – so to be democratic, for the people to do their job of ruling, to save the state, to be patriotic, to love your country, to love yourself, to pursue happiness (of which pay justice is a very important part), you need to be able to locate pay justice.

At the moment, many are saying: these people should have less, these others have more. But how much should they have? What are the principles of pay justice? Happiness [everyone's everything], survival of the state, peace, order, satisfaction – all depend on justice. Those are ‘pretty important’ things, yet we look in vain for thoughtful study of where pay justice is. It should have been the focus of all education, from young age right through. People should have been very sophisticated about pay justice, able to pinpoint it by good principles. Instead, all the debate we hear boils down to: they should have less, no, they shouldn’t have less, they should have more, no, they shouldn’t have more.

Pay justice is the great wallflower, waiting to give us the world average pay per hour, which is approximately US $40 per hour including paying housewives and students. Pay justice waits to give us peace and plenty – and give us our future back.

Pay ranges widely while no one asks how widely it should range. How are people going to be able to say: “This far and no further. This is the line between right and wrong, between fairpay and robbery, between fairpay and overpay-underpay.”? Children should all grow up knowing that overpay-underpay is the cause of the shaking of societies to pieces. People should worry about their society being shaken to pieces. People should know that every empire so far has been shaken to pieces by pay injustice. There is no subject closer to civic responsibility and pursuit of happiness – no subject more worth our care and mental labour – and it is utterly neglected. Vigilance is the price of liberty – but vigilance about what? Very few can answer that question.

Proper pay is what a person’s work would win them in a state of nature, plus an equal share of the benefits of division of labour. An equal share, since division of labour is a community effort, with equal contribution, so everyone should reap the benefits equally.

Pay justice is no-pay for no-work, pay only for work [= sacrifice], equal pay for equal work. Pay justice is taking out of the social pool of work as much as you put in, as your work puts in. [We pool the workproducts because of division of labour, and trade is ideally the exchange of items of equal workvalue, in order to remix goods separated by division of labour, job specialisation, to get the mix of goods everyone wants and needs.] The variety of goods we take out is ideally of equal workvalue to the workproducts we produced in our job. Anything more or less than this is overpay or underpay, and overpay-underpay is unjust, causing tensions which escalate endlessly as people try to get justice and people tug to and fro, causing violence, war, crime, weaponry growth – which has grown for 3000 years – and brought us to superextreme pay injustice and danger, and corruption, tyranny, slavery, wageslavery, disorder, undemocracy, falling states – all our gigantic problems.

What things are there, that justify unequal pay per unit of work, unequal pay/hr, unequal pay/yr? Are there any? Provided society pays students for studying, there are NO reasons for unequal pay per hour. Close scrutiny of the reasons given for unequal pay do not, as far as I can see, stand up to rational examination. (I’m open to rational discussion.) One common, universally accepted reason given for payment is personal gifts – he’s really smart, she’s especially talented, but reason says that these gifts are work done by mother nature. It doesn’t take any work, any sacrifice, by anyone, to have these gifts, and using them doesn’t mean the gifted person is sacrificing any more than a lesser gifted person does who uses the gifts he got. No one got to choose greater or lesser gifts. No one who has lower intellect or more fragile health or lesser innate abilities chose that for themselves, so it is no part of justice to force the lesser-gifted to give up equal pay in order to give overpay to those who won greater gifts. Rationally, [as distinct from the irrational invalid fallacious argument to the authority of irrational but accepted ideas, in which people put such great reliance] pay for natural gifts is as irrational as payment for receiving Christmas gifts, which has not received the fallacious support of custom.

