I cobbled together the following (hopefully helpful) observations from recent personal correspondence with an egalitarian friend. We were discussing the global “financial” crisis, and hearing ever-more-dire expectations/predictions of full-on econo-socio-political collapse. While escalating fears of impoverishment and chaos are all too easily understood in light of events and people’s degree of economic confusions, we’d like to add these considerations to the “collapse conversation”:

First, the convulsion is in money and credit, not in substantial wealth. The substantial wealth is still there; the fields, the plants, the animals, the buildings, the people who labour.

Second, the response to the crisis will always be underestimating the size of the crisis - will always be “behind-hand” in facing facts. People will continue to respond late and inadequately – they will be slow to look outside their paradigms - but there will be responses, which will be increasingly realistic, so there will be money and therefore some transport and trade. Collapse is never total, and every incremental collapse will increase realism and thus reduce suffering. The demands of the people will produce some response, for no ruling class can afford to secure themselves against a too-angry populace; they have to give something to keep anger sufficiently low for them to be safe.

[Note: This next is a reference to corrective measures I will be suggesting elsewhere in this forum.] The solutions offered by our plan are never irrelevant, because they are realistic. The trouble is that when there is no obvious trouble, people are too unreal to face facts and do anything practical, and when there is trouble, there is little leisure to consider solutions. Like with fixing the hole in the roof: no need to (they think) when it isn’t raining, and no chance to when it is. The solutions we give are the realism that people will be driven to by crisis, and the solutions will reduce the crisis. The collapse will continue until people become realistic.

The collapse can be avoided at any time by countering the inequality – insofar as people reduce the inequality, the crisis will be reduced - nothing else will reduce the collapse. There is plenty of substantial wealth; the only lack is distribution of means to trade (money).

People are thinking of a single sharp total collapse, but it collapses in stages, and some response is made – never fully realistic, but partially realistic. It can’t collapse to zero in one go. Loss of confidence in the money is a matter of degree. Even false confidence keeps the money up. And the more money evaporates, the more confidence there is in the remaining money. The money collapses towards reaching equality with the substantial wealth. The closer it gets to substantial wealth, the slower it falls. Eventually the substantial wealth (goods and services) holds up the money. Loss of money of course impacts on production, which requires trade, which requires money – but money never collapses totally, but collapses in stages. All the safety nets in society do not disappear totally, at once, but in stages. And the more things fall, the closer they are to recovery.

Administrators come and go, but Governments have never fallen, never disappeared: there is always someone picking up the pieces and starting again. Government will disappear only when the second to last person disappears: as soon as you have group, you have government. People will always try to increase their safety, comfort, etc. There can be a degree of anarchy (using the term as commonly (if erroneously) generally understood to mean chaos, loss of beneficial social order), but there cannot be total anarchy, because people are not totally anarchic. Some people can have anarchic episodes, but all the people cannot have total anarchy all the time. If people were totally anarchic, they would never have planted a crop or built a house.

The functional value of money is proportional to confidence. When there is overconfidence, as we have experienced, and that confidence declines, money disappears – but money is prevented from going to nothing by the work and people and products, which are the substance behind the money. There may be a period of under-confidence (after a crash), when people underestimate the value of money, but the substantial wealth will buoy this up – will after a time show that people are underestimating the substantial wealth backing the money.

At any of these stages, all money is worth something, and a billion is ALWAYS worth a billion times as much as one dollar. Repeat: a billion dollars is ALWAYS worth a billion times as much as one dollar.

World wealth has dropped maybe 10% - ‘lost’ trillions, of course, but not a big percentage of the total. It will drop further too – maybe 20%, something of that order, but not 50% or 75%. The correction happens when the overvaluation is big enough to be visible to people – and that is only 5% - something like that. Real estate has dropped 50% in places, in some countries, but the overall average for the whole economy is smaller.

We can remind nervous, concerned people that if they don’t understand it all then they do not know that there is no solution. There is still land and people and work and systems and buildings and money. These will produce something, and the production will buoy the money to some extent. The fundamentals are still there – the ultimate safety net is people, who do stuff. Forget money for the time and look at the fundamentals, the substantial wealth, which is everywhere: people, land, etc. As said, the money at the top didn’t disappear - a billion is still worth a billion times as much as one dollar: a part of the value of every dollar disappeared. There will be a contraction, not a disappearance. The snail is pulling in his horns – he’s not vanishing. Part of the lifestyle will disappear – something off the top – a drop - but not to zero, but to 70% or 50%. Food doesn’t disappear till you reach 1%. Luxury spending increased after the 1929 crash, because those who cashed up just before the crash could then buy cheap. So clearly wealth didn’t disappear.

