Thanks for reading this chapter. I welcome feedback. If you have an idea that you think can help me improve chapter 6, please don't keep silent.

Chapter 2

In a world as suffering as ours is suffering from ever more extreme crisis, corruption, danger, violence, want, insecurity, inequality, and injustice, one thing has to be certain: we have to be making the error of thinking some particular things are good when they are actually bad. For thousands of years, people have been making a simple mistake which has caused war and weaponry to grow to the present state of our being able to kill the planet.

All our errors consist in seeing the small and sometimes mythical upside of certain things, and not seeing the thing also has a colossal and killing downside that comes attached – as inseparably attached as the flip side of the coin is attached to the face side.

For instance, private inheritance. People have thought, understandably, private inheritance, that sounds good. A bit of money may come my way. That can't be bad, so let private inheritance exist, and people get angry at anyone who says otherwise. People have failed to see the big picture, that private inheritance has prevented public inheritance. With public inheritance, people will receive a share of ALL deceased estates. Private inheritance prevents us receiving our rightful share of all deceased estates. Private inheritance causes money to concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. Which is why the founding fathers of the American dream of freedom from tyranny took steps to prevent unjust concentration of wealth by inheritance. Their efforts failed, but we can have another and better go, and save every human being from the global catastrophe, the vast unnecessary danger and suffering, that human society has become.

Public inheritance will be sufficient to prevent the endless unjust concentration of wealth in ever-fewer hands, causing ever-increasing assassination, tyranny, war, crime, warmongering, cannonfoddering, chaos, anarchy, violence, danger, etc, etc. People have seen the advantage of private inheritance, which is easy to see, and failed to see the enormously greater disadvantages, which are a little harder to see. Public inheritance will mean that all the fortunes will come showering down on humanity generally, and this will not only make 99% people richer financially, it will also save the world from the endless escalation of universal misery to the point where the tension and anger and madness are enough to use enough of the bombs to kill all planet life. It will make 100% of people 100 times happier.

The founding fathers of the American dream of freedom from tyranny saw clearly that wealth concentration would destroy freedom and democracy, would raise the immense misery and danger of tyranny, with its ever-escalating warmongering and cannonfoddering of the people. But they saw it insufficiently clearly, in too small numbers, to prevent the regrowth of tyranny in the land of the free. Not all the founding fathers were free from myopic ideas of their self-interest, and even the most free from such myopic, incorrect ideas were not perfectly free. The steps they took to prevent unjust wealth concentration, theft of the nation's wealth and existence, were insufficient to prevent the American people reproducing the basic mistake, and allowing wealth to concentrate, and consequently for tyranny, extreme range of political power, to regrow.

The French revolution also took steps to break up unjust concentrations of overpay. And those steps were also unsuccessful.

By allowing private inheritance, all people of all nations have allowed the endless accumulation of ever-greater fortunes, the endless march of ever-greater wealth and poverty, with its endless growth of violence, war and weaponry. It has allowed overpay and injustice and tyranny to accumulate endlessly.

Everyone benefits from public inheritance. With public inheritance, everyone receives an equal share of all deceased estates. With private inheritance, wealth naturally automatically concentrates, money makes money, the rich get ever-richer, the poor get ever-poorer, and anger, conflict and weaponry ever-grows.

Public inheritance provides an effective counter to this ever-more-horrible situation. At present, the overpaid are constantly being torn down from the heights of wealth and power, the underpaid are constantly exploited, and driven to conflict as the only way to try to get back their earnings. Plutocracies grow up, become more and more intolerable, and the people tear them down. Although money is power, the people have a greater power, and they have never failed through all history to bring an extreme plutocracy down. So plutocracy is disastrous for the overpaid. The super-overpaid are dancing on the edge of a volcano, as the saying goes.

Overpay is disastrous for the overpaid individual, because the overpay attracts people, rich and poor, who try to take it in many ways. Plutocracies are disastrous for the overpaid as a group in the long run, when the worm at last turns, and the people steal justice back with all the pent-up anger of centuries of oppression, suffering and slavery. The endless cycle of unjust wealth concentration and revolution to restore fairpay. But after revolutions, the same mistake is repeated. Private inheritance causes wealth concentration again. With public inheritance, everyone will justly be on the receiving end of all deceased estates. There will be a steady flow into everyone's estates of all deceased estates. And the global catastrophe of relentlessly ever-growing violence, in the forms of war, crime, riots, strikes, massacres, genocides, terrorism, etc, climaxing in global annihilation soon, will be avoided.

People instinctively feel that public inheritance would be unfair. People's mistaken sense of justice inhibits the promotion of public inheritance. They feel: But that person earned that money, and they have a right to give it to whom they wish. They think: I don't want a system that doesn't allow me to dispose of my fortune how I wish. They do not think: By supporting this business of private inheritance I am opening the door for myself to have to fund the heirs of the richest. They don’t see the downside loss to themselves is far greater than the upside gain.

Heirs have, generally, done nothing to earn that money, and giving heirs money for nothing forces others to work for no pay. It is everyone who has earned that money. Wealth concentration is unjust, is legal theft.

But, all the time, everyone identifies with the wealthy, and everyone feels very protective of unlimited fortunes, as if the fortunes were their own. 99% of people are sacrificing their real wealth on the altar of their imaginary wealth. And 100% of people are sacrificing their real happiness on the altar of their imaginary happiness.

This is like the story of the golden idol. People felt richer having the golden idol. But they had given up their wealth to make the golden calf. And we are still being this foolish. And then getting angry because we are poor.

In one way, this is a very simple error which a moment's thought can dispel. But in another way it is a very difficult error to rout. Evolution has programmed us to believe very strongly in holding on to whatever we get hold of. And, out of nature, in society, this belief is crucifying us, year after year, century after century, millennium after millennium.

Public inheritance is a correction of a wrong, a very dangerous and ultimately fatal error, which engulfs everyone. People seem to see that the legal owner of the money has earned it. People do not see that everyone has in fact earned it. When they can see this, the global catastrophe of violence, nuclear extinction, and universal colossal destruction of happiness will cease. Will cease as easily as cat fatalities on the road will cease as soon as cats clearly, fully understand traffic. Cats are relying on nature-given attitudes in a non-nature situation. And it is killing them, and they are not changing their behaviour. They are not thinking: Hmmm, something is wrong somewhere. They are writing the losses off as natural losses. And we are still doing the same. We are handicapped by still being 98% identical to chimpanzees, genetically more similar to chimpanzees than zebras are to horses, and porpoises are to dolphins, while we have made a whole new alternative to nature with our technological, toolmaking brains. We are still writing off vastly worse unnatural war as natural war. We haven't yet really seen society's wars as a problem. We think it is nature.

Money is a license to take products of people's work from the social pool of wealth. The only proper thing that entitles people to take out of the social pool of wealth is having put an equal value of goods into the social pool of wealth by their own work.

We have a social pool of the products of work because we specialise in tasks. So we pool the products of work so that everyone can get out the variety of goods they need and desire. Ideally, the money we get paid for work accurately measures the amount of work we put in to the social pool of wealth, and gives us license to take out the same amount of work, in the form of a variety of goods, so that no one takes out more or less than they put in. The proper function of money is to facilitate the remixing of goods that have been separated by job specialisation.

But justice, nontheft, demands an equality in workvalue between what each person puts in and what they take out. That is, the work that has gone into the goods and services they take out has to equal the quantity of work that went into the goods and services they put into the social pool of work and wealth. Otherwise theft has occurred, which causes the endless escalation of anger and violence. Bill Gates puts in an hours' work, and on a very good day, takes out US$10 million. That is, US$10 million of other people's work. In return for one hour of his work. For example, 10 US$1 million dollar houses. Every hour, on a very good day. His lifetime average is only half of a $1 million dollar house every hour of work. Whereas of course Bill Gates, even with all his putative talent, could not design the door handles, nor make one beam, in one hour. So are we wrong or are we right to allow this? Are the arguments for doing this sound, or are they biased by myopic, incorrect ideas of self-interest? Do overpay and underpay exist? We are handicapped by assuming that whatever is, must be right, an assumption that applies in nature, not in society.

Private inheritance breaks this iron rule of justice. The heir has generally done nothing to earn that money. So the heir steals legally from humanity. He takes out where he did not put in, which means others have to put in more than they take out. He steals safety, peace, freedom, democracy, social stability and order, and finally survival, from all others and from himself. Causes every single human to be thrown into a vicious, cruel, sadistic and masochistic, endlessly escalating battle for fairness. Causes every single human being to be thrown into every human-caused suffering in Europe and other lands that people fled to America and other places in the hope of avoiding.

The net effect of private inheritance is to make 99% of people poorer, because they are financing this pay without work. But we look at the upside only, not the whole picture, and yet we think we are seeing reality clearly. There is a reason why some people have hinted that people are often in error.

People have supported and still support and believe in private inheritance because they see only the close-up upside, the chance to inherit something. They do not yet see that, in all the cases where they don't inherit, they are subsidising the overpay, they are subsidising, by work without pay, the licenses of heirs to raid the social pool of wealth. The net effect of all the private inheritance, and all the other legal and successful illegal thefts, is that 1% benefit financially, 99% lose financially, most of them horribly, and 100% of people are embroiled in relentlessly ever-nastier global disasters of millions of kinds, deeply scarring everyone emotionally, spiritually and physically.

Everyone loses, massively. Therefore changing it will make everyone win massively.