Personal sacrifice of time and effort spent developing one’s gifts is different. Pay for developing gifts [of commercial value] is just, because developing gifts is work. There is no *reason* anyone can give for payment for natural gifts, and no reason anyone can give for others having to fund this payment, and because the pool of wealth is finite, it is the underpaid who must take less for their sacrifice in order for there to be more to give the better-gifted. Everyone loves being paid for gifts, because they hope to benefit by them, but it hasn’t worked out like that and it never will work out like that. 99% are paid less than the world average pay per hour. The downside of funding this payment is, for 99% of people, much greater than the benefit, but few are aware of this – of how they rob themselves by supporting this payment, of how they con themselves out of money by this, of how they open the floodgates of limitless overpay-underpay [and consequent violence and misery] by this support.

Again, and similarly, people support pay for experience – but cold, hard sense says that experience is gained at no extra sacrifice of time and effort beyond that made in doing the paid work that provided the experience. Again, people support it, defend it, although for 99%, the costs of funding this exceed the financial benefit to them. They con themselves out of their full rightful pay by mis-thinking that pay for experience gives them more money, and they thus open the floodgates to unlimited uncontrollable growth of overpay-underpay [and consequent unlimited uncontrollable violence, war, crime, weaponry ever-growing]. People don’t want to look at justice because they fear it will mean less money – they never suspect that justice will mean more money and the destruction of violence.

How could stopping myself from getting pay for things like gifts and experience give me *more* money? It doesn’t make sense to people – it doesn’t make sense to people because they are looking at a tiny part of the picture – themselves only. Not being paid yourself for non-work things gives you more money because it stops others being paid for these things at your expense. Overpay, pay for nonwork, is funded by work for no pay, underpay, by others. The overpay buys things other people have worked to make. Your participation in this injustice prevents you stopping others benefiting from this leak – the line is crossed, erased, and there are no principles of justice left to limit pay, to prevent unlimited pay/hr, hence we have pay per hour, after 3000 years’ growth of inequality, from $10,000,000 to 1cent – an inequality violence misery war crime weaponry tyranny slavery undemocracy unliberty unfraternity corruption brutality torture state-terrorism private-terrorism warmongering cannonfoddering disinformation rights-trampling factor of one billion, and rising – to extinction soon, thanks to e=mc2. Happy people have no history. We have heaps of history – and history is now accelerating exponentially.

Get the idea of pay justice, and we get a history-free golden age. Keep faith with pay injustice, and we get oblivion. The bombs are global. Global means every house. Culture is based on ideas. Our idea for 3000 years has been wrong – it has produced underpay misery for 99%, overpay misery for 1%, and violence for everyone.

Overpay is necessarily always happiness-negative, because 1. satisfaction waits on desire, overpay is just 3000 pairs of shoes for two feet, 1000 rooms for one body, etc., and 2. erosion of overpay [individual, national and imperial] [by both underpaid and overpaid] is myriad and relentless, so the labour of keeping it is constant and danger-fraught: the sense of justice in people is indestructible.

The same “logic whoopsie” governs the universal support for private inheritance. The heir has done nothing to deserve that money, done nothing to earn/create that wealth. People see themselves getting money from private inheritance, they don’t see themselves funding this gift, impoverishing themselves, and they don’t see they are thereby starting the evergrowth of inequality violence misery.

The same logical error governs the universal support of profits above fairpay for work. By definition, the owners have done nothing to earn profits above fairpay for work – others fund that gift. For various reasons, it is not good to interfere directly with this injustice. It can be controlled at the macro-macro level by making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. Everyone has done the work that the overfortunes represent and buy, so overfortunes belong to everyone.

And the same logical error [seeing only part of the picture, imagining themselves gaining, not seeing themselves losing by funding the bigger gains for others, not seeing themselves opening the gates to ever-growing inequality violence misery, which gets to everyone, overpaid and underpaid] governs the support of capital gains. People do the work that builds cities or other infrastructure, but only landowners get the added value – and get it in proportion to their fortunes – for no work, for no sacrifice of personal time and effort to working.

