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Interesting. So when I come to your home and throw you out because I want the land you are living on and kill you if you mouth off to me, what would you call that?
I'd call it fantasy. In reality, I'd protect myself and my property and you'd cease to exist. And since you were planning on stealing from me and killing me, I'd have an iron clad case of self defense.
Since you said you did not actually read the post, I'm not going to bother to respond. I'm interested in debating the merits of the post, I'm not interested in arguing with you.
And that's what we're doing. You're saying that I'm being exploited. It's in your post. In order to debate the merits of that statement, you need to try and convince me that it's true, because as far as I'm concerned, it's not. That's what "debating the merits of the post" is.
So convince me. How am *I* (personally - not in vague Orwellian generalities) being exploited? Let's have it - "debate the merits of your post."
Our current market economic system is corrupt and should be replaced with a fair market system.
A fair market system is a system where:
1) 100% of the total income produced in the economy is paid to workers since they are responsible for 100% of the total production.
We must put an end to paying out HALF our income to people who don't work and just collect unearned income like rent, interest and profit because, as I will demonstrate, we don't need to pay these incomes, any more than we need to pay people an income to print their own money, in order to get our market economy to work and because the capital we are paying this unearned income on was produced with stolen resources.
2) And we must allocate that total income based on how hard you work, instead of based on how much exploitation you can get away with, since the whole purpose of income is to be an incentive to work and work hard. So differences in income will be based only on what is necessary to get workers to do mentally or physically difficult work and to get them to give their maximum effort in performance based jobs since this is the only legitimate economic justification for paying one worker more than another.
Paying 100% of our income to workers and paying them based on how hard they work is the only fair market system.
If we did this, it would enable us to:
* Raise the minimum wage to $115,000 per year (1)
* Raise the minimum wage to $230,000 per year for people who work mentally or physically difficult jobs (science, construction, mining, farming) (1)
* Cut the work week to 20 hours (2)
* Guarantee everyone a job
* Eliminate interest which would cut your mortgage in half (3)
* Guarantee 100% financing to everyone who wants to own a home without the need for a down payment (3)
* Pay students an income to go to school
* Guarantee everyone a pension at retirement
* Make everyone wealthy
* And when you make everyone wealthy, you eliminate nearly every social problem we have
Our current market economy is corrupt because it unfairly concentrates income in the hands of a small ruling class through institutionalized theft, government welfare, and institutionalized exploitation.
It allows this ruling class to unfairly siphon off the great majority of the income our workers produce, leaving the vast, overwhelming majority of hard-working Americans broke. It is criminal.
And this ruling class uses their vastly superior wealth and resulting vastly superior power to maximize the corruption and entrench their ability to illegitimately and undemocratically rule over society.
In order to end the corruption, and to make our market economy fair, we must put an end to the welfare, theft and exploitation.
I have another question...if 100% of the income of a company is being paid to the workers, how would said company afford up keep of their buildings and facilities, or afford to purchase new inventory to see or make? How would they pay their taxes, fees, lawyers, permits, etc?
If 100% of what's coming in goes immediately back out to the workers, there's nothing left over to improce the company or keep it able to produce or sell goods. Therefore, the company would tank in a matter of weeks or months.
For example, take McDonalds for example. They sell tons of food when this plan is first put into place, then pay their employees 100% of the income from those sales...they then have no money remaining to purchase new beef or buns or vegetables or chicken. Thus, they have nothing to sell. Thus, they have no income to pay to their employees. Thus, they go out of business and ALL those $115K employees are out of a job. Explain that!!
Wow, you can copy and paste the same post twice in a row! AMAZING!! I'm going to pay you $115K a year to preach this crap!
No, no, no.... you need to pay him more than $115K since he's "working" more than 20 hours a week at his "job" of writing fantasy. Sheesh... get with the program.
Why would someone make 1 million when they can make much, much more somewhere else or if someone chooses to stay in the US, where is the motivation to produce a single dime after they make a million dollars that year?
I wonder how many jobs would move overseas? I wonder how many people would stay in America when they can live so much cheaper elsewhere? Canada here we come.