If you ever wondered why you are a wageslave, or if you ever wondered why 90% of people get between 10th and 1000th of the world-average hourly payrate, this is why. Seeing the close-up effects and not the longshot effects of private inheritance and other legal thefts. Seeing a part of the picture and assuming from this that we are seeing correctly. 90% of people get between a tenth and a thousandth of the world-average hourly payrate. Pay without work necessarily means work without pay. And that means violence. Any license to take out where they didn't put the same amount in, means others left to put in more than they get to take out.

We would not be happy if the Louvre showed only a tenth of the Mona Lisa. We would feel that we were being denied the view of the picture. And yet when it comes to life, we think we see clearly if we see something, if we see only a part. So we are in contradiction with our own good sense.

For certain reasons, there is little sympathy for the poor. We mostly think that the poor are doing okay, despite the evidence, or that they deserve poverty, which is far more untrue than true. More on this later. But 99% of people are underpaid. 99% of people take out less than they put in. Wealth concentration not only relentlessly ever-widens the range of pay per unit of work, it relentlessly increases the percentage of people underpaid. There are now 99% of us who will net-profit financially by public inheritance replacing private inheritance. And 100% of humans who will benefit 99% in happiness and 100% in survival.

Despite these arguments, people will still find it very difficult to make the transition from custom to reason. And here we are victims of mother nature's mechanisms of survival which do not apply in society. What works in nature doesn't work in society. The herd instinct is a great survival mechanism in nature. But it preserves herd errors just as much as it preserves the self-interest of the herd members.

A cartoon: A herd of lemmings going over a cliff. A thought balloon over the head of one of the lemmings: Should we be thinking about this?

And we are secondly handicapped by mother nature in our tunnel vision. Both hunters and gatherers, men and women, have focused vision, although the gatherers retain more ability to see peripherally, since they might spy something else useful in peripheral vision. But the natural way is to assume that the system is good, that tunnel vision works. There is a fundamental trust of mother nature. This trust is inappropriate in society, which has not been made with the wisdom of mother nature. There is a profound confidence in all animals that fundamentally everything is right. This confidence becomes very dangerous when it is humans, not mother nature, who have built the system. Tunnel vision, limited perspective, is overall good when mother nature has designed things, but not when the design is made by tunnel-vision animals like us. We are predators, with tunnel vision for focusing on prey. This works as long as the predator is not the object of prey. The eagle rarely has creatures attacking it while it is attacking rabbits and mice. And the designers of a system need to have the overview, the clear picture of the whole. Which we seriously lack. We see the preylike upside and not the vastly greater downside that preys on us. Our technological brains have connected the world with trains and boats and planes and satellites, and we are still using the mindset of creatures who do not need to have the overview, who can trust the designer to have the overview. We have made the world a village, we have put the whole world on our shopshelves, we have global transport, global finance, global communication, global weaponry, and we do not yet feel the need for global consciousness, global information, globally informed opinion, global ruling by the people. Nuclear giants and ethical infants. Technological giants and ethical nonstarters. Because ethics, that is, pursuit of happiness, requires big-picture awareness, perspective, non-tunnel vision.

Ethics, which is properly the pursuit of happiness, requires a knowledge and an instinctive sense of the connectedness and the cause-effect relationships among all things relevant to the individual. And we have made the whole world relevant to every individual. Coffee, coconuts and bananas are international items. Most products are international items. It is becoming ever-less true that this is a Japanese car, this is an American car. Obviously everyone should have a hand in decisions, because everyone has their happiness to pursue. This is what equality of human beings means and is based on, that everyone has their happiness to pursue. But this makes appropriate education essential. The necessity of sufficient relevant education follows from equality of human beings. And we are handicapped with minds that think that focusing on what is close and ignoring what is distant, and focusing on a part and not on the whole, are going to be okay for us. This confidence is based on millions of years of survival. In nature. In society, we need to lose this thoughtless confidence. We do not have global democracy. We do not have the people knowing global information.

The suspicion that we need a wider vision is implicit in the timeless story of the hunter tracking the bear who is coming up behind the hunter. We have everyone with little-picture consciousness, no one with big-picture consciousness. We have global reality without any global governance.

Even global information is in its infancy. The word global has become a buzzword, while the data has remained merely international, that is, merely multi-national. Consciousness is stuck with information about many nations, and has not yet become information about the global realities. How many know that world topsoil is being lost at the rate of 1% a year? That is, that world topsoil will be a thing of the past in 100 years. Very few. And fewer grasp its grave importance. If we are childishly to let wiser minds than ours take care of governance, we need at least to be vigilant that the governors do have wiser minds than ours, and are free from corruption away from having the interests of everyone at heart, and that they do know that they need to have global information and consciousness. We have made the global society, and we have no one yet who can drive it. And it is necessary that all know at least broadly how to drive it, lest the unglobal voices of some people prevent global-minded governors from acting properly.

And in the present situation, true governance, with everyone's interests at heart, is usurped by wealth concentration. We are two steps from order. We need to get the true governors in place, and we need to get everyone thinking globally in harmony with the global reality our technological minds have made. It is impossible to get true governors in place while there is a golden carrot of US$70 trillion a year being offered to the richest.

The human cortex has made our tool-making ability explode far, far, far beyond the other animals. But our 1% cortical rationality has had the disadvantage of making us assume that all our thinking is rational, and of making us hate to be wrong. While 99% of our brain and our thinking is driven, promoted and supported by evolutionary instincts inappropriate to our society. We have had enough brain to get into every trouble, without having enough brain to get us out. We are sorcerer's apprentices without a sorcerer for back-up. To get us out of this giant trouble, we will have to quickly acquire global intelligence. To quickly make the 1% cortical intelligence dominate and control the 99% atavistic, instinctive, tunnel-vision, evolutionary 'intelligence' or unthinkingness. Before our technology drives us over the cliff.

Why is there so very little alarm at the future of nuclear winter? Why is there so much facile and inappropriate confidence that it won't happen?

It is partly because of the immature, irresponsible, and badly-named pleasure principle, which is actually the pain principle. The mis-named pleasure principle says: If it isn't pleasant, I don’t want it on my radar - it doesn't exist for me. But the reality principle is the happiness-maker: if you spy the doggie doodoo, you won’t step in it.

It is partly because we have not adapted to the global reality which the toolmaking cortex has made, and so everyone thinks that nuclear winter is someone else's problem, as if global doesn't include your locality. It is partly the utter confidence in mother nature, which is inappropriate in society but which still dominates people's thinking or unthinking. That is, if I just take care of my patch, or some patch, the whole will be okay. I am just one among many, so it can't be my job to be responsible for the whole. Whereas the fact is that, unless everyone, or at least the 10% bellwethers of society, the people of love and intelligence and maturity and awareness, take responsiblity for the whole, there can be no governance.

At the moment we have only the appearance of governance, the error of thinking there is governance. Whereas wealth concentration, which is power concentration, means that the people with political power are the last people to have everyone's interests at heart. Obviously, wealth concentration most attracts those who most want it. It most attracts those who are most impervious to the rational arguments 1. that satisfactions are limited and so overpay suffers rapidly diminishing returns in happiness after all needs, all major desires, and millions of minor desires, are satisfied, which they are by fairpay, and 2. that the danger and insecurity of overpay is proportional to the ratio of overpay and underpay. Astronomical overpay means astronomical danger and insecurity, means slip and fall is far and fast, means life and wealth are devoted to security. The crests on the financial seas always rush to fall.

Examples: The tremendous labour of security Stalin laid on himself by taking all the money and power of all Russia and communism. Ceausescu. Caesar. Hoffa. The French so-called aristocracy, actually plutocracy, guillotined. The short lifespans of many of the Roman Emperors, especially in the later, extreme wealth-poverty, decline and fall, stage of that empire, some emperors lasting only days. The multitudinous kings, presidents, prelates and would-be kings in all times and places killed in battle and by poison and assassination. The Borgias. The boss of the Vatican bank. The top people in business and politics and organised crime who have toppled in just one year would make a long list. But we ignore the fallers, because of the pleasure principle, the unreality principle, the masochism principle, the selfblinding principle.

And any such list of the superrich and superpowerful toppled by rich and poor would be only the tip of the iceberg, since concealment is paramount in these activities.

Obviously the intensity of the battle is proportional to the size of the prize. There are few legal niceties in small estates. The greater the fortune, the shorter the stay. The whole world is tearing at fortunes in every way they can. Beggars fear no thieves. Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown. The greater the overfortunes, the greater, and more numerous, the underfortunes are. The rich are dancing on the edge of a volcano. And other such ignored sayings.

Most people have some instinctive understanding that satisfactions are limited, that life is for a balance of enjoying as well as of getting, and that individual deserts are limited, because individual capacity to contribute is limited. The people at the top are the people who have least instinctive sense of these truths, and are therefore the last people you want governing. In the unlimited-fortunes system, they are unfortunately the first people in power. Hence the limitless cruelties of history to the present time.

The error in thinking on private inheritance is all one with the attitude of gamblers. Las Vegas is built on the biased focus of minds on the upside of gambling. Most get poor and a few get wealthy on gambling, which obvious fact ought to make gambling unpopular. The fevered vision of wealth feeds money and power into the hands of a very few, draws money and power out of the hands of most. It will not stop until the idea that wealth has a net extreme negative effect on happiness is the generally accepted idea. It is true that wealth does have an extremely negative net effect on happiness. All history shouts it. It needs only the domination of the 99% evolutionary, instinctive brain by the 1% rationally thinking brain for people to see where their self-interest lies.