We only have to see the reality, we only have to see the real enormous badness of pay injustice, and the real enormous goodness of pay justice, and human culture is changed forever, violence dies forever – [war is not human nature - human nature is unchanging and violence has grown for 3000 years - no correlation, therefore no causality. And so-called religious and racial wars are pay-injustice wars along religious or racial lines; where there are religious or racial differences without pay injustice, there are no wars - again, no correlation, so no causality.] Culture is ideas. A change of ideas is change of culture. And the ideas are not hard to see.

No force is needed, just education, just epiphany – no evergrowing bureaucracy, but a massive reduction of bureaucracy [lower taxes, more money and freedom for productivity] – no group, just individual realization and tell your friends – no economic upheaval, just a little law with gigantic benefit – no restriction of ambition, just efficient prevention of evergrowth of pay injustice. Pay injustice is the vital justice, because money is the joker good, good for most things, including social power.

Justice causes happiness. We can secure far, far greater happiness for this whole planet, but not by pretending to believe in justice but by knowing the reality: pay injustice is theft, theft is injury, injury ricochets untiringly as atoms. As doormats, people are totally unreliable – every plutocracy has fallen. Where is Spanish Inca gold? Honey attracts bears. The Golden Rule is ironclad: hurt people and they hurt back. Other-injury is self-injury – ask Hitler, Marie Antoinette, Ceausescu, Nero, Richard III.

Justice is not a cost, it is happiness out of the vast quagmire, at the cost of objective, patient examination of a new expression of an ancient idea, at the cost of ditching idols that have hurt us enormously, that are set to kill us – is the price too high?

Everyone, understandably, but mistakenly, as it turns out – it isn’t in their interests after all – wants maximal pay for minimal work.
So everyone supports the specious arguments for pay for no work, like: risk, delaying gratification, responsibility, stress, willingness to work crazy hours, creativity, vision, being on call, mental effort, mental focus. (See below for explanation that they are in fact pay for no work.) People focus on the good of pay for no work, and overlook the bad of it. People want the apparent good of overpay so much, that an automatic mental delete function makes it very difficult to see the enormous downside, even when it is explained. People simply cannot pay enough attention to the reasoning, because it is, they mistakenly think, not in their interest. This is how we have conned ourselves, richest to poorest, out of 99% of natural birthright levels of happiness. This is why we are today drowning in history. (Happy people have no history.) This is the root of ‘all evils’, of 99% of problems of all types.

The underpaid want more, to reduce their underpay. This means they are perpetually scrabbling and scratching at the overpaid. And this means that overpay is brief, arduous and dangerous. The overpaid are under siege from the whole of the rest of the world. Perpetual siege. Which must in time exhaust the funds and power of the overpaid. Because of gravity, no one can go higher without someone going lower. Everyone is scrabbling to get higher, and the overpaid are very few, so clearly many have fallen. (History is biased to telling the stories of ‘winners’ (overpaid), because everyone mistakenly thinks overpay is good, so we don’t hear much about the equal number of fallers from overpay, so we overestimate how safe it is, high up.)

If we come to see as fact that overpay (wealth, over-wealth, overpay) is miserable, necessarily miserable, then we will be free to see the rationality of the demonstrations of the pays for no work.

Overpay and underpay cause violence, which escalates perpetually, destroying quality of life of everyone. All the work equals all the pay equals all the work-products. So overpay causes underpay (theft, theft of money, the joker good, good for most things, good for essentials and social power too), which causes righteous anger, which causes violence, which escalates perpetually. One injury causes an endless escalating vendetta back-and-forth of injuries (Example Israel. Israeli average income 20 times Palestinian).