We Should Raise The Minimum Wage to $115,000 per Year And Reduce The Workweek to Just 20 Hours
Before you jump into your explanation of why the economics of labor markets make this impossible, or that it will just cause inflation, I am not saying this can happen by merely enacting a minimum wage law that pays people that much.
In this post, I will make the case for doing far more than that. I will make the case for a revolution, for overthrowing (peacefully and democratically) our current tyrannical market economic system and replacing it with a fair market system.
If we made our market economy fair, it would enable us to:
* Raise the minimum wage to $115,000 per year (1)
* Raise the minimum wage to $230,000 per year for people who work mentally or physically difficult jobs (science, construction, mining, farming) (1)
* Cut the work week to 20 hours (2)
* Guarantee everyone a job
* Eliminate interest which would cut your mortgage in half (3)
* Guarantee 100% financing to everyone who wants to own a home without the need for a down payment (3)
* Pay students an income to go to school
* Guarantee everyone a pension at retirement
* Make everyone wealthy
* And when you make everyone wealthy, you eliminate nearly every social problem we have
Quick Overview
Our current market economy is tyrannical because it unfairly concentrates income in the hands of a few people through government welfare, institutionalized theft and institutionalized exploitation.
This concentration of wealth not only forces nearly everyone else, the vast overwhelming majority of hard-working Americans, to be broke, it also allows this small group to use their vastly superior wealth and resulting vastly superior power to illegitimately and undemocratically rule over society.
What I will make the case for in this post is that in order to make our market economy fair, we must eliminate that welfare, theft and exploitation by doing the two things that social activists, who understand economics and business, have been saying to do for 150+ years:
1) We must put an end to the world's largest government welfare program - Unearned Income - by eliminating the law that allows people to collect income that they have not worked for. All of our income should be paid to workers since workers are responsible for all of our production.
Allowing people to collect unearned income like rent, interest or profit is just as useful and necessary to a market economy as allowing people to get paid for printing their own money.
I will demonstrate that a central bank can provide investment money to the market more efficiently than private investors can just like it can deliver enough money to the market more efficiently than allowing private individuals to print their own money can. I will also demonstate that paying private investors unearned income is not just inefficient, it is also illegitimate since all the capital that they are getting paid unearned income on is actually produced with stolen resources.
Unearned income should be banned, just like printing money should be banned, because it is inefficient and illegitimate. All income should be paid to workers in exchange for working only. Since nearly 50% of our total economy(4) gets paid as unearned income, banning it will double the amount of income that gets paid to workers.
2) We must put an end to allocating income based on how much bargaining power you have and instead, allocate total income based on how hard you work by legally limiting differences in income to only what is necessary to get people to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum effort in performance based jobs.
Paying people based on bargaining power is a scam. It is just a way to allow a very small handful of wealthy people at the top to exploit the entire rest of the labor force. It has nothing to do with making our economy work well.
In summary, the only way to have a fair market economy is by paying 100% of our income to workers and allocating that income based on how hard you work. Doing that will deliver all of the benefits listed above and more than quadruple the average worker's income.
Our Current Market System Does Not Work
With 50% of all Americans living in or near poverty(5) and 97% of all workers earning a below average income(6) and the govt releasing data on wage earners for the first time ever which shockingly shows 50% are making less than $26k(7), it is clear that the economy does not work at all for the overwhelming majority of workers.
The vast majority are broke. And the fact that they are broke is the cause of nearly every problem in society.
But people don't lack income because they are lazy, or because they don't want to work or because there is not enough income or resources to go around. People lack income because a very small minority use their ability to exploit and their ability to collect unearned income to unfairly take so much of the available income for themselves that there is simply not enough income left over to pay everyone else.
Everyone in the US in 2012 should be wealthy. We produce $15.4 trillion(8) in goods and services every year.
That is just under $50,000 per year for every man, woman and child(9). That is $200,000 per year for a family of 4. That is $65 per hour(10) for each hour every worker works. That is $135,000 per year for every full-time worker.
No matter how you slice it, that is clearly enough income to make everyone in this country wealthy.