All wisdom has spoken of it, but for some reason, wisdom has never shouted it. And wisdom has been often distracted towards giving false arguments against wealth. Which has no doubt fed the assumption that there are no true arguments against wealth. In this way, the false arguments against wealth have worked to protect the error that unlimited wealth is totally good. We think: Money is good, therefore more money is always better. This is the simplistic, tunnel vision, pleasure principle, argument that universally prevails.

The same error in thinking exists in the attitude to profits. We think: Profits are always good. Don't take away profits. Profit good. Taking away profit very bad. The fact that most people who have wished to take away profits have only wanted the profits for themselves hasn't helped. This attitude is firmly established despite the fact that there is a generally accepted idea that there are excess profits, profiteering, price-gouging, etc. Although the word profiteering seems to have disappeared lately. Sometimes people talk badly of profits.

As a candid businessman said, business is just selling things for more than you paid for them. As the Greeks said a long time ago, the merchant buys cheap and sells dear. The honest purposes of trade are to facilitate exchange in a society where everyone specialises in what they produce, and to get a fairpay for your time spent providing the service of making the products available. We don't know what can of worms we opened when we decided to go for the efficiency of job specialisation. Job specialisation was intended to make everyone 20% happier, producing the same products in 20% less time, but it has resulted in everyone being catastrophically unhappier, everyone being 99%, soon 100%, unhappier than they need be.

The very simple, very dangerous fact which seems to have been overlooked by all economists and thinkers, and which has never entered the common mind of humanity, is that, in every transaction, the two things exchanged cannot be equal in workvalue. There must be more work gone into one thing than the other thing in the exchange. There is no way to determine with absolute precision the exact workvalue of the two things. They must be unequal. The chance of them being of exactly equal value is infinitesimal, and equality of workvalue will occur in almost no transactions. This necessarily means that wealth will pass automatically from one person to another in every transaction. Every transaction will be a fair-exchange-no-robbery, plus a robbery. The two things will be of values x and x + y. The x's will be the fair-exchange-no-robbery, and the y will be the robbery. One person will get out more than he put in, the other will get out less. On top of the fair exchange, in which both work and both reap, one will work and the other will reap. Inevitably. Unavoidably.

Both may think they profited, but if both profited, the mere exchange would have caused an increase in net value of both products, and mere exchange cannot increase value. This obvious truth has not stopped economists from teaching that both do profit. They argue that the exchange is voluntary, and therefore what can be wrong with it? They ignore the involuntary elements in transaction. The one who loses does not know he loses. You can't volunteer to do something without knowing what that something is. There is a measure of coercion in all transactions. For example, the cost in time and money of going to a competitor, of finding out the price in other shops.

And what happens over the trillions of transactions? After many transactions, a few will gain a lot, a few will lose a lot, many will gain or lose a little. Just as, if you toss a coin a million times, sections of ten tosses will often be 5-5 or 6-4, heads to tails and tails to heads, and will, rarely but definitely, be 9-1 and 10-0. A bell-shaped curve of net gain and loss will ever-stretch through time, as transaction continues, and then a realisation of injustice will emerge, and violence, war and weaponry will evergrow. Almost no one will come out of all his transactions neither better off or worse off. Almost no one will come out with neither more or less than he put in. A firm advertises that you'll come out better off. You cannot come out better off than you went in unless the company makes a loss. The ideal is that you come out with as much as you took in, no more or less. The ideal is that you pay for the work that has gone into the products you buy, and that you pay for the service of all the people who provided the goods, the miners, the manufacturers, the drivers, the accountants, the managers, the shop-assistants, the owners. But in fact you cannot help but be robbed or to rob when you shop. For 99% of people it is net being robbed, despite profit, private inheritance, capital gains, and all the other ways of getting money without proportionate working. Because all the money equals, represents and is backed by, all the products of work. Therefore pay without work has to mean work without pay. Means violence. Means misery.

If we understand by profits the money left over after every contributing working person, including the owner-managers, has been fairly paid, then it is necessarily true that profits belong to underpaid workers and overcharged customers.

Profits can mean two things. They can mean the money left over, out of which the owners pay themselves for their service in providing the shop or company. Or they can mean the money left over after everyone, including the owners, have been paid salaries. The first meaning tends to occur in small businesses, the second in large. Provided the owners have been paid fairpay, money left over after this is by definition not deserved by, not earned by, the owners. They have been fully and fairly paid for their contribution and sacrifice of their time. Money is supposed to be for work alone, to compensate sacrifice. Wherever there is pay without proportionate work, there is work without proportionate pay for someone else. But the general error that profits are good means that the overpay is legally snapped up, taken possession of, by the company owners. We will in this book have to go into exactly what is and what isn't fairpay, what is and what isn't sacrifice. The simplistic, myopic love of profit has caused no one to establish exactly what is fair to be paid for, and what is not. The human hunter of money has not seen the bear of violence creeping up behind.

Everyone has said: Profits, whoopee, that's for me, and jumped in grabbing what they can, and then got angry when the net result is super-extreme overpay and underpay, with 99% getting underpaid, with 90% getting out between 10% and 0.1% of what they put in. And have then felt that humans are bad, because of all the fighting going on.

Even if everyone strived to make the two things exchanged as equal in work-input value as they can, they could not prevent half the participants making ever-increasing net gains and half making ever-increasing net losses from the endless stream of transactions. The percentage gaining and losing will stay the same, 50%, but individuals will be constantly changing between the sides. This is the imp in transaction that has caused the ceaseless, automatic stretching of the range of pay per unit of work over all history with its consequent ever-increasingly horrible and dangerous violence.

Add in plunder, conquest, imperialism, slavery, legal thefts, etc, that is, things which ought to be illegal and aren't, add in the vigorous mercantile endeavour to enlarge y at all times in all ways, by reducing wages and pension rights, and puffing product, for instance, add in successful illegal thefts, add in the fact that money is power to rake money, and you only speed up the stretching of the bell-shaped curve of overpay and underpay, of endless growth of violence between the sometimes innocently overpaid and the righteously angry underpaid. Everyone tearing at everyone else all the time with ever-bigger weaponry.

How many more people would be honest if they knew they were robbing others? How many will be willing to honestly, fearlessly, openly look to see if they are robbing others? How many will grasp that it is in their own interest to minimise the automatic legal robbery? Some will be tempted to think that: I am not doing it deliberately, so it is alright. But the violence continues to escalate, penetrating everywhere as efficiently as water into sponge. Theft pays in the short run and in the part-picture, sometimes, but in the long run, it is the cause of the screaming-overrevving nightmare of history.

It is not at all necessary that people care for others. It is only necessary that people care for themselves. Because the erosion of quality of life is universal. Everyone suffers equally from injustice.

But that people care for themselves is by no means a given. It is possible that at bottom people love self-destruction. It is possible that at bottom people only care to go out with a bang. It is possible that at bottom people 'know' they are going to Valhalla if they only die spectacularly. The failure for millennia to correctly analyse the simple source of their disastrous history, the confident failure to read the shouted lesson of all history, and the confidence of the resistance to this somewhat obvious thesis, points to the hypothesis that we are in fact at bottom totally confident of our immortality, totally confident that we are here in bodies for the fun of destruction, for the myriad dramas of the chaos and killing. Looking into a movie shop, anyone might conclude that we love mayhem. But perhaps we love seeing mayhem, to stiffen our nerves for reality. The joke that gruesome nursery tales are to prepare children for the newspapers comes to mind.

How much goodwill and fair-hearing will this thesis get? Is the resistance all just myopia, the force of custom and convention, misplaced confidence in the herd and mother nature, and the aversion to being wrong? Will people prefer to fight than switch? Will people continue to sacrifice their happiness, their all, on the altar of their misplaced confidence in the accepted ideas? Is the deathwish the stronger? Tune in next week.

Can global violence continue to rise and yet never reach the point of using the planet-freezing bombs we have? A helium balloon released in a room will reach the ceiling. Unless we prevent it. Alas, the helium balloon of theft and violence has been released, and, over thousands of years, has risen nearly to the ceiling. Will people care enough about life to bite the bullet of being real? Or will they be as charmingly unrealistic as those pictures of children practicing to get under desks when the atom bomb goes off? Will they strive mightily to drive their 99% reptile-mammal brains to rationality, survival and restoration of normal levels of happiness, or will they say: To hell with this, I don't have to? Is the purpose of life the pursuit of happiness? Or are misery and destruction the happiness of humans?

It is possible that we have been designed to need to be rescued, designed to be unable to save ourselves, so that a saviour can be useful. But I think it is appropriate to our self-esteem, dignity and honour to strive mightily to save ourselves whether we can or not. We cannot assume that we cannot save ourselves, and therefore sit on our hands, without being ignoble.

In review. Unlimited-fortunes society is like a machine that if you embrace it, it gives you an endless series of kicks in the pants. People do not yet connect the kicks with the machine. The unlimited-fortunes machine dispenses too little milk to 99%, and too much to 1%. Far too little to 90% and far too much to 0.1%. But it dispenses kicks in plenty to all. It is probably not good taste to refer to our miseries lightly as kicks in the pants when our miseries include assassination, guillotining, the growing danger of cities, the chronic rise of stress and mental breakdown, the 500,000 deaths every year from pharmaceutical drugs, torture of millions each year, the sexual slavery of one million more girls every year, millions having legs blown off by landmines, 100 million deaths per year by violence and starvation when the family working average hard produces US$200,000 worth of goods per year, half the hospital beds in the world full of victims of bad water when clean water can be provided for $1 a person, the strangulation almost to death of the world economy, the reduction of science and progress to a 50th of what it would be with justly limited fortunes, the going blind of 2 million a year for lack of 4cents worth of vitamin A per year, for millions the failure of completion of brain growth for lack of protein when the per-person production of food is increasing, and a trillion other unnecessary sufferings. In short, the absence of 99% of natural, normal happiness in every human life.