Pay justice is always a live issue, always the issue that cuts across all other issues *especially* in depressions! In good times, the people don’t mind super-overpay. In bad times, FDR’s appear. FDR nearly put a 100% tax on income over $25,000 ($300,000 in modern dollars) and regretted he didn’t. The next FDR may do it in this bigger depression.

Again, total collapse is impossible. Under-confidence is possible for a time – money is proportional to confidence – confidence never totally disappears, because there is still people, workers, land, buildings, infrastructure, systems, etc. Even the unrealistic confidence (the delay in facing facts) holds up money. There can only be a correction to the overconfidence, which for a while produces an over correction, but this overcorrection gets corrected by the substantial wealth showing the value of the money. There cannot be a total collapse, because land and people and infrastructure do not disappear. The stages of the collapse may be terrible in local effects (riots, etc), but overall, the substantial wealth sustains in a substantial way. It may look like things are in freefall, and headed for zero, but the trampoline of substantial wealth is below – the momentum of the fall to the trampoline drives the trampoline down below its level for a while, but the trampoline pulls the level of money back up to level.

Even if all the governments and money and trade disappeared, there would be people and work, options, efforts, rolling up of sleeves and fulfilling needs using whatever was available. The ultimate wealth is people and nature – they produce everything, and will continue to do so.

Oil will decline over 50-100 years, the price of oil will gradually rise and there will be less and less movement, but food transport will be the last to go – and local food use will happily increase; at the moment New Zealand is importing Italian kiwifruit! At the worst, we will go back to pre-oil lifestyle – the lifestyle that got us through till 1900. The higher the price goes, the slower we will use up oil – the more economical we will be with it. There is plenty of coal, and people will plant more trees if they need them – just like they bred horses when they needed them.

People’s first reaction to change is big reaction – then they settle down and bear it. The rhetoric you get now is their first reaction, expressing the change in the most dramatic terms because change is new to them – but they quieten down as they get used to it. If you woke up and found the skies were now red instead of blue, your first reaction would be strong, but after a while you would get used to it.

As I said before, the drop in confidence has removed something like 5-10% of world apparent wealth (the figure they put on wealth) – which is not a big difference. Of course, this is trillions, which sounds very dramatic and frightening, (which sells newspapers) but as a percentage, it is not large. It will drop to something around 15-20% at the bottom of under-confidence, before realism will reassert itself and bring the under-confidence back up to a realistic figure, between the peak and the trough.

And all the time this is going on, the substantial wealth is undiminished.

The thing is, people forget to look for the whole picture. They mistake part of the picture as being the whole reality – they mistake jigsaw puzzle piece for puzzle picture. One piece may be dark, and they think the picture is dark because the brighter parts of the picture are not in view from their perspective, are not in their consciousness – “omg! Loss of trillions! The sky is falling!” – but no.

You just have to make a big noise around an hypothesis long enough and people will take it for truth. Throw a smokescreen of words and people will shout fire. Combine inadequate education in fallacious reasoning, the assertive overconfidence a phd gives some people, the people’s naïve reliance on phd’s and government and the media’s profiting from sensational news…and you get universal untruth. Add the universal hatred of being proved wrong and you have untruth set in concrete.

When you have a little pay injustice, then something like 40% of people will be slightly overpaid. As the pay injustice grows, the top overpay grows and the percentage of overpaid shrinks. The more extreme overpay (which is now 100,000 times average pay) takes more underpaid people (99% are currently underpaid) plus more extreme degree of underpay to finance it (we now have 90% of people on 100th to 10,000th of average pay). That is the point, and no financial crisis changes that.