Explanations:

Risk is pay for no work, because risk is not work. Only work produces wealth (work-products), so only work deserves wealth. There is no measurement of risk, and no way of determining pay per unit of risk, if we could measure risk, so no one is, and no one can be, paid for risk. What there is, is people being paid, and people taking risk, but no pay for risk. The overpaid put forward every argument in defense of their wealth as part of their self-defense. Words are cheaper than swords. Even false arguments are valuable, because they fool so many. And these arguments acquire the force of custom: people begin to feel it can’t be wrong, because everyone has thought it for so long. There is nothing special about business risk, it does not deserve special treatment. If there was measurement of risk, we would find that there is no correlation between risk and pay. Worker risk is far greater. The risker is risking for his own benefit. Do we pay the fisherman for risking his bait in trying to catch a fish for himself? People rake money by various means, and the risk argument is one of the ways they try to reduce the opposition to it. And most people cannot see the answer to the risk argument, so it wins by default, and then it acquires the force of custom. If it were true that we could pay for risk, and true that we should pay for risk, we would have to run around assessing every risk, and paying for it. And how would we justify people having to pay for this payment for risk? The absurdity is very hard for us to see, because we are blinded by custom and by the ‘over-confidence’ of the person giving the risk argument.

Pay for delaying gratification, by going to school. In justice, students are paid for studying (work), and, in justice, they are paid by society, which benefits. We, the perpetual nutty screw-ups, who will do anything in an illogical way if at all possible, get parents, scholarships or the students to pay the students for studying (theft from parents, scholarships, students), and then give a market-variable (unjust, overpay or underpay) premium for having studied. There is no work in having studied. The ‘smart’ ones give this argument in defense of pay for having studied, and the rest cannot see through it. Pay for delaying gratification! Oh, I see, the students are superior, fine, disciplined people who, unlike some they could think of, are fine enough to delay gratification. Students don’t live on air. And they don’t delay gratification. It sounds so plausible, doesn’t it. The uneducated are running around gratifying themselves without stint, but students are delaying gratification. The human characteristic of attributing virtues to oneself is well known. And the rest of the people swallow this falsehood and the insult it contains.

Every overpay that escapes detection contributes to the pay injustice (injury, theft) and every pay injustice produces its quota of violence, which gets to everyone, from richest to poorest. People flee to wealth for security, but has wealth been secure? Does one observe in history that the richer a person has been, the less they have been attacked? No, because, while wealth is power to defend oneself, it is also stimulus to be attacked. Caesar, Ceausescu, Marie Antoinette, Hitler, etc, etc, etc. The person with the goods of 1000 people has 1000 enemies. Honey attracts bears. Bigger banks have stronger vaults because they need them. Every empire and plutocracy has fallen.

Both the overpaid and the underpaid are miserable. Overpay is proportional to attack and isolation. And the overpaid cannot get more satisfaction, because of the limits of desires. Satisfaction waits on desire. The poor man searches for food, the rich man searches for appetite. But everyone is still convinced that wealth is good, so the wealthy are mindlessly convinced they are happy. And everyone is subject to violence, which is proportional to overpay-underpay. And overpay-underpay is from 10,000th of world average to 100,000 times the world-average pay, of $40 for every working person, paying housewives and students too, $100,000 a year for every working person in the world, including housewives and students, or $200,000 a year per family.

Pay for responsibility or stress is pay for no work. It sounds so plausible to us: He has more responsibility, so he should be paid more. There is no work in responsibility. The person high-up in an organisational hierarchy is just doing a job with the abilities he has. Responsibility isn’t harder work. It is just the same hardness of work higher up. People lower down are not working irresponsibly. There is everywhere this conviction that higher up is better, superior. There is deference to this attitude. There is no measuring of ‘responsibility’, no way of determining the just pay per unit of ‘responsibility’, if we could measure it. It is just the old underlying excuse, I deserve more than others, and people deferring to that. It just drives the pernicious ladder of ‘success’, on which everyone, from top to bottom, is extremely unhappy. (Being ‘happy’ by ignoring all the unpleasant realities of present human life doesn’t count.)

Willingness to work crazy hours. Oh, he’s so good! He, unlike lesser folk, is willing to suffer crazy hours. What a guy! Noble! Fine! Throw money at him! Justice pays for hours of work. Working twice as many hours doesn’t justify being paid any amount; it justifies being paid twice as much. Put twice as much in to the social pool of wealth by twice as much work, take twice as much out, no injury to others, no anger, no injury, no violence, no weapon growth, no nuclear extinction.