And not only is our current system making everyone broke, it is also incredibly inefficient.
All of our production comes from labor and you cannot manage our available labor any more inefficiently than how our tyrannical market system has. 18% of all available workers(11) cannot find a full-time job. And 55% of the people who do work are being wasted(2) by having them do pointless jobs that machines can already do. That means our economy is wasting just under 70% of our potential labor/productivity.
Our economic system simply does not work.
And it does not work because it is based on institutionalized theft, government welfare and institutionalized exploitation.
Institutionalized Theft
The first problem with our economic system is that it is based on theft.
There is a significant, fundamental problem with our version of a market economy: It is based entirely on the privatization of the planet and its resources.
Since Mother Nature does not have a store where you can purchase the planet, 100% of this privatization came by way of pillage and plunder. Like Mark Twain said, "There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle after cycle, by force and bloodshed."
Privatization of the Earth and its resources means you are claiming control over a portion of the planet for your own private benefit to the exclusion of everyone else and using whatever force is necessary to maintain your control. That is unjust and barbaric.
When you privatize a part of the planet, you are stealing that part of the planet from everyone else.
Every single good and service we produce in our economy are produced using these stolen resources. Every single business is essentially trafficking in stolen goods. So our entire economy is based on ill-gotten gains. That's a problem!
The planet and its rich resources should not be privatized. It rightfully belongs to everyone which gives everyone a natural right to be able to participate in converting the planet's resources into useful goods and services and a natural right to get paid fairly for that work.
As equal owners of the planet, you have a natural right to a job and a fair income. And the first step in paying every worker a fair income is to pay 100% of the income to workers.
Privatization is happening, of course, because the government allows people to do it. But not only has the government institutionalized this theft of the planet, they have also set up history's biggest government welfare program for these thieves: Unearned Income.
The government allows owners of capital to collect trillions of dollars every year, roughly half of the entire economy(12), without ever working for it! It is called Unearned Income. It is the income paid for rent, interest and profit.
We don't need to pay any of this income in order for our market economic system to work. I am well aware that this claim will be vehemently disputed by most people who think interest and profit are what a market economy is based on. But I submit that whatever case you can make to justify paying profit and interest you can make to justify paying people to print their own money.
And just like it is absurd to claim that we need to pay people to print their own money, it is absurd to claim that we need to pay people interest and profit to make our market economic system work.
But most importantly, paying this money robs the workers, the people who are actually doing all of the work in our economy. For every dollar in unearned income you pay to owners of capital, that is one less dollar in earned income you can pay to workers.
Because of the institutionalized theft of privatization and the unearned income welfare program, workers are only getting paid half the income they produce.
The first step in turning our current tyrannical market economy into a fair market economy is to stop paying investors unearned income, income that they did not work for, on capital that is made from resources stolen from the public, and pay 100% of the economy's available income to workers.
Since roughly half of our income is paid as unearned income(12), this first step will double the income paid to workers.
Ending The Unearned Income Welfare Program
We don't need to pay investors interest on their savings in order to make investment money available any more than we need to pay people to print their own money in order to make enough money available.
A much more effective system is to just provide banks with enough public funds, taken from whatever the natural savings rate is, to meet whatever their demand for investment funds is.
This is a trivially simple task to accomplish for a central bank, especially in today's digital banking system. Just like the central bank can manage the money supply, they can manage the investment supply.
And just like our natural capital - the planet and all its resources - should be democratically owned, our investment capital - which makes use of the planet and its resources - should be democratically owned.
Keep in mind this does not mean government does the investing, runs the banks or runs the businesses. This is still a free market economic system. Investing will still be done by individually run banks, the people in charge of investing will still be paid based on how well their investments perform, they will still invest in entrepreneurs who launch individually run companies, and those entrepreneurs will be paid based on how well the companies they launch perform. It just means the funds they use will be public funds.(13) Requiring companies to use public investment funds is no different than requiring everyone today to use public money.
More detailed information on how investing would work can be found in this footnote.(13)
Also, keep in mind that there is a difference between privatization and private property. Privatization is just an excuse to pay wealthy people unearned income for not working.