Also, volatility in markets is proportional to pay injustice. More power in fewer hands means more power to make huge bubbles and be way above the law, buying the law, owning the law, making the laws, doing exactly as they please, without any checks or scrutiny. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and vigilance about fairpay has been zero – he’s a billionaire, ah, how lovely, what a great man, we owe him a lot, we must be gentle with him, not anger or doubt him. God and the rich – these are how people project their great desire for a good loving father to take care of them, so they can live thought-free, without civic responsibility. It doesn’t matter how much he beats people, we don’t lose faith in him because it would mean we had to think and seek the truth and keep watch. What luck for governments that people don’t think (Hitler said that).

Not all the leverage ratio of the banks will disappear in the correction. People who say that this thin-air money isn’t real don’t understand money. There is the substantial wealth (the trampoline) and there is the confidence level, which goes overconfident and then under-confident and then returns to level (the trampoline). In the panic, the confidence level goes below trampoline level and the trampoline pulls it back up. After the correction, the trampoline level for bank leverage ratio may be 20-1, 10-1, whatever, but not 1-1.

The bank leverage ratio creates money out of thin air, but this DILUTES all the money, it doesn’t destroy all the money. Twice the money means each dollar buys half as much, and incomes double. The injustice arises between old dollars and new dollars – getting paid in old dollars and buying in new dollars. The injustice in inflation is the government and banks stealing the national credit to back the dollars. The national credit belongs to the people who work, who have made the infrastructure, the substantial wealth that gives the nation its credibility or credit rating. The nation can sustain a certain level of debt without creditors losing confidence in that level of debt, and the level of debt is forced to return to a credible level of debt. There is never total loss of confidence in a nation, because there are still workers, and infrastructure and nature’s bounty (land, sun, muscles, brains etc).

Like bubbles in a bath; the bath can sustain a certain level of bubbles (credit) because there is soapiness (infrastructure, systems) and there is agitation of the bathwater (work) – but sometimes there is a big bubble that is going to burst and the level of bubbles is going to suddenly drop. The stock market steadily grows with infrastructure growth. In a depression there is a blip of overconfidence and under-confidence, but it returns in around 3 years after the crash to the steady rising line (the trampoline).

So our numbers remain good (Note: This is referring to the figures we’ve used to calculate fairpay), only needing change when the government devalues the dollars, as in Zimbabwe.

The point remains that we should prevent individuals (wealthpower giants) being able to blow huge bubbles that temporarily affect the national credit and stability and order when they burst.

At the peak of the overconfidence before the correction, the national wealth is of the order of 5-10% overvalued. The correction comes when the overvaluation becomes large enough to be visible to creditors, who are of course keeping a sharp lookout; it is their money on the chopping block.

It takes time to work through the system, but if central banks double the money, income and prices double, too. Incomes and prices have been rising for many decades, for centuries. You know what prices and incomes were 200 years ago – a penny bought you a good hot meal, incomes were $100 a year – that sort of thing. $25,000 in 1930 is $300,000 now. Global inflation at 4% a year doubles the money every 18 years. In the cold war years, there was about 10% a year inflation, which is why house prices rose 10% a year in that period. The inflation is a sneaky tax, which they used to finance the cold war, buy all those bombs. They then lend the new (stolen) money back to the people, making the people pay maybe three times the loan on a 30 year mortgage (stealing again) – for the privilege of borrowing money the government (devoured by the superrich) stole by the inflation, which dilutes your dollars, making you need to borrow more.

Keynes said: governments can take money from the people through inflation. He should have said: governments DO take money…but he was going soft on the ruling class, to which he belonged. People find it very hard to believe the rich are thieves. The rich fool themselves and then fool the people, who they keep ignorant of economic realities by promoting economists who are fooled, who can’t see what the rich don’t want people to see. False arguments are cheaper than guns to keep the people suckers. It is only in the last 200 years that the ruling classes have allowed the people to be literate, and they haven’t yet allowed the people to be economically literate. And the people are too unwilling to think their way through the smokescreen thrown up by self-deception and greed.

The strong point we have to make is that overpay is bad, is happiness-negative for the overpaid as well as the underpaid. If people see this (and good sense and all history prove it), justice will start looking good to them.

At the moment, most of both underpaid and overpaid are thinking overpay is good. People are thinking in twos, in opposite poles, not seeing the option of the middle as the best alternative. They are thinking: underpay is bad, so overpay must be good - instead of thinking: underpay and overpay are bad, so pay justice is good. Like the Sophie Tucker saying: I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich – rich is better. But it isn’t; what’s better and best for prosperity, safety, and happiness is fairpay. Most of the present overpaid is new money, so old money has (with some few exceptions) fallen from overpay and overpower. Rags to riches to rags. The turnover among the overpaid is very high – crests don’t stay up.