Some will say: Where is all this misery? It isn't here. My house is standing, my car works. I say: Let go the comfort blanket of denial, of the pleasure principle, open up fully to the miseries in your life that you pushed out of your mind so long ago you don't remember that you did, picture yourself in a world where every family working average hard is paid US$200,000 a year, and others working less or more get proportionately less and more, and where you are free from the weight of the oppression of, and danger from, and manipulation by, all those with more, and other-earned, money and power than you, and you are free from the presence of, and the danger from, all those with less money and power than you, when world anger is minimalised, when the whole world is safe to travel, and friendly, when dance and laughter and lightheartedness have bloomed everywhere to an incredible extent, when the miracles of science and technology are 50 times as fast coming, when financial crises are few and comparatively very small, when dog-eat-dog and ratrace and skyjacking and suicide bomber and illegal immigration and job-outsourcing are words no longer understood.

Of course everyone is happy relative to the level of happiness we have got used to.

Will happiness diminish dramatically for all if a government takes 90% of aftertax income permanently off 90% of the population and gives it all, that is, 81% of the national income, to 1%? Will violence increase? Yes. Everyone will readily agree with this. Violence and unhappiness will increase by something like a factor of 100. And violence and unhappiness will decrease by an equal factor when the government stops doing that theft. And after thousands of years of transaction and legal and illegal theft, we have theft levels far higher than this example, which is already so extreme. No government would be mad enough to propose such a scheme. They would be far less likely to propose such a scheme as a plan intended to improve everyone's quality of life. There is no one who would propose such a scheme with the intention of raising the general quality of life. So there is no one on this planet who really believes in the present situation, which is far greater inequality than the hypothetic example above.

In the above example, the pay-injustice, violence, misery, danger, stupidity factor, that is, the ratio of highest to lowest pay, is only 820. The same factor in the present state of this planet is one billion. In the above example 1% take 81%. In the real world, 1% take 90%. The very, very, very good news is that it is by the same factor of one billion that things will improve if we can get sane. I don't see that anyone can refute this argument. I have looked at it for years and I still don't see a crack in it. Do you?

Can 99 people make one person behave? Can 99 win a tug-of-war against one? 0.1% take 70% of money, 99% of happiness and 100% of human future. Can 999 make 1 behave in the interests of 1000? I think: Yes, they can. If the reality can be explained clearly enough to people.

How much devilry is concealed by the unlimited money and power to conceal? How much evil do those above the law, and thus free to do as much evil as they wish, do? How much evil did Nero and Caligula do that we don't, even now, know? Benjamin Disraeli tells us that most history is hidden. The powerful Duke of Wellington, winner of Waterloo, said that if he told the truth he would be torn to pieces. Who are these superpowerful who tear great people to pieces if they try to tell truth, which is the only mother of happiness? And why have we shovelled all power and responsibility to them, who are the least sane, the furthest from justice and moderation and love? How much have they destroyed our good sense when we all think pay justice, nontheft, is a bad thing? When we all passively give our support to near-maximal inequality at the same time that we all believe maximal inequality would be maximally bad?

We who allow unlimited overpay are responsible for all the unlimited evils that the overpaid, above the law, do. Whether we think about it or choose not to, we choose unlimited-fortunes systems or justly-limited-fortunes systems every second.

Another example of happiness we have lost and forgotten: Kindness is strangled by extreme inequality. Since no one feels safe with what they have, since everyone has less than others more powerful, no one feels safe and secure enough in happiness to be kind. The more people have, the worse their security is. The less they have, the worse their security. Everyone is on the slippery slope above yawning awful poverty. The higher the inequality goes, the more poverty gapes wide under everyone. How much of self-esteem is lost by the constraint on kindness? How much less do we think of ourselves because we cannot afford to let our sympathies out? How much joy do we miss out on by being too threatened by life to be free enough to be kind?

Everyone is in an extreme state of insecurity from being under attack from everyone, above them, below them and beside them. Everyone has an abyss of extreme poverty and death yawning below them. And the richer have the greater insecurity of having further to fall, of fighting hard to try to keep the crest up, while the crest is under the most intense attack from the toughest fighters. Everyone's attention is devoted entirely to trying to increase security by trying to scrabble higher, although security is no greater with height, although unlimited overpay, this limitless scrabbling, only makes the poverty yawn wider and deeper. Clearly, we are very unhappy, very poor in happiness, when our anxiety is so great that we have no freedom to stop someone starving to death. Obviously someone being swept away has no leisure and freedom to save anyone else from being swept away. Obviously we all feel we are too close to the edge to give money away.

Increase of happiness is impossible without facing areas of unhappiness. Finding areas of unhappiness is the only way to increase happiness. Facing areas of unhappiness is not all bad. Not finding and facing areas of unhappiness completely blocks the path to increased happiness. In our case, it is completely blocking the path to vastly greater happiness. The purpose of government is justice. So our present governments get an F in government. They get a mark of 1 out of 100, for writing their name. This is an extreme view relative to customary thinking, which is corrupted by self-congratulation, but is it a view right on reality?

In relatively egalitarian societies like Scandinavian countries, there is a plateau of success, which all reach, and are safe on. Consequently, generosity and social concern are at a peak. And capital formation, that is, saving, is highest, too. Because people feel safe and strong standing on a plateau of general success, surrounded by others equally safe and secure. How much more desperate and frightened, cruel and antagonistic, are people in America and the Middle East?

We will never know how much happiness we have lost until we regain it.

How much more secure did people feel when they were merely somewhat powerless against the tiger than we do now, somewhat defenceless against guns and bombs and world wars and atomic bombs?

Can we begin to grasp the amount of happiness we have lost? Can we easily underestimate the happiness we can gain?

Some people will immediately think that being 100 times happier is impossible, the idea ludicrous. People think: We cannot be much happier, unless we meet the love of our life, or some such thing. But how much do you think happiness would decline if some agency took 90% of wealth off 90% of citizens and gave it all to 1%? Let us say that you think happiness would decline by a factor of x times. Then it follows that you already believe that happiness will increase by a greater factor than x, because the world reality is worse than the above example.

Since money satisfies all needs and almost all desires, the theft of 90% from 90% of people is already the loss of 81% of national happiness. And then there is the violence engendered between classes, the ever-increasing war of everyone against everyone, the desperate insecurity of having society riven by everyone having people above and below them. So I think the loss of 99% of happiness is not an extreme figure. Therefore happiness will be 100-fold with the removal of this grand theft of 90% from 90%.

Another little example. How much cheaper would rents be if no buildings had been destroyed in wars?

People say complacently that you'll never stop wars. But the example of a government taking 90% off 90% and giving it to 1% shows that everyone already knows the connection between injustice and violence. That is, everyone already knows that injustice is the cause of war, not human natural bellicosity.

People say you will never stop people being greedy. But 99% of people will get more money with justice. And it will be self-earned money, so it won't cause violence. And 100% of people will get the savings in time, money, lives and labour, the happiness and survival of enormously reduced violence. So isn't it true that the only barrier to this enormous increase in happiness is prejudice against hard, clear, impartial, self-interested thinking?

99% of people have the vice, the cause of misery, that is the opposite of greed. They are shovelling 90% of world money and power to the 1%, or allowing the 1% to shovel 90% of world money and power to themselves, which amounts to the same catastrophic, suicidal thing. And this means shovelling poverty and powerlessness, undemocracy and slavery, violence and cannonfoddering, to themselves. And shovelling extinction to everyone. The difficulty is getting 99% of people to be greedy enough to get all of their own earnings, and thus prevent 1% having power over everyone else, to their own, and everyone else's, destruction.

And the amount of war that is natural to humanity is the amount of war that there is without the presence of extreme inequality. And the amount of war has been rising from natural levels for as long as inequality has been rising, namely, for thousands of years of transaction, with its inbuilt, automatic, injustice side-effect.

So isn't there a little hope?

That with tremendous mental striving and a little work talking to two friends we can reap a great harvest?

Even to pursue a substantial rational hope is already a great happiness.

Mr. Onasis,

Once again you have sent us great work. It is a pleasure to read, not only because it resonates as true, but also for purely literary value.

I often thought of America as a lottery. When immigrants come here, they believe that they will get rich, and ignore the odds that say they will be poor. Everybody has high expectations for themselves, and doesn't want to believe in the possibiliy of their own failure. I was such a person, still am.

--Bart

Um, that's Ms. Onassis if you don't mind.

Color me very deeply grateful for your comment, Bart. It means so much to me that you read my chapters, saw the goodsense, and spoke up. I'll be back soon, but my computer just came home from being in the repair shop for over a week so I have much catching up to do before I post another chapter...or anything else.

(and yes, I'm female, but this book is a collaboration between myself and my teacher from New Zealand, who is male. The completely original thinking about that imp that creeps into transaction causing inequality automatically - the vital new discovery that makes this writing so crucially important: that came from my brilliant but unknown teacher.)

I was hoping these chapters better answered/explained to LC and Curse some points that came up in comments elsewhere, but I guess I'll just have to keep wondering about that...?