Everything you buy with your income is your private property. You can do whatever you want with it, including sell it. The only thing you cannot do is sell it for more than what you paid for it, unless, of course, you spent time working on it to increase its value.
If you buy a house for $400,000, you cannot sell it for more than $400,000. If you add a $20,000 kitchen, you cannot sell it for more than $420,000. If you spend 100 hours fixing it up and the rate for construction workers under the current compensation plan is $100 per hour (as explained below), you cannot sell it for more than $410,000.
Institutionalized Exploitation
The third and final problem with our economic system is that it is based on exploitation.
We currently allocate income based on bargaining power. It is not based on fairness or how hard you worked. This allows a very small minority of rich people at the top to use their bargaining power to unfairly exploit everyone else - all the people who have no bargaining power including nearly everyone reading this post - by taking most of their income.
Let's be clear on what exploitation is. Exploitation is using another person's labor without paying them an adequate compensation.
And the only way you can get away with exploitation is by having an economic system where you allocate income based on bargaining power. Otherwise, a worker would never accept a lower pay. The only reason why workers accept a lower pay than what they deserve, than what is fair, is that their alternative is no pay. They are desperate. They have no bargaining power. So they accept the lower, unfair inadequate pay.
The reason why some worker in a third world country readily accepts a job that pays $1 per day is not because he thinks this is fair or because he only delivers 1% of the work effort an American worker gives. He accepts it because the alternative is death from starvation. He has no bargaining power to demand a fair, adequate pay.
Although American workers do not get exploited as badly as workers in third world countries do, they are still getting exploited.
Even though the bottom 97% of workers do nearly all of the work in this country, the top 3% are taking nearly all of the income. That is because of exploitation.
The top 3% are using their bargaining power to command higher incomes than they deserve. And the only way to pay them these higher incomes is to pay the bottom 97% less than they deserve.
The bottom 97% of workers have to be exploited in order to pay the inflated incomes of the top 3%.
The top 3% are getting paid 50 to 50,000 times more than others and this is undeserved because:
1) They don't work 50 to 150,000 times harder than everyone else.
2) They didn't earn this money from willing consumers in the market. It is important to understand that when consumers purchase a product, they are not doing it because they love the way that company allocates its revenue among its workers. Consumers do not in any way endorse the way companies allocate income in the economy simply because they buy things.
Yankees fans buy Yankees tickets because they think the game is worth the ticket price. That is it. They don't buy tickets because they believe they should make $80k less at their job so that A-Rod, the Yankees third baseman, can make $25 million at his. When you pay A-Rod $25 million, that is $25 million less that every other worker in the economy can make.
If consumers had a direct say on how workers were valued, no worker would ever be able to earn thousands of times more income than another worker because they would never be able to convince consumers to take a huge pay cut at their job in order to pay their inflated salaries.
3) They shouldn't have the power to force the rest of society into poverty or financial struggle. When A-Rod takes $25 million in income, that is $25 million less the rest of the workforce can make. The top 3% take so much of the available income, they leave 97% of all workers earning a below average income and the bottom 50% of all Americans in poverty or close to it.
4) There is no economic justification that requires us to pay them this amount in order for the economy to work well. The only economic reason for paying one person more than another is to get them to do undesirable work and to give their maximum effort. We don't need to pay people 50 to 150,000 times more income in order to get people to do that.
5) It makes society undemocratic. Democracy is a society where people have equal political power and equal freedom. Since your political power and freedom depends on the amount of income you have, their 50 to 150,000 times greater income gives them 50 to 150,000 times greater political power and greater freedom than everyone else.
What advocates of exploitation would say in defense of exploitation is that the reason why some people are paid far more, the reason why some have far more bargaining power is because they deliver far more value. So the extra income is fair. It is not exploitation. But this, of course, is nonsense.
Let's continue with our baseball example. There is no question that one of the most visible members of the Yankees is A-Rod and he may have a direct impact on millions of dollars in increased sales by helping the Yankees win more games.
All of this obviously gives him bargaining power. And that is why he is able to command an enormous salary. But is he responsible for all that extra value and extra millions in revenue alone?