US $40 per hour for all working people including housewives, and students who successfully study in fields society wants studied, is a good but not exact figure for fairpay before the meltdown, and the meltdown takes off around 5-10%, and inflation is running at 4% a year, so the figure is perfectly good. It is a round figure anyway ($100,000 per year means $100,000 plus or minus 20%) – and it doesn’t matter what the figure is anyway, as long as it makes the point that something like 99% of people are now underpaid, that fairpay is higher for most people than what they get now or have ever got, that extreme pay injustice means most are below fairpay and will be paid more, they deserve to be paid more (they are creating that much substantial wealth (goods and services) by their work). All the work is equal to all the workproducts is equal to all the money, so world-average pay per hour is world-annual income divided by total workhours – around $40 US. World annual income is $25 trillion (1987) inflation adjusted – global inflation since 1987 has been between 32% and 4% - $25 trillion compounded with global inflation each year since 1987 brings it to $300 trillion (2009). Total workhours is total workers (around 4 billion), times world-average hours per year (around 2500).

No work equals no workproducts equals money worth nothing. Twice as much work equals twice as much workproduct equals money worth twice as much (a dollar buying twice as much).

Our figures are still good figures in the crisis – they are not just guesses – they are round figures because there are a million minor factors that affect figures to a small extent, and all the figures are constantly changing (a little) all the time - but they are solid within plus or minus 20%.

One thing is absolutely solid – when you have super-extreme pay injustice, most people are below the average. The average is higher than anyone imagines – and that average is plenty for all. When you have a very skewed graph, with most low and a few very, very, very high, the average has to be well above what most get. The very, very, very high incomes ‘pull up’ the average – and we have highest income 10,000,000 times what 90% of people are getting, so they are pulling up the average well above what most people are getting, above what 99% are getting, above what 80% of Americans are getting.

People see many poor, and they understandably but mistakenly think that the average will be below what ordinary Americans are getting – that the many poor will pull down the average below the ‘American ordinary’ level. But it is not the ‘ordinary’ American (neither rich nor poor) who is richest. The relatively few, the 1% who are overpaid up to 100,000 times average, pulls up the world average well above the American average. 50% of Americans have less than $2000 net equity (net assets – wealth) and 80% of Americans are below the average.

People got by up to 1800 – in fact pretty well, worldwide, before the first world imperialism (plunder) went into high gear with industrial technology (guns, trains, etc) and impoverished the third world (after impoverishing most in the first world). And productivity has multiplied 20-fold since 1800 – so, again, there is plenty – there is super-abundance. If average income in 1800 was adequate, average income (substantial wealth, good and services) today is 20 times adequate.

Our figures are from Sprout and Weaver, International Distribution of Income 1960-1987 Kyklos journal, volume 45 1992 pages 237-258 - inflation adjusted using IMF/ILO inflation figures. You have to compound the annual inflation figures – global annual income is now $300 trillion. Since 1987, global inflation went from 15% up to 32% in the early 90s and then down to 4% now. The Sprout and Weaver figures are PPP figures (purchase price parity figures) – which adjusts for the fact that products are cheaper in poor areas - supermarkets in poor areas have cheaper prices than supermarkets in ‘upmarket’ areas – they take smaller profits (= they steal less per customer).

With pay injustice, the majority are always going to be below the average. The larger the pay injustice, the larger the majority who are below. With the real super-extreme pay injustice, 99% are below. Think of our swimming pool graph – if the pay justice level = one metre deep, and in reality 90% of the pool area ranges between 1 cm and 1/10th mm deep, then obviously most of the pool is practically empty and most of the water is up in the thin but very tall (100 kilometres tall!!) needle of overpay. The giant sucking machine of the legal thefts (and the successful illegal thefts) has done its work: we are relatively very close to one person having all (very close to maximal pay injustice).