Pay for creativity, vision, mental effort, focus, is pay for no work. Ideas come without effort. Justice pays for work before and after ideas, work implementing ideas, but not ideas, which are not work. They come in a moment. They are gifts from nowhere. It is impossible to work harder per unit of time. Slackers get noticed or fired. Everyone works about the same, per unit of time. It takes more energy to try to get away with slacking than it does to just work.

In all these excuses for limitless overpay, there is the underlying attitude: I want to be paid more, I am better than other people, If I have got more money, it is because I am divinely superior in my work. And we think: If I get paid more, I will be able to attribute my higher pay to these fine reasons, too.

But everyone loses. Everyone is stressed climbing, everyone is rising and falling, security, safety, peace is minimal. Everyone is being pressed down on from above, everyone is being attacked from above and below. And everyone could stand on the ground of equal pay for equal work, no pay for no work, no work for no pay! Fraternity, equality, justice, peace, non-injury, everyone mates, friends, no attack, a golden age. Work, create work-products, get fairpay for work, no problem. The more overpaid you get, the more underpay you create, and the more you get attacked. Happiness is horizontal. Vertical society is hell from top to bottom. Pay justice pays the highest dividends, and we utterly neglect to collect these dividends. We are all losers. Pay justice is win-win. We are in a super-extreme lose-lose system. Thinking that somehow, somewhere, sometime, we will be winners. With bombs going off louder and louder in our ears. We ignore the noise, and carry on. If limited intelligence was gold, we’d all be rich. We are all extremely poor.

Why do we love pay injustice so much? Let pay justice flourish and let all other inequalities flourish. The person who wants to prove he is superior is a person who feels inferior.

It would be impractical to try to root out all these and the other overpays. We can compensate for them by making everyone in the world equal heirs of large deceased estates, and giving everyone in the world equal shares of a 1%-a-month increase in the money supply. All the overpays make money pile up with few, we spread it out again among all. Everyone is happy. Anger goes, violence goes. It benefits everyone, so we only need to study and ponder until we see it. We don’t need to force it on anyone.

Obviously, everyone is unhappier if one person has all. We are close to that, with 1% of people with 98% of world income and wealth. Our systems have been like 100 children with 1000 sweets, all grabbing from each other. No fun at all. ‘Stealing’ from Nature is harmless, because nature is happy for us to steal from her. Stealing from people is dangerous. There isn’t a shortage. There is super-abundance. Inequality (pay injustice) drives inequality. The underpaid are, naturally, trying to get more; the overpaid are trying to get more, because they are under attack from the underpaid (99% of people) trying to get more. Accept that people have never taken and will never take theft lying down, and aim for pay justice. Individual contribution to wealth (work-products) by work is limited. Getting more than your fair share is hell, getting less than your fair share is hell. Pay justice is heaven.

One great advantage of pay justice is that freedom to search for the work that gives maximal intrinsic satisfaction is maximal. The corruption of the personal search for the work of maximal intrinsic satisfaction by ‘better’ pay in other work is minimal. And thus job satisfaction and personal fulfilment is maximal. Everyone is happy.

Love of overpay (theft) is the root of all evils. Virtually all evils will disappear with pay justice. Cut that and the whole tree of problems will fall and die.

You can work very hard, be extremely well educated and intelligent – BUT unless you picked the “right” field of work, you can easily find yourself SOL.

After all, if the “education” that you sank years of your life and much of your savings into is suddenly “outsourced to India” you can work as hard as you like but will find yourself struggling to stay north of the poverty line. The people who went to school for engineering and computer programming in the 80′s and 90′s weren’t “lazy” and the weren’t “stupid” but they didn’t choose the “right field.” OOOOOOHHHHH MY BAD!!! I broke my back in the wrong field…I DESERVE a life of poverty.

The trouble is that there has been a narrowing of fields that are truly remunerative. If you were “stupid enough” not to select from the handful of career choices that have remained remunerative, you are in a world of hurt just now.

