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Paychecks are not proportional to a person's contributions to society. You've got some people who give a lot more to society than what they get paid. You've also got some really worthless people who make millions.
Let me tell you about my former boss, who was "active in the community." She was active with a homeless organization the mayor of Denver was involved with, sat on various boards, and she was a 40-under-40 winner. There came a point where her husband died suddenly, leaving her with two little kids to raise by herself, and she had her hand out. I, on the other hand, didn't sit on any boards, but I had accumulated quite a bit of money. I suppose you'd have me fork over money to my old boss (who made more money than I did).
That's what the situation would have looked like on paper. IRL, I had some money from vacations not taken, home improvements deferred, brown-bagging my lunch, shopping at thrift stores, enjoying inexpensive entertainment, and researching investments. At the time, I spent a lot of hours helping my elderly parents through one crisis after another. My boss, OTOH, used meal services, had i-phones for both her small children, and apparently saved little or nothing. She was also one of the biggest a$)($%s I've ever worked for. And completely, utterly incompetent.
Having paid for my education partly through spending three miserable years in the Air Force, having paid off my mortgage, no, I am not in favor of debt forgiveness in any circumstance but a legitimate claim to bankruptcy. I am definitely not in favor of debt forgiveness based on an appeal to emotion.
Last edited by sheerbliss; 12-15-2019 at 04:23 PM..
The concept of Jubilee is an interesting one, albeit it is way out of context. Today, everyone's debt is someone else's asset. Anyone can go online and buy some bonds from Sallie Mae. With all of the rhetoric on debt elimination, they sell at a hefty discount in the junk bond section.
As for deciding whether or not to pay off the debt, the interest rate on much of the debt is fairly high. However, if you can get a lot of credit cards that will offer 0% for a year and a half or so that is twice what your student loans are, you could use those advances to pay the loans, keep making payments and as they turn to full interest, then use the other cards to pay the first cards and get another round of 0%. That's how I did it. Plus, once you've moved it, it is now unsecured debt that can be taken into bankruptcy should the need arise.
That aside, the original Jubilee was a pretty cool concept, but one that takes a lot of understanding. For one, realize that 5,000 years ago, money didn't exist as it does today. You had a couple of small city states that had become built up enough to start allowing for specialization because they started eating food others grew. However, the one thing you need in that situation is a ready source of seed... So in the spring, the farmers would come to this "bank" to take out a loan of seed which would be used to plant in their fields. It would be paid later at harvest time when they would bring their harvest back in to this granary type building. In the initial precursor bank, monetary units would represent a measure of a crop, and the interest rate was actually negative because that covered the storage cost and kept the harvest safe. To keep track of how much had been put in and taken out meant that loans of these measures needed to be tracked.
Now if I were a group of barbarians, that granary would look like the perfect place to rob. Everyone knew this. To defend this area, you needed someone that was smart with numbers, honest, yet strong enough to either command the defenses or influence for their defense. Most importantly, it needed to be organized with certain rules, and these rules were also useful for how the citizens should conduct themselves. Enter the first elements of organized religion. If a man was merely a vassal of a God, then men might fear this God. While cities are still attacked, perhaps this granary/temple might be spared because it was sacred ground, and realistically very important to the region. If marauders ate all of the food, there would be nothing to plant in the following season and the town would die out.
So this worked as long as the most powerful person was good and true and in charge of the granary. But deals are always made. A family may lose their ancestral lands and be forced into the city. A few families may become too powerful and begin controlling the seasonal ebb and flow in other ways, like planting enough of the land for themselves only. What better way to combat this in showing that God is calling for a Jubilee to occur every 50 years. At the year of Jubilee, families are restored with their ancestral lands, outstanding harvests owed are eliminated (and thus planting can occur again) and the process begins anew. Plus, it made up for the fact that the average human wasn't going to celebrate their 30th birthday and record keeping systems were not very efficient or standardized.
Hence the Jubilee system could have worked very well. "Money" at that point was not a scarce resource, but rather it was a widely used resource that was both renewable, subject to spoilage and consumed by all. However, as economies became more complex eventually a better system was needed. The largest capital requirement of the day would have been a mine...and with it came the concept of scarce resource coinage. It was much easier to haul around than a measure of wheat, and it was much easier to tax trades that have no use for wheat whatsoever or were in different regions.
Thus money supplanted religious measures. Having money offered greater convertibility for things on Earth. There was no need to lose family wealth every 50 years....and the power to tax on this coinage became possible to split from the pre-bank/temple/granary that could only coexist if harmonious that came before it.
Paychecks are not proportional to a person's contributions to society. You've got some people who give a lot more to society than what they get paid. You've also got some really worthless people who make millions.
I see you've never studied economics. There are some really good free online courses you can take to educate yourself. Take a look at, for example,
Paychecks are not proportional to a person's contributions to society. You've got some people who give a lot more to society than what they get paid. You've also got some really worthless people who make millions.
What people get paid represents closely what value they add to society. The free market is determining their value via pay.
There may be other metrics for other criteria -- but in terms of the actual value-add, market-based pay is the best measure of the relative value of individuals in a society.
The concept of Jubilee is an interesting one, albeit it is way out of context. Today, everyone's debt is someone else's asset. Anyone can go online and buy some bonds from Sallie Mae. With all of the rhetoric on debt elimination, they sell at a hefty discount in the junk bond section.
This is an interesting observation -- especially that the value of these bonds have dropped with the political discussions around the absolution of student loans.
What people get paid represents closely what value they add to society. The free market is determining their value via pay.
There may be other metrics for other criteria -- but in terms of the actual value-add, market-based pay is the best measure of the relative value of individuals in a society.
No. What you get paid has little to do with value add to society. For most wage earners, it’s simple supply and demand.
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