The 1000+ billionaires are economically the third richest country in the world. People dismiss the superrich because they are few, and because people cannot really conceive how extreme a billion dollars income per year is, relative to average or ‘ordinary’. A billion is 10,000 times average and 20,000 times American ‘ordinary’. ie, taking out 10,000 times what the billionaire puts in to the social pool of wealth by his work. The highest annual revealed income is $30 billion – and the highest annual concealed income is higher. Obviously the super-superrich have good reason to conceal, for if people knew the highest income they might wake up to the fact they are being robbed, and take action. Every plutocracy has fallen when things (poverty-wealth, slavery-tyranny) got so extreme that the people finally woke up – witness the American, French and Russian revolutions. Unfortunately, even then, the people still did not ‘get’ the absolute essential importance of pay justice, and let it go away again - pay ranged from 1cent to $10,000 per hour in America in the 1880s.

NO ONE is a winner with inequality. The overpaid (both nations and individuals) are constantly falling and being replaced, like the water in a Las Vegas needle fountain – because overpay is attacked by both overpaid and underpaid, both internally and externally – attacked with intensity proportional to the extremeness of the pay injustice. Both overpay and underpay are stimuli to attack. The overpaid are attacked by both overpaid and underpaid – by everyone, including their subordinates, including their families. It stands to reason – and all history has no exceptions to this.

People think that more money is always better because they ignore or forget the attack element. They focus only on the money, using selective consciousness, deleting or censoring the reality of the attack element. Conquering is the beginning of troubles – look what troubles came to the whites in South Africa – what troubles come to America today. Plundering makes enemies, enemies make defence needs, defence needs force more plundering (both internal and external), which makes more enemies (both internal and external). Eventually cost of defence exceeds income and the empire falls. The largest fortune is always smaller than the rest of the world, so it must fall – for as long as people have stomachs to feed and need to place their feet on land. The defence needs force robbing the people, so the plutocracy is attacked both internally and externally, by the underpaid within the country and the overpaid and underpaid external to the plutocracy. Pay injustice says to invaders: we have gathered the wealth, and weakened and alienated our people – ie, pay injustice causes invasions (eg, undocumented immigrants, eg the sicilian mafia).

This idea of ours is just to get people to open their spotlight focus on the money to see also the inevitable necessary attack element in overpay – and to see also that there is diminishing marginal utility in more money, which you can see by looking at the fact that the loss of $1000 in income when income is $1000 is catastrophic, and loss of $1000 when income is $100,000 is a very minor difference…still bad but far less bad – ie, all income money is not equal. 100 times the income is not 100 times the happiness, pleasure, satisfaction etc. – income money is very unequal. Satisfaction waits on desire; when the tummy is full, all food is worthless, more food can add nothing to happiness. The increase of happiness in going from $0 to $1000 is huge, the increase going from $1000 to $2000 is a bit smaller – and each additional $1000 income can do less and less, because more desires have been already satisfied – the finite limits of desires. A $4000 plate of truffles is not 4000 times as good as a good $1 meatball – maybe more like 4000th more pleasurable.

Therefore overpay can do little good and must do harm proportional to the size of the overpay, therefore the net gain in overpay is negative. You gain constant worry over security, constant labour to maintain security, constant cost in life-time, money, and psychological wear and tear. Look at the labour of Hitler, Bush, Caesar, Cardinal Wolsey. Look at Stalin’s paranoid desperate activity purging suspected subordinates, Richard III’s troubles, the South African whites’ troubles, the British Indian Colonial troubles – do you think that people had much freedom from troubles when they had stolen so much, killed so many? What does it take out of you when you have to respond to troubles whether you are exhausted or not, respond to the constant eroding energy of the robbed?

That more money is always better has been the simplistic leading idea of humanity for 1000s of years – and it is simply horribly wrong – and sense and all history shouts so. Violence gets to everyone, gets wherever humans get, and violence is proportional to pay injustice, is caused by pay injustice. Overpay is theft is injury, and injury is always paid back with interest. Injury never fades away – it just keeps attacking however it can. It is the golden rule we have never learned: hit people hit back. Kindness (non-injury) is essential for survival and happiness - it is the lesson of history we have not yet learned: Injustice is a vice (a cause of misery). It is love of overpay that is the root of all evils – which is good news, because we only have to see this to cut ‘all evils’ (99% of social problems) at the root.