Anyway, huge and sincere thanks, Bart.
And Happiness wishes to all of you.

How interesting. It seems to me women would be the last people to embrace this philosophy. What do you think?

I think we have only to look at/to our own loving Mothers to observe that women have always realized this policy of equitable shares for each and all is no high philosophy hanging in air; it's realism, it's practicality, it's as tied down to earth as anything gets. Did our Mothers feed a feast to one of their children whilst giving the others one pea for dinner? Did our Mothers give more than he could eat to the child who was smarter or more attractive, depriving her other offspring in order to do so?

Most of us would be ashamed to say to our parents "I'm better/smarter/etc than my brother Tommy, so love me more, give me more, give me most of Tommy's share, too." But when we grow up and it comes to money...to equal reward for equal sacrifice, we adults in this world seem to have lost all shame over being so mindlessly unjust. But somewhere still in us, the lessons our Mothers modeled are still in there, waiting to be ressurected by careful thought.

Whether a Mother or Father, if you were the sole adult in charge of an orphanage and you had to leave for a few days, and upon your return you discovered that one big kid had taken all the food and supplies for himself and was depriving all the other children and everybody was fighting like mad - the deprived fighting to get their share and the big kid fighting to keep what he'd hoarded - and everybody bruised and battered from the constant fight and no one happy - even the big kid having no time to eat what he took - wouldn't you put that situation straight immediately?

Love is the very realest Realpolitik.

Men (and women) who want to be good providers for their families only need to see that continuing to support unequal pay for equal sacrifice provides their families, their every descendent, with a downside that far and away exceeds the upside of having possession of overpay. Clawing our way to the top of the pyramid means clawing our way to misery. When we could deconstruct the foolish pyramid, and have a picnic with everybody on level ground.

The non-negotiable price of survival for Humanity is justice. Murder the unjust idea to allow wealthpower giants. Nothing else you can do is more crucial to your happiness and safety. Nothing else will give your children back a chance to have a future, Humanity. Feed your children on the inescapable truth:

“If there were but one person in the world, it is manifest that he could have no more wealth than he was able to make and save. THIS is the natural order.”
-Henry George 1839 – 1897

and now, dear bpj (and thanks again for responding again), if you don't mind answering...I'm very curious to know WHY you suspect(ed?) women would be the last to embrace "my" message?

In my experience women are more materialistic than men. To a woman, there is nothing more unattractive than a poor man. It's like holy water to a vampire. At the same time, weather or not this woman has any money is irrelevant. She could be worth millions.

I could go on. Women are more savvy socially. They like and thrive in social hierarchy. The last thing on their mind is weather or not any of it is fair. More likely a woman believes that climbing the social ladder is a skill like any other and should be compensated, even though nothing is produced by it.

If you wanna get down to reality, it's a simple fact that most women don't do manual labor. If we are to have a fair society that would have to change.

I have to strongly disagree that women "don't do manual labor", as the evidence shows otherwise: women produce/provide most of the food on this planet, and do the greater share in the sum of all work that gets done. (Not to mention, bpj, you're talking to a woman who not only did all the endless, heavy manual labor that goes into keeping a home and raising a family but who simultaneously worked in the construction and remodeling trades for better than a decade. Yes, Sugar, I can roof your house, build you an addition, tile your floors and walls, etc etc etc. And before that, it was the factory floor for me, just like for my own Mama. We both did time helping produce food packaging in a plant where the temperature sometimes exceeded 105 degrees, about the same temperature as one experiences when roofing a house in Iowa in July...)

Here are some USA and global facts:

7 out of 10 of the world's hungry are women and girls.

Women do two-thirds of the world's work, receive 10% of the world's income, and own 1% of the means of production.

Women make up 60% of the world’s working poor; people who work but do not get paid enough to lift themselves above the $1 per day poverty line.

Elderly women are 70% more likely to be poor than elderly men.

Women account for 64% of minimum-wage workers in the USA.

Women in the USA get paid 77 cents for every $1 paid to a man in 2005. In the developing world, it’s 73 cents. Even worse, of course, for women of color: Black women, it’s 63 cents. For Latinas, it’s 53 cents.

Of the 37 million people living below the poverty line in the USA, 21 million are women.

More than two-thirds of the world’s unpaid work is done by women – the equivalent of $11 trillion or almost 50% of world GDP.

In many regions women provide 70% of agricultural labor and produce over 90% of food.

The women of Africa walk the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back 16 times a day to supply their households with water. (Talk about manual labor!!)

Two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls.

Global average proportion of women in Parliament is just 17%. The USA ranks 67th with a mere 16%.

Over the past decade, women’s work has contributed more to global growth than has China.

Want more? Go here: http://www.womenfightpoverty.org/docs/WorldPovertyDay2007_FactsAndFigures.pdf

Meanwhile, the top nine richest men in the USA have money that rakes in (with no work done at all) $150.00 per second every second of their lives, 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Want more? Go here (and by all means sign up for the most excellent Monday emails Sam Pizzigati offers): http://www.cipa-apex.org/toomuch/tmweekly.html

So much for "women don't do manual labor". (watch out your wife and sisters and Mom don't smack you one for having said that, sweets!)

Also, I believe your suggestion that women mostly like and thrive on social hierarchy is not borne out by evidence. It seems obvious to me that in general, Womens' first instinct in any trouble is to come together employing cooperation - not competition - to deal with crises. And lastly, if women reject poor men, then why have there always been so many sons and daughters born to poor Mothers and Fathers?

When I was writing my message, I realized I knew nothing of the 3rd world, so I should have prefeced my message with "western women".

I don't trust statistics. I trust my own eyes more. For example, the reported unemployment rate in the US is 9%. In my area, I'd say it's more like 90%. I admit my environment is a bad example, but I do travel once in a great while, and notice that people in the suburbs are home in the middle of the day. A better idea is gauage how many businesses there are in an area and how much residential housing. You'll quickly notice there just aren't enough places to work, there never will be, because job supply is always lower than demand.

If you do trust statistics, you might want to pull up the number of women in college as opposed to men. Also take a look at the number of women going to junior colleges. I walk by a junior college, and noticed the "ratio" there is favorable, if you know what I mean. The problem with this system is that everybody want to go to college. It's a country where everybody's a scholar, even though almost nobody really is. Schools are simply places where you bribe people to get into the middle class. You are then assigned a useless occupation. I believe this is called "bureaucracy".

Forgive me if I offended you.

No forgiveness necessary. You have not offended me, Bart - (but you are a real gentleman for asking forgiveness in case you had.) I want you to know again how grateful I am for your honest and sincere responses, no matter what they be: I can't know where people's heads are at when nobody responds, so you do me a great kindness by your replies. Namaste.

It IS crucial that we all strive to get and keep a global perspective, as our most severe problems are all global and will require people who think globally to solve them.

I'll be back with more soonish, but I'm swamped just now. Y'all be well and keep well today.

You there, yes, You: THERE IS A GREAT HEAP OF HAPPINESS YOU HAVE OVERLOOKED!

(Hey, Bart, this was originally going to be a separate essay, but I'm thinking now it should possibly be chapter 1?) (there's one little section I'm still not happy with, so if you hit an awkward bit, just forgive it and keep going?)

What if someone had been stealing from you for a long time, and, for some reason which we need not try to imagine, you had not noticed, and then you learn that this has indeed happened, and all you have to do is understand that it is your money, and how to get it?

As strange as it sounds, this has happened. There is a wealth of money that belongs to you, that you have earned, that has been stolen from you without you realising, and it is waiting for you to understand it is yours, and understand how to get it.

In this book, I will do my best to explain how and why this is the truth.

This misunderstanding has cost you, not only a lot of money, but most of the happiness that is yours. And when I say happiness, I mean freedom, leisure, safety, peace, power, status - a lot of very important, valuable things like these.

A short, preliminary explanation: You have heard of the saying, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Have you ever thought that this has been happening for a very long time? That this has been going on for thousands of years. And that it means that money has been being stolen.

Clearly, it doesn't mean that the rich have been working harder and harder, and therefore earning the ever-increasing wealth that comes to them. It doesn't mean that the poor have been working less and less.
Everyone knows it means the contrary. It means that the rich work less and less per dollar got, and the poor work more and more per dollar got.

It means that the rich get more and more per unit of work they do, and the poor get less and less per unit of work they do. In other words, it is unjust, it is inequity, it is wrong, it is inequality. It is theft.

But right there is the beginning of the problem of why people have not really seen and understood that it is theft, not only of money earned, but everything else too, like freedom from being bossed, order, peace, friendliness, neighborliness, enjoyment of life, an environment of happy people you can trust, freedom from pollution of your life by violence, fear, difficulties, dangers, trouble, anxieties. Right here is the beginning of the problem of people not realising that this is the cause of most troubles and pains in human life. Somehow people have got it all mixed up and reversed. The idea that the rich have got money that doesn't belong to them, that belongs to others, meets a strange, powerful resistance, hard to break down, hard to understand.

It seems that the general reaction to the idea that the rich have money that belongs to other people, and that this money can and should be gone after, in the names of peace, happiness, justice, democracy and everything good, generates fear, not excitement. Most people instinctively side with the rich, somehow, and when there is talk of taking money off the rich people feel it as if it was money being taken off them, instead of money that belongs to them being returned to them. People seem to feel the idea as an attack on all the order in society. They seem to feel it as an invitation to theft, instead of feeling it as a return to justice and freedom from social disorder and disturbance.