Let's take away the vendors who provide food while you watch the game, take away the landscapers who maintain the beautifully manicured field, take away the camera operators that film the game for television, take away the thousands of menial workers who deliver that video to your home, and take away the construction workers who built that palatial stadium.
Take away all those people who supposedly provide relatively little value and what you have left is a bunch of guys nobody knows playing a game nobody is watching. Without all those people, A-Rod has zero ability to add millions in revenue to some baseball team. So his ability to increase the revenue of the Yankees depends on all those other workers who are getting paid a fraction of what he does.
The claim that A-Rod alone is responsible for all that extra revenue is bogus. A-Rod is getting paid more because all the other workers are being exploited. They are getting paid less in order to pay A-Rod's unfair and inflated salary.
The way to end this exploitation is to put an end to allocating income based on bargaining power. In order to make our market economy fair, not only should 100% of the income be paid to workers, but that income should be allocated among workers based on how hard they work.
Allocate Income Based On Hard Work Instead Of Based On Bargaining Power
The whole point of income is to motivate people to work and work hard. It is an incentive system. So it should only be used as an incentive system. That means we must allocate income based on how hard you work, not based on how much exploitation you can get away with. That is the only fair way to allocate income.
The way to allocate income based on how hard you work is by limiting differences in income by law to only what is necessary to get people to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum effort in performance based jobs.
The way we would do this is we would use the political process to filter out reasonable, national compensation proposals where differences in income are legally required to be limited to just what our best scientific evidence says is necessary to be an effective incentive and then the worker population votes directly on its approval in a national vote.
We would perhaps vote on a new compensation plan every 4 years so that we can continually update it based on current market conditions. If we have a shortage of workers in some job, that means we would need to increase the pay for that job in order to attract enough workers. So the market would be the ultimate arbiter of how income gets allocated.
We can't predict what the exact final plan will be. But what we can predict is that you will not come up with any valid scientific study that says we need to pay people much more than twice the amount as everyone else in order to get them to do undesirable jobs or that we need to pay people much more than four times the amount as everyone else in order to get them to give their maximum effort in performance based jobs.
You do not have to pay someone 150,000 times more income in order to get them to build a social networking website or a better cell phone. In fact, we know you don't even have to pay people anything at all when you see all the free open source software and maker faire inventions.
We also know that studies show the general public wants equality, not inequality. So they will never vote to lower their own income in order to give movie actors or Kim Kardashian or athletes or bankers or anyone else the ability to earn, say, 50 times what they make, let alone 150,000 times.
So for the sake of example, if we paid 100% of our income to workers and if we determined that paying the top performers in performance based jobs four times more is enough incentive and that doing physically or mentally difficult jobs were undesirable and that paying the people who did these jobs two times more is enough incentive and this income distribution plan was democratically approved and passed the legal test, that would enable us to pay $460,000 per year to the top 2.5% of all workers; $230,000 per year to the 12.3 million workers who do the mentally or physically difficult work of science, computers, engineering, medicine, construction, mining, and farming; and $115,000 to everyone else.
If, for example, we voted on a plan to pay the top performers 10 times more, they would get paid $1 million per year and the bottom earners would drop to $100,000 per year.
You can view all the calculations in footnote 1.
So entrepreneurs or investors at investment banks will be paid an income just like any other worker. We don't need to pay entrepreneurs a profit in order to get them to launch and run businesses successfully. We can simply pay them a performance based income, just like any other worker. We don't need to pay hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in order to get them to perform.
Entrepreneurs will have the chance to earn the top income which, depending on what the final compensation plan is, could be as much as $1 million per year. To claim that a Mark Zuckerberg or a Steve Jobs won't be as motivated to build Facebook or Apple because they no longer are able to earn billions and can only earn $1 million or $460,000 is simply false.
In fact, when a business generates a huge net income, this should not be something that is celebrated. If a company generates $1 billion in profits, all that means is that they overcharged their customers by $1 billion!
Entrepreneurs and managers should be incentivized to grow their company and to make sure their company generates enough revenue to pay its expenses. But there is nothing inherently worthwhile about maximizing its net revenue. And most importantly, they don't need to get paid billions to do this.