People think justice is a sacrifice, because they think more money is always better. It is very hard for them to realise justice has her arms full of happiness for overpaid and underpaid – waiting…waiting…waiting through the ages for people to see reality – the whole picture – the downside of overpay - the Lindberg’s child kidnapped and murdered – Barbara Woolworth dying with $3000. People think the rich are secure, up there permanently – it is everyone’s dream to be rich and free from troubles – it is easy for them to believe it because they want to believe it – and they want to believe it because they have troubles. If they placed their hope in pay justice, their hopes can be realised, far beyond their fondest dreams. Change their dream from: The landlords oppress the peasants, may I be a landlord – to: The landlords oppress the peasants, may there be an end to the sufferings of landlords and the sufferings of peasants. Look at the present wars among the Mexican druglords – look at the present endless struggles and dangers of the sheiks in northern Iraq – at the endless troubles of Queen Elizabeth I – at the electric fence prison of Rockefeller – at Howard Hughes dying alone, his teeth rotting in his head.

But alas, it seems there is just not enough will in people to learn the truth – not enough alarm – not 100th enough realism or willingness to think. Not even though it means survival, $40 an hour, and world peace and friendliness and calm and democracy and freedom like they have never known. Since they can’t even understand that giving unlimited fortunes for what is absolutely limited work means having super-extreme, ever-growing overpay-underpay, unlimited tyranny-slavery and violence for everyone, what hope is there? They think that Bill Gates can do 180,000 years’ work in one year - they think Gates can build 18,000 $1 million homes in a year – so what sanity is there?

Re the importance of nationalizing the fed reserve – it is very important, but is a branch problem. How are you going to do it before you fix the root problem, everyone thinking that overpay is good when it is evil for everyone? Fix the root problem and the branch problems fix themselves – or get fixed easily, with universal will to change it. If you nationalize the fed reserve, the same overpaid will dominate the nationalized reserve – nothing will change – the bad root will still drive the branch problems. The solution is never near the problem – did Pasteur find penicillin near the beds of the dying? No, he went away, following the causative line back from the beds to the root – and he cut the root and the people in the beds got well. People are trying to solve the problem near the problems – they are shortsighted.

Same with all problems – they all go back to pay injustice, super-extreme undemocratic bias of power, the super-powerful way above the law, driven by defense costs to steal ever faster both internally and externally.

Making the swimming pool of wealth vertical like a Las Vegas needle fountain (with all the water that rises falling) is like building a building ever-taller on an ever-shrinking base. It’s bound to collapse. Things haven’t changed since the tower of Babel, which was a metaphor for what was happening then – same as now – pay injustice creates confusion of tongues – everyone talking and no one learning or hearing.

We need to make the point strongly that pay injustice is not just one more problem: it is the root problem, fixing which fixes all the problems – fixes suffocating bureaucracy, disinformation, tyranny, war, warmongering, starvation, overcrowding, corporate fascism, corruption, poverty, terrorism – it fixes everything. How can anything work when a few have most of the money, which is the lubrication for the social machine, the blood of the social body?

If you want to stop raccoons becoming roadkill, only teaching raccoons traffic will do it: if you put up barriers they will just go round them.

The elite have always been under extreme attack, always been miserable, desperate, hard-laboured, doomed. Happiness is horizontal not vertical. Kindness (non injury, non theft) is good, practical, real self interest, is happiness for everyone – therefore justice is good, beneficial, not a sacrifice for anyone. It’s amazing that history and story are unanimous, the desperate struggles of the overpaid, and no one has learned it.

The rich may enjoy comforts and luxuries etc in the short run, but they can get no more enjoyment than the fairpaid on $40 an hour, because of physical limits of desires. All overestimation of rich enjoyment is moonshine glamour illusion – driven by underpaid people still having substantial desires to satisfy, by underpaid people living vicariously through their dreams of the fabulousness of being wealthy. The greater the underpay, the more glamourous and wonderful overpay appears. Ray Kroc said about his wealth: So what? I still only have two feet.

Some rich do not fall within their own lifetimes, but people should be reminded that the overpaid experience power struggles all the time before they fall – family who want a piece of it, subordinates who want to take over – it is a hill of humans where everyone is being attacked from below and beside and above. Everyone below is trying to get higher to be less attacked/oppressed from above – corporate infighting, competing for jobs, golddiggers, kidnappers, thieves, embezzlers, hostile takeovers etc etc – necessarily so, inevitably, because no one settles for discomfort, everyone is uncomfortable, so everyone is moving in the hill.