This feeling, so strange, and so hard to understand, is the reason that humanity has suffered so terribly, and so unnecessarily, for so many thousands of years. This strange reaction has kept humanity in bondage to vast, gigantic and unnecessary pain and suffering for a very long time. Looking at this reaction, trying to see it and understand it, is the key to the opening of the possibility of undreamt-of peace and happiness for humanity, is the key to our very survival.

Although we have this strange reaction, feeling that the rich really deserve their wealth, and that it is bad to even think of taking it from them, at the same time, we have the contrary feeling that we deserve more, that there is injustice. It is the sense of injustice that drives the wars and other disturbance. It is very clear that there is injustice when a few have so much and so many have so little, while the many are doing most of the work. Everyone will willingly say that there is social injustice, meaning that some deserve more, but no one seems to be keen to go from the word injustice to the word theft. And yet what is injustice in regard to income except theft?

Somehow no one wants to think of the rich as thieves, as having the belongings of others, as being bad, as being wrong. On the contrary, there are some who will defend the 'rights' of the rich with intensity, with passion, with anger, with strong conviction. We have had millenia of rich and poor without the general feeling of humanity coming down firmly on the idea that this is wrong, is dangerous, is cause of many evils. If the general feeling had ever come to the point of certainty that it was wrong and harmful to all, we would have had a will to do something about it, and we would have done something about it. It isn't just that the rich have been propagandizing for millenia that they are good. I think on the whole they haven't had to. The support has been there from the people, from the many, from the general opinion, which is so contrary to common sense.

"The patience of the oppressed has always been the most inexplicable, as well as probably the most important, fact in all history."
-Author Amos Elon from The Pity of it All

"The rich have given to the poor a little food, a little drink, a little shelter and few clothes - the poor have given to the rich, palaces and yachts and an almost infinite freedom to indulge their doubtful taste for display; and bonuses and excess profits, under which has been hidden the excess labour and extravagant misery of the poor" - Gilbert Seldes

"The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly of having more as a privilege which dehumanises others and themselves" - Paolo Freire

"The modern English oligarchy does not rest on the cruelty of the rich to the poor - it rests on the unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich." - GK Chesterton

This 'the rich get richer and the poor get poorer' has been going on for a very long time, and therefore has gone a very long way. The richest are very, very rich indeed, the poor are very poor indeed. And money is power, so the richest are very, very powerful, tyrannical, and corrupt. And tyrannical means the rich do many terrible things, like murdering millions of people, more or less at will. And poverty is anger, and desperation, and violence. The income or increase in fortune for a fortnight's work ranges from US$1 billion to $1. That is, from a million times the average pay, to a thousandth of the average pay. A billion times as much for the same amount of work! A billionth as much for the same amount of work! I think people cannot really take that range in. It is beyond the general human powers of imagination. It is staggering. It is the mother of all facts about human existence.

Say that the range of pay for a fortnight's work is from $1 to $1 billion and you have told the story of human existence. That fact is enough to deduce enormous violence, enormous suffering, enormous disorder, enormous waste of happiness. A perpetual storm of crisis and disaster, chaos and craziness. And yet, there is this powerful reluctance to even think of the rich as having money that belongs to others. Individual minds come to that conclusion, yes, but it makes no headway in the general thinking. And this reluctance is the cause we are wedded, welded to war. And war is escalating. War and weaponry have been escalating steadily for thousands of years, and war and weaponry have escalated very dramatically in the last century, and yet there is a lack of concern, a lack of a general search for answers. We ought to be desperately seeking the answer, the exit from this nightmare, and we are not. At the same time, there must be consciousness of the injustice and theft, for it is that understanding that drives the violence and other disturbance. It is as obvious as obvious can be that there is enormous poverty and enormous wealth, and that this cannot be right, that is, that it must be theft, and the cause of most violence, and yet there is also at the same time a failure to grasp and face these obvious points.

A consideration of the following points will make it clearer that there is gigantic theft, and that this gigantic theft is the cause of the gigantic problems and pains we suffer. And yet, I am afraid it is true, that even after the clarification, the idea will stubbornly persist in a large part of most minds that wealth is right and good, and war and crime are not driven by injustice. We will have to follow the ins and outs of this strange contradictory mixture of common sense and its opposite. We will have to come to see and know it to be part of ourselves. Only then can we conquer it, and make our way back to consistency with our own good sense, and thus lead the way to forging a will to correct these injustices and reap the happiness that is the fruit of justice. We have enormous injustice. Injustice causes unhappiness. Injustice causes millions of problems. Therefore we can be very much happier than we are now. We can be very much happier than we are now. We just have to see things with common sense only, unmixed with the strange mad ideas we have got from goodness knows where. We just have to sort out what we really think is the case. We have to look at this strange confusion we have, and master it and conquer it. Then we will be free to act on our own good sense.

Unfortunately, it is not enough to point out the facts and the reasons. The facts and the reasons seem to have zero impact as long as the fatal disastrous fascination with our strange ideas has its hold on us. We have to see our strange ideas, and separate them from our common sense, and choose to operate only by our common sense, and not at all by these nonsensical ideas that seem to have taken us over, and which we allow to rule our actions without questioning them.

Some points to bear in mind. Some of our good sense to hold firmly onto, while we set about the task of weeding out these strange, nonsensical, unexamined, undoubted ideas.

1. The average person works 50 hours a week, or maybe more. [Housewives are reported to work over 90 hours a week average, whether they work outside the home or not. And it only takes the 80% of people working 52.5 hours a week average to raise the world average to 50 hours a week if the 20% in the first world work only 40 hours average. And the third world works far more than 52.5 hours a week average.] No one can work more than 100 hours a week average, not long-term, they can’t: we eat and sleep or we die. So no one works more than twice as long as the average. And yet we allow pay up to a million times the average. That has to be overpay. Super hyper extreme overpay. And there cannot be overpay without underpay. That is, you can't have one person getting more than they earn without others getting less than they earn. And overpay/underpay is injustice and theft, and causes violence, ever-escalative violence, which brings us to the present eve of annihilation.

2. Think how you would feel to be on a 100th of your present pay. Imagine how angry you will be if the government forces you to be paid 100th of your present pay, permanently, from now on. Multiply by five billion, because 90% of people are on between a 10th and a 1000th of the world average pay. The amount of anger you would feel, times five billion, is the amount of anger generated by the present level of injustice. That is how much motivation to violence can disappear if we undo the injustice. That is how much quieter, safer, more pleasant, troublefree, our lives can be, if we can only get all of our intelligence facing the fact of injustice and theft.

3. If all the adults in the world are clear and firm and strong that the extreme injustice is the cause of the extreme violence we suffer, there is nothing that can stop, there is nothing that will try to stop us getting the happiness we can get, that is ours. And the common sense of everyone is already correctly understanding the reality. And 4 billion adults can be reached and taught in just 32 times the time it takes to reach and teach 2 people. If you have 4 billion candles unlit, and only one lit, and everyone with a lit candle only ever lights two candles from their candle, all 4 billion candles will be lit in just 32 times the time it takes to light two candles. So everyone can be reached very easily, in short time, just by word of mouth, as soon as we figure out how to get clear ideas into our heads, as soon as we figure out how to get these strange nonsensical ideas out of our way to seeing clearly. There are 4 billion people that have to be reached, but there are 4 billion people to reach them. It seems a giant job to reach and teach 4 billion people, but many hands make light work. Strange it is, but true, that if everyone lights only one candle, it takes 4 billion times the time it takes to light one candle for the 4 billion candles to be lit. But if everyone lights just two candles, it takes just 32 times the time. Amazing but true.

4. When anyone talks about redistribution of income, everyone is inclined to shout 'communism!', and then 'communism doesn’t work!' This idea is not communism. It is the opposite of communism. Most people seem to instinctively feel that redistribution of wealth will attack them, will impoverish them to make others better off. Everybody assumes that they are wealthy! Everyone identifies with the rich side! The truth is that 99% of people are underpaid. Only 1% of people are paid more than the world average hourly payrate. No one imagines that the world average pay might be more than what they get.

I suppose no one likes to think that they are underpaid. No one is interested to know the world average pay, so they can know whether they are underpaid or overpaid. The world average pay is far higher than people imagine. 99% of people are below the average. The 'rich get richer and the poor get poorer' has gone on for so long that now 99% of people are underpaid. The 1% who are paid above the world average now get over 90% of world income! And most of the 1% are only moderately overpaid. Something like a 10th of 1% get 80% of world income A 100th of the 1% get 70% of world income. And so on. It is like a tub of water which is shoved sideways very hard. Most of the water goes up in the air, and there is very little water left in the tub.

Most of world earnings is up in the air, in the hands of the superrich, the super-overpaid, the super-overpowerful, to whom people with ordinary incomes are like minute insects, insignificant. The killing of them is no more guilt-making for them than our killing of minute insects. When a person has a million times the average income, a billion times the lowest income, it is like everyone goes around in tanks, and the richest have tanks a million times the size of the average, a billion times the size of the smallest. What would make them care if they run over a few million tiny tanks? That is how people like Stalin and Napolean and Hitler and Genghis Khan and Alexander, called 'the Great', think.

We allow unlimited fortunes, which means that we allow unlimited power. We let a few have superwealth and superpower which they use to try to get more wealth and power. We create the superpower that enslaves us. It is somehow that we so identify with wealth, that we permit unlimited fortunes because we see ourselves having that superwealth. We want that chance of having superwealth. We are incapable of getting it into our heads that we might end up on the other end of the deal. We are incapable, it seems, of fearing that we might be robbed of everything to fund someone else's overwealth and overpower! Even when we are on the losing side of the deal, among the majority who are underpaid, we think of limitation of fortunes as being a negative thing for us. We cannot imagine that limitation of fortunes could ever work in our favour.