The desire to earn $1 million (or whatever the top pay is) every year will motivate entrepreneurs and executives to not only build new companies but to make sure those companies remain the top performing companies in the market every year.
Our Current Market Economy Is Tyrannical
Changing minds about our economic system is no easy task. Everyone has been brainwashed since birth to believe this is the best system there is and changes to it will turn society into a totalitarian nightmare where everyone is a slave and destitute.
But having a market economic system based on theft, welfare and exploitation is unfair. It unfairly makes most workers broke. It unfairly concentrates more and more of our income into the hands of fewer and fewer people, people who do not deserve that extra income or who have fairly earned it.
Perhaps even more troubling is that this is not just unfair, it is also tyrannical.
The people who are getting rich off of this welfare, theft and exploitation are using their vast wealth to not only convince everyone that this welfare, theft and exploitation is not happening, but to also put in laws to enable them to maximize their ability to exploit and steal.
Since they have most of the income, they also own all the businesses and all the politicians and all the governments and all the newspapers and all the radio stations and all the tv stations and all the rest of the media. They have full control over the public discourse which they naturally use to not only convince the public that the raw deal they are getting is fair, but to also make it taboo to actually question it!
Their system of propaganda is mighty and effective.
The few at the top have deliberately made our version of a market economy a sacred cow in this country. They have turned privatization, investment and exploitation into a religion that people are not allowed to question.
That is because they know that if we ever had a real debate about the merits of a system that allows a few people to unfairly take nearly all the income using theft, welfare and exploitation and to force everyone else to be broke, there would be an unstoppable public outcry to put an end to it.
We need to change our market system from one that is tyrannical to one that is fair. And the way to make markets fair is to pay 100% of our income to workers and to limit differences in income between workers to only what is necessary to get them to do undesirable jobs and to give their maximum effort at performance based jobs.
Fair Markets Makes Society Genuinely Democratic
Not only will ending theft, welfare and exploitation make our market economy fair, it will finally make our society democratic.
Democracy is a Greek word. But it is not a Greek word for "voting" or "mob rule" or "majority wins". It is Greek for "people power". It means power rests with everyone equally(14). And the modern, liberal version of democracy means a society based on equal political power and equal freedom.
Since everything you do in society requires money, your income determines how much political power you have and determines how much freedom you have.
A person with $1 billion has 50,000 times more power than a person with $20,000 to get someone elected to government or to lobby government to their cause or to use the media to lobby the public to their cause. And they have 50,000 times more freedom to live how they want - to live in whatever house or neighborhood they want, to drive any car they want, to attend any school they want, to get any medical treatment they want, to pursue any hobby they want, to travel to any place they want or to work any job they want.
A society where some have 50,000 times more political power and freedom than others is not democratic.
In order to have democracy, a society where power and freddom rests with everyone equally, income must rest with everyone equally. But income is also our incentive system. That is why we must limit differences in income to only what is absolutely necessary for income to remain as an effective incentive in order to have a genuinely democratic society.
How To Change The System
One way to make this change possible is with a general strike.
If workers organized into a single union, demanded that they get paid 100% of the income since they are doing 100% of the work and demanded that this income be allocated based on how hard you work so they were no longer exploited, and were willing to strike until their demands were met, the economy would have no choice but to change.
It obviously takes a lot of workers willing to strike in order to change an economic system, but benefits like raising the minimum income to $115,000 and reducing the work week to 20 hours is a deal that enough workers may find worth striking for.
Labels
Labels, for some reason, are very important to people and some may say that what I am advocating is socialism.
If after all this explanation, you want to call this socialism because the planet is no longer privately owned and you cannot get paid unearned income like profits, I am fine with that because you at least now understand that it is nothing like the socialist systems of the Soviet Union or China. In fact, it is not even as socialist as our current schools or fire departments since they are monopolies that do not compete in the market and do not have to be profitable.
It is impossible to get everyone to agree on definitions of political terms like capitalism, socialism and democracy.
What I have made the case for in this post is to make three changes to the economy: Pay 100% of the income to workers, allocate that income based on how hard you work and use public funds for investment.