Equality: no one above or below, everyone happier, freer, safer, liberated from troubles, struggles, conflict, betrayal – in all groups – crime gangs, families, companies, nations, empires.

Being rich – getting overpay – is not a win. It isn’t a win relative to pay justice, it is a vast loss of ease, trust, safety, leisure, relaxation, enjoyment, confidence. Everyone is a giant loser in the hill of humans – but people would rather kid themselves they are happy and right than face reality and improve their happiness really. Modern man’s pride is stronger than his will to live to be realistic to be sane to be practical to be happy.

The rich have as much enjoyment as the fairpaid have – apart from the danger, which is proportional to the pay injustice – and the enjoyment is spoiled by the danger, by the absence of trust and safety. Like children with party cake - it is hard to enjoy what cake one has if everyone is constantly, ever more desperately and violently and sourly grabbing from everyone.

It looks as though the problem is the human insistence that the solution be where people are looking – at the symptom level, at the detail level, at the part-picture level. People are mopping the floor instead of turning off the broken tap. They cannot understand why someone is leaving the problem of the wet floor in the living room and going away, upstairs (into the bathroom where the broken tap is) – they just ‘know’ that is the wrong thing to do – and they keep mopping the floor. They think the pay-justice solution is unrealistic because it isn’t addressing (directly) the wet floor.

It is like looking for the lost keys where the light is better for looking, and not looking where the keys fell. You have to teach people that the solution (to the immediate problems and most other problems) is simple if they look where the keys fell, where the problem started. It takes mental discipline not to pluck off the vine where it is strangling the roses, but to trace the vine back to the root, where one cut will kill the whole vine and keep it in check permanently with little effort.

People are fascinated by the immediate problems and can’t take their eyes off them to look at the big picture and see the root cause.

Inability to pay debt causes a contraction, a drawing in of expansion, a re-structuring – never a total collapse – not even a half collapse or a quarter.

Pay justice will always maximise spending, the efficiency of the cycle of production and consumption – and reduce violence which is a waste of money, lives, property, energy, confidence. The giant sucking machine has taken spending away from most, breaking the cycle.

Pay justice will always be the only answer – one can’t steal and steal and steal without end. They saw this (to some extent) at the end of the 19th century, when economics practice changed from low wages to high wages. The Marshall Plan saw this, as the way to avoid loss of European markets and thus global loss of confidence.

Increasing the money supply say 1% a month and GIVING this to everyone equally (only to save the vast bureaucratic cost of distinguishing the 1% overpaid and 99% underpaid) – which can be done by a computer, ie low bureaucracy - will increase spending, increasing production, increasing market confidence: you have to water the plants to make them grow. The gift (actually return of stolen earnings) overcompensates all the underpaid for the inflation effect and ‘robs’ the overpaid gently, unobtrusively, automatically through their spending. If the superrich cannot understand pay justice, they can at least understand that you have to leave enough wool on the sheep so you can fleece them again.

Lastly, Hate is a luxury item – when things are tough, people rally round, know they have to be tolerant, loving, cooperative, caring, communal. When things are tough there is a rise in that sort of attitude – some turning from competition and antagonism to cooperation and compassion. Even if you do nothing, you have safety nets – family, friends, society. Very, very few people in America will starve. When one is going down, one feels that ‘maybe I will keep falling forever’, but there is the trampoline below – the energy of people, the productivity, even in social disorder, nature’s bounty. Things will come up again, even as they did after the last boom and bust and boom again. Life is a wave - the very fact of things going down stimulates people to turn things around. The 800 who own everything may even let Obama do an FDR – the big enough bust makes even republicans more responsible and realistic. People may even feel some shame – there has to be something good about the bottom of the wave because it is all up from there.

I am reading The Greening of America (1970) – about the last time Americans tried to grow up, before the oil price hike made them scurry back into old patterns, shovelling heaps to their superrich father figures to get them out of the mess.

I saw the movie Sharpe’s Challenge, with Sean Bean, about the struggles and dangers of the overpaid (and underpaid) in British Colonial India, wherein Sharpe says:

And I thought for a moment all this [trouble] might have been for more than just to make rich men richer.