Clearly there are irrational thoughts in us. And we are not on the alert against them. We trust all our thoughts totally. We don't know that we are mixtures of good sense and bad sense. It is too horrible to be wrong, so we can never face up to the possibility of being wrong, and so we suffer and suffer forever from our uncorrected mistakes. Even though our own good sense would tell us we are wrong. Amazing situation. A very tricky spot to get out of, when we are undermined by our own minds!

5. It is useful to bear always in mind that our brains are 99% reptilian and mammal brains. The cortex, the rational mind, is only a thin layer on the outside of the mammal brain, which covers the reptilian brain, the cerebellum. Our good sense is vastly outnumbered! A lot of our ideas are unthinking ideas that come from the instincts, from the evolutionary survival tricks that are inappropriate to our artificial lives. We have to re-think all our thoughts, and make sure that all our thoughts are appropriate to our reality. At the moment we are unquestioningly having and relying on unthinking ideas that we just accept because they have been there since we were reptiles and mammals - a lot longer than we have been thinking rationally. Unthinking ideas, or instincts, which were appropriate and saved our lives in ages past, are now destroying us because we uncritically accept them and assume they are still good for us.

6. If you took 100 people from across the range of pays from top to bottom of the range, and gave them all the same tools, and the same materials, and the same knowledge, to do a wide range of jobs, the productivity would not range very widely, and there would be no reason to assume that the richest people would be necessarily more productive than the average. We have this notion that the rich are somehow superproductive, superpeople, who are founts of abundance, who can do what no human can do. It seems to be part of our urge to idolize and idealise. It’s why we hear the rich create jobs, when only demand creates jobs.

Naturally it is nice to think that there are magic fountains of superabundance. We may even resent the attempt to destroy our illusion of such fountains. But it is in our interests to destroy this illusion, because it keeps us allowing unlimited wealth and power to a few. This illusion keeps us making tyrants. It is obvious that money is power. That unlimited wealth is unlimited power. And yet we allow unlimited power over us. We complain when we see it hurting us. But we do not forbid it. It causes over 99% of our problems, sufferings, griefs, hardships and terrors, but we do not make it illegal! We do not see that we can make it illegal. We do not see that we must make it illegal, to survive and to have all our natural happiness again [which is about 100 times as much happiness as we have now, drowned in war and threat of extinction].

It makes a sort of sense, and is perhaps unfortunately true, that the further we sink into misery, the more inclined we are to reach for the straw of idolization of superabundance. We may be unable to detach ourselves from this fatal attachment, or have greater difficulty detaching ourselves from this torturing illusion, because we are so miserable. The more miserable we are, the more tightly and irrationally we cling to the illusion. And we are very miserable indeed. Far more miserable than we are comfortable thinking of. Imagine an imaginary community in the jungles of New Guinea or the Amazon or Borneo that knows nothing of bombs and bullets, torture and massacre and genocide, riot and depression, world war and anthrax and 9/11, living as safe as our prehistoric ancestors! ‘We are far less secure now, defenseless against the bomb, than we were, defenseless against the tiger' - Arnold Toynbee, historian.

And we were never defenseless against the tiger. Our defense against the bomb will come from destroying the illusion that unlimited wealth is good.

The individual contribution of the individual to wealth by work is limited, why should fortune be unlimited? The American dream of a land of the free, away from the tyrannies into which Europe had fallen, was based on limitation of fortunes. And yet even America does not grasp or remember this. It seems that the conviction that unlimited fortunes is the fount of all good is so deep in the American psyche that it is impossible even to bring American thought back to the vision of their founding fathers. How simple is it that tyranny is utterly dependent on super-overfortunes? That where superwealth is, tyranny is. How simple is it that everyone's contribution to wealth is limited, not unlimited? We may define the essence of greed as the illusion that an unlimited personal wealth system is abundance, and a limited personal wealth system is poverty. How obvious is it that since everyone's contribution is limited, fortunes can exceed this limit, and thus get into overpay, which causes underpay, which causes the violence, the escalation of war and weaponry to extinction?

The illusion is a gambler's illusion: the bigger the jackpot, the richer we all are! No depth of poverty can destroy the gambler's illusion that bigger jackpots are better. Apparently the more primitive parts of our minds cannot grasp that the higher the water in the tub is thrown, the lower the water level in the tub must sink. Unlimited wealth is unlimited poverty. Which we definitely have.

It is clearly an illusion [and a very powerful one] that makes us feel comfortable with superwealth for very few and starvation for 50 million a year. How do we manage this? We are dazzled, excited, thrilled, entranced, besotted by the brilliance of the superwealth, and we simply attach no significance to the superpoverty.

There is superabundance for all. There is US$200,000 a year for every family in the world. [doubling every 12 years or so with global inflation.] That is, the family working average hard produces US$200,000 of goods a year. And yet we can think it right and proper and good to have 1% paid up to a million times the average, 1% paid 90% of the products of world work, and 1% of humanity starve to death each year. This is okay. This is 'unfortunate, but there it is'.

The founder of Christianity said that superwealth is bad in the strongest possible terms, and yet 2000 years has been too little for this to have the slightest impact on the ideas of Christian nations. The wealthy are most highly respected. They are even loved, adored!

It seems it is impossible to plant the idea in human minds that overpay is killing us, has done us vast harm. The very word, overpay, is hardly in use. And yet it must be obvious to some part of us, that no one can work more than twice as hard as the average. We have the ideal of liberty, equality and fraternity, and we have the super hyper extreme opposite practice. We would never say that we believe in extreme slavery, maximal inequality and minimal fraternity, and yet we act in that belief every second of very day, and reap the extreme violence, disorder and danger without question! We would never grant that we give away enormous amounts of money to a few individuals, and yet we do! It is clear from the fact that 90% of people are paid between a 10th and a 1000th of the average, and that another 9% get between the world average and a 10th of the average, and that over 90% of world earnings goes to the remaining 1%. If the lowest hourly income is graphed at one millimetre, the highest hourly income is graphed at 1000 kilometres, a million metres, a billion millimetres. This astounding fact should go round the world in days. It should have gone round the world a long time ago. Something strange and very powerful it must be that prevents us grasping this fact in all its enormous significance. Equal pay per hour, which, however unjust it might be, has to be enormously more just and peaceful than what we have, is regarded with immediate instinctive unthinking aversion, and as terribly unjust, and the present state is regarded as 'innocent', as innocuous, as good, as just! Have we been wired back to front?

7. Another mystery is why people connect communism and wealth distribution. In theory and practice, communism was taking everything off everybody and giving it to the state, which of course in practice is a person, the leader of the party. Thus it was the most extreme injustice possible. Which caused the most extreme tyranny and most extreme violence and suffering possible. It was the wholesale theft of a nation, the wholesale enslaving of everyone in that nation. If the leaders had genuinely believed that their system was for the people, they would not have stopped anyone leaving. Preventing leaving was a complete confession that the leaders were robbers, not friends. The number of people who run away when you are just and nice and friendly and unthieving is insignificant. It was a perfect demonstration of what happens when you have injustice. The leader is paranoid, with good reason, as he has everything and everyone else has nothing. Order can be maintained only by the most extreme state terrorism. It requires the most energetic and expensive and exhausting security, which exhausts the nation. The functioning of the state is paralyzed by the necessity of dishonesty, unfrankness, toadying. And America is well on the way to that fascist extreme. It seems the mere name communism is sufficient to blind most people to the reality, to the extreme anti-communism of communism. And people seem to be easily blinded or distracted by the idea of political left and right. The general notion seems to be that communism was somehow opposite to fascism. Communism was fascism. Unlimited personal fortunes capitalism is fascism. All concentration of wealth-power in the hands of the few is fascism, whether in America or Russia. The vote, and the right to bear arms are nothing against concentration of power by wealth. How much money you have determines how good your weaponry is.

8. There is a notion that seems to be taught in all the economics classes, that the pool of social wealth is infinite. [And that therefore, you can take out as much as you can get without interfering with anyone's rights, without stealing.] But this confuses the potential for growth with the actual finity at any time. Very few things are infinite. Certainly not human work, human productivity. Hours of work are finite, not infinite. Number of workers is finite, not infinite.

All wealth is the product of human work. Even if you find a gold nugget, the wealth of that nugget depends on the social structure that values that gold, and thus ultimately on everything and everyone in that society. People made huge amounts of money on the IT market, and to bury any sense of overpay, imagined that the pool of wealth is infinite, although it is not known if the universe is infinite, or even stupidity. [If stupidity was infinite, there would be no room left for any intelligence, of which I think there is some.] The thoroughness with which this myth of infiniteness of wealth has spread, even among economists, and the ease with which it has been universally swallowed by economics students, despite its impossibility, shows the power that the stupifying vision of unlimited wealth has for us.

9. It is not clearly taught, or understood in economics, that there are many wideopen, legal ways in which money is stolen. In which money transfers from its earners and true owners, to non-earners and false owners.

to be continued

The problem with all this is that you're either preaching to the choir or you're preaching to the devil. If you're trying to convert the devil, you have to use better tricks than what you've got there. Try distracting the devil with one hand, meanwhile take a baseball bat to his head.

You must force a logical conclusion they cannot deny, but they must come up with it themselves. I'll give you an example. I was talking to a conservative the other day.