But aside from these 3 differences, the economy would work exactly as the current economy works now.
All the features of our current economy that make it perform well as a consumer responsive, decentralized, dynamic, efficient system of innovation and progress remain in place. All we are doing is just making sure that the system is always working well and fairly for everyone.
So what I advocate here can be reasonably argued to be capitalist since companies are still individually run and owned; they are not government run. They must compete in the market; they are not monopolies. The market determines what gets produced; it is not centrally planned. And consumer spending still rules the economy; companies can only remain in business if they generate enough revenue to cover their expenses.
This reasoning will not satisfy all the people obsessed with labels. Some capitalists will call this socialism and some socialists will call this capitalism.
But regardless of what you call it, it is the only way to have a fair and effective economy and it is the only way to have a democratic society.
footnotes:
Unfortunately this forum doesn't allow me to link to my citations. I already got banned for spam the first time I tried making this post. I think it was because I linked to other websites.
Let's say (just for laughs) that I agree with your premise that everything anyone has ever achieved was accomplished by theft. In your words via the slaughter of a whole population and the privatization of the planet. Since all the land in the US was stolen, we need to return the land to the rightful owners. OK, then let's do that. Let's reduce everything that's been built in the last 600 years to rubble. No roads, buildings, homes, businesses, power plants or Starbucks. We're gonna bulldoze the whole kit and kaboodle and give the land back to the indigenous people. Oh, wait, that won't work because you don't want to return what was taken, you want to take what was created. Never mind......
So you're solution, is to make sure no one has incentive to work but everyone will still get paid. But you think there will be some people who will work long hours doing jobs that take a lot of skill and knowledge
This is what I advocate:
1) 100% of the total income produced in the economy is paid to workers since they are responsible for 100% of the total production.
We must put an end to paying out HALF our income to people who don't work and just collect unearned income like rent, interest and profit because, as I will demonstrate, we don't need to pay these incomes, any more than we need to pay people an income to print their own money, in order to get our market economy to work and because the capital we are paying this unearned income on was produced with stolen resources.
2) And we must allocate that total income based on how hard you work, instead of based on how much exploitation you can get away with, since the whole purpose of income is to be an incentive to work and work hard. So differences in income will be based only on what is necessary to get workers to do mentally or physically difficult work and to get them to give their maximum effort in performance based jobs since this is the only legitimate economic justification for paying one worker more than another.
Paying 100% of our income to workers and paying them based on how hard they work is the only fair market system.
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or there will be those still willing to invest in businesses, even though they are not getting any proportional rewards for that work, skill, knowledge and risk??
People will not be expected to invest their own money in any business. Investment money comes from public funds, taking from whatever the natural savings rate is in the economy. These funds are allocated by the central bank to investment banks (which is no different than the central bank providing enough money for the economy). The banks will be responsible for investing that money.
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It's actually not FAIR...and then some idiot comes along and tells the people working for the business owner that the worker deserves all the money
Our current economic system is not fair to nearly every worker and most business owners. It is not fair for half our income to be paid to people who do not work. And it is not fair for the top 3% of earners to use their ability to exploit to take most of the income the bottom 97% of workers produce leaving them all making below average incomes, leaving 50% in or near poverty, 18% unable to get a full time job, and 50% of wage earners making less than $26k when workers produce on average $135,000 per year according to the latest BLS figure on worker productivity (International Comparisons of GDP per Capita,GDP per Hour, and Related Measures, 1960–2009).
no, you keep saying there is a cap of 4x the lowest pay job and that there is only the 14.5 trillion in wages to be spent. So for someone to be incentivised to do those undesirable jobs, you'd have to get MORE than that 14.5 tirllion you keep talking about, which would neccessarily raise prices on everything
You can, of course, allocate the $14.5 trillion in a way where some workers get paid 2 times more income and some get paid 4 times more income. You can see the calculations here:
Take away the money that I get, and forget about it! I wouldn't do this job for free
As explained, I don't advocate people should work for free. There is a 97% chance you would get paid more income in the fair market system I propose.
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