I’m a Ph.D. trying who worked roughly 70 hours a week for 15 years in a field that no longer has any real opportunity. I’m now working 70 hours a week on a business start-up. Forgive me if I find the grandstanding by those who happened to luck out and hit on a jackpot career none too amusing.

The underlying question is this: “Do poor people who find themselves in financial hardship deserve our sympathy and deserve to be treated with dignity?”

Another unstated question is: Do smart hard-working people who work on Wall Street deserve to earn more than “ordinary” people?

IMHO a complicated set of questions.

To the first question: My answer is a qualified yes. Smart, hard-working people deserved to be rewarded for their — honest — work and contribution to the real economy.

As for a Bollywood glamour. We have it in spades and it is a dream.

Want to include a few comments in a forthcoming post on my Blog. James Kwak is happy with that but mentions, technically, each of you own the copyright in your own comments.

Anyone here prefer that their comments are not used in another Blog?

If so, let me know and I will respect that. Email to learningfromdogs AT gmail DOT com

The idea which seems to find support here is the assumption that wealth accumulation is an obviously laudable goal. This says volumes. What if wealth accumulation is not a laudable goal but is actually a pathology? Perhaps the real answer to the question is that truly intelligent (emotionally as well as intellectually) and hard-working humans work to create a more compassionate civilization where the natural world is respected and where self-understanding, and therefore understanding of, and compassion for, others is a treasured characteristic. This would be a world which has a future instead of a downward spiral of violence and environmental destruction. One would think that this is pretty obvious, and one would think that, after the last year or so, the mental world inhabited by the most privileged members of the Financial/Economic sectors would have been revealed as pathological as regards the future of the human race.

This does not mean that there are not honorable people in the privileged classes (isn’t it interesting how our language is weighted… what does “honorable” mean?) or mean and reprehensible people in the working classes. There is a great deal more gray than black-and-white. However, for a very long time societies have evolved patterns of behavior and structures which have the effect of maintaining the powerful (wealthy) in their position. Part of that is the recognition of up-and-coming members of classes not in the club. It is surprising if you find this surprising.

Also, a fourth factor, other than class, intelligence or hard work should be mentioned as regards to outcomes- frugality. It makes a big difference.

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

The point being that as conscious beings we have the right and our obligation to improve our situation – we can’t use the “natural” order as an excuse to avoid the hard work involved in providing liberty for all.

For example, consider a terminally ill cancer patient who is guaranteed to die within six months. If he kills someone right before he dies, there will be no opportunity to punish him in his current lifetime. Similarly, if he saves someone’s life, there will be no opportunity to reward him before he dies. So it will have to be postponed to a future lifetime.

My key point is this: whenever some asks “What have I done to deserve this?”, the answer is never “nothing”.

Stupid argument right? Yes, but it makes as much sense as a moral case for reditribution amongst human beings that is argued on the same basis. Look, there are probably an infinite number of ways that social organization could be accomplished. The particular arrangement we have is a contingent fact of our particular development but it has one obvious thing going for it. It’s relatively stable and people seem to be able to keep the species going in its presence. There are a lot more ways of being dead than there are of being alive. Sticking with what works and has worked for quite some time is not intrinsically a stupid idea.

At the very least, people need to be really, really cautious about which direction they jump in if they want to change the social order. All sorts of phenomena work in concert to make communication and social cohesion possible and changing one part without looking at the whole from a vantage point of an understanding we do not yet possess is dangerous.

Beware the law of unintended consequences.

Moaning about the wrong people breeding too much has been popular with the simple-minded wannabe elite all through the millenia. Wherever there are written records you find somebody complaining about the poor the weak the undesirable having too many children.
But if you really want to be worthy of joining that proud line of ancestors you have to include the “misshapen” and “mentally lacking”
- imagine the horror if they are allowed to breed.
but this time around please don’t call it euthanasia, call it by its proper name which is premeditated m..rder.