I start off with this: "do you think the world is overpopulated?"

A good conservative will say yes. This is because conservatives don't like to share. LOL

So, the guys says: "yes, it most certainly is overpopulated."

I've now forced him into a conclusion. I go on...

"I agree with you sir! that is why I believe the government should limit family size".

In the end, the guy was telling me that the government should test people to see if they're fit to be parents. Before this, I don't think he would have agreed to any government control.

Just something to think about.

One more thing. Write more like prose. You had it before.. what happened?

you are describing having shown the guy...rather having let him see for himself...that he has not been acting in accord with what he really believed, bpj. it's a weird example, but you allowed him to see that he did really believe the government has legitimate purpose(s) though he wouldn't have admitted it before. and that is the only difficulty we face: getting people to see they are definitely not acting in accord with what they really do already believe...which thankfully is much easier than getting them to believe differently.

here is Chapter 8:

The unanimous opinion of wisdom through the ages.

Note: I have lightly edited some of the quotes we’re about to examine, only to increase ease of reading. That is, I have not followed the academic custom of slavish, pedantic, exact reproduction, with all its distracting cloud of ellipses and brackets and so on. I have fiddled a bit with the grammar sometimes, too, and I have sometimes changed ‘man’ to ‘people’.

This chapter is hopeful in that it shows the amount of support through history for equality. It is useful in eroding some incorrect accepted ideas that are dug in very deep in our psyches. It is a buttress for confidence and clarity, for those who accept the challenge of saving our species and every other species by changing the human mind, two by two.

We are going to find fault with some of these quotes. Some we are going to like.

We must extrapolate the point of the quotes to the global situation. That is, take the quotes as indicative of the global reality, not just of a particular and local reality.

• The rich have given to the poor a little food, a little drink, a little shelter and a few clothes. The poor have given to the rich palaces and yachts and an almost infinite freedom to indulge their doubtful taste for display, and bonuses and excess profits, under which have been hidden the excess labour and extravagant misery of the poor. Gilbert Seldes.

And now this strange, infinite over-generosity is tickling human extinction. Masochism can be taken too far.

• Each century was the same. History was the same record played over and over. War was war and peace was preparation for war. It was as if man were crazy, had always been, would always be, and the people on the street were man in his daily and abiding craziness. Ella Leffland.

• Now it needs no Christ to convince anybody today that our system of distribution is wildly and monstrously wrong. We have million-dollar babies side by side with paupers worn out by a long life of unremitted drudgery. Naturally so outrageous a distribution has to be effected by violence pure and simple, the process being euphemistically called the maintenance of law and order. Inequity can go no further. George Bernard Shaw.

• Neither patriotism nor religion are justifications for the suppression of reason. Sarah McCarthy.

What is irrational patriotism or religion but selfdestruction? We come close to God through reason, unless God is irrational. The thought: My country, my religion, right or wrong, is madness when safety and happiness depends totally on being right.

• How long soever it has continued, if it be against reason, it is of no force in law. Reason is the life of the law, nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason. Edward Coke.

• Restrained by custom, and the ridiculous prejudices of the world, we go with the crowd, and it is late in life before we dare to think. Frances Brooke.

. Man must not check reason with tradition, but contrariwise, must check tradition with reason. Leo Tolstoy.

• He who will not reason is a bigot, he who cannot is a fool, and he who dares not is a slave. William Drummond.

He who dares not reason is *merely* a slave, he who cannot is *merely* a fool, and he who will not is *merely* a bigot. Consider what you haven’t previously heard: that neither slave nor fool nor bigot is to blame. Folly and bigotry are ‘gifts’ of nature – guaranteed to us because we humans were granted limited wits, not unlimited intelligence. No bigot sits down and decides to be a bigot. Nobody sets out to be getting it wrong. None of us is to blame for anything, but we can and must take responsibility for our happiness and survival, and fight the bigotry and limited intelligence we have been given.

It is one of the great mysteries: Why people are ashamed of being what they are when not one person believes they created themselves. How did we get this shame and hatred of being imperfect? Somewhere along the line, somehow, we have been taught selfhatred. We can be skyscrapers, but only by building on the solid ground of who we are. To do this, the nonsensical selfhatred will have to go. Drummond in his quote is supporting the selfblame and selfhatred. He seems to cast it, not only on the bigot, but on the fool and slave too. I prefer Mark Twain's point of view, that god, mother nature, existence, makes us and then has the cheek to blame us for the way we are. It seems we gullible innocents have totally swallowed this misplacement of blame.

• Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths, without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true, that what we like is not necessarily good, and that all questions are open. Clive Bell.

• A book must be an ice-axe for the frozen sea inside us. Franz Kafka.

• When I began to write, publishers were gentlemen in tweed jackets puffing pipes. Now publishing houses are owned by oil companies and their interest is in the big strike, the gusher. I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everyone's heads. John Updike.

• Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient and sterile. Sinclair Lewis.

• Governments have always been careful to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolise it more and more. The school imprisons children physically, intellectually and morally, in order to direct the development of their faculties in the paths desired. Fransisco Ferrer.

• I took the repeal of the Corn Laws [early 19th century English laws] as light amusement compared with the difficult task of inducing the priests of all denominations to agree to suffer the people to be educated. Richard Cobden.

• To think is to live. Cicero.

• A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry. Henry Thoreau.

• Maturity of mind is best shown in slow belief. Baltasar Gracian y Morales.

That is, take time and care in coming to belief. There is no virtue in belief without reason. Belief without reason is just nonsense. Believing without sound reasoning can only be pretending to know, which can only be extremely dangerous to happiness.

• i have noticed that when chickens quit quarrelling over their food they often find that there is enough for all of them i wonder if it might not be the same with the human race. Don Marquis.

Don Marquis pretends the author of his words is a cockroach who can't do punctuation. This quotation sums up the good sense that can save us a vast heap of misery.

• No person will ever be safe who stands up boldly against you, or any other government, and forbids the many sins and crimes that are committed in the state. The person who fights for justice, if he is to keep his life at all, must work in private, not in public. Socrates.

Socrates was put to death for asking questions and thus getting people thinking about justice.

It is lucky for us that 4 billion adults can be reached in just 31 times the time it takes to reach two people, just by word of mouth, because the media are controlled by the ruling groups. Word of mouth stays under the radar longest.

But will people pick up the responsibility and mindfulness that has been stolen with their democratic powers? People held as slaves lose the habit of selfdetermination. See Paolo Friere's book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The longer the movement is kept grassroots, the larger the majority will be, and the more peaceful and easy the change will be. With a very great majority, there will be no conflict. With a very great majority, even the state muscle will become part of that majority.

The idea in this book really is very, very beneficial to all, so elucidation can do all. Force can in any case do nothing to make real change. Ideas are the root of actions, and force does not affect ideas. Use of force is a confession that you don't believe you have reason on your side.

If the communist leaders had really believed that communism was good for people, it would have been inconceivable for them to force people to stay in communism. Forcing people to stay contributed to convincing people in communist lands that communism was tyranny and slavery, not freedom. The same applies to Catholic Europe in the time of the Inquisition.

By spreading the word by word of mouth, we can avoid conflict with the establishment. We can pass the message from friend to friend until everyone sees the point and wants the change. It is actually very good for everyone, like the law against murder. It only needs clarification of ideas people already have. There is no need for protest marches, conflict with the police. Why use force when you have everyone's good sense on your side? We just have to cultivate people's good sense, and separate it from the nonsense we have got used to.

• The working people have been exploited all the way up and down the line by employers, landlords, everybody. Henry Ford.

• No person should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar's worth of service rendered, not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by people of smaller means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate. Theodore Roosevelt.

If only Teddy or Jefferson had thought of public inheritance, the just sharing of deceased estates among everyone. If they had, they would have turned around the downward slide of America from democracy to decline and fall. The force of erroneous tradition was still bending Teddy's reform thinking away from sense. And when people saw how much money and political power they were getting from public inheritance, Teddy would have got more presidential terms, and been the greatest President. And he would have given a practical demonstration to the world, and saved millions of lives, and saved billions from unnecessary sufferings. Saved the entire infinite future of the human race from an infinity of giant unnecessary sufferings. If only he had seen that all inheritance is other-earned, that any other-earned money is a license to create violence and destroy happiness.

There would be minor exceptions where work was done by heirs without compensation in anticipation of inheritance, but when public inheritance came in, of course no one would any longer work without compensation in anticipation of inheritance, so that wouldn't be a problem.

A note on the graduated income tax. People think: Good, we are stiffing it to those rich people. Boy, I'm glad I'm not having to pay such high tax rates. But in fact the graduated income tax is another legal theft. If a person getting out 100 times what he or she puts in, pays only a 75% tax rate, they still get out 25 times as much as they put in. A person being underpaid and paying a 25% taxrate is still being robbed, by the underpay. A person being underpaid should be getting a negative taxrate that brings their pretax income up to equality with what they contribute by their work. If both people are producing $1000 of work products, the person pulling out 100 times as much as he put in, and paying a 75% taxrate, would be getting $25,000, and the person being underpaid 20%, and taxed 25%, would be getting $600. The one putting in $1000 and taking out $25,000 in money and power, the other putting in $1000 and getting out $600 in money and power.

And there is the further point that, with unlimited-fortunes systems, with the corruption of ever-expanding bureaucracy and tyranny, you don't know that money going to the government is getting back fully to the people who earned it.

• When we resist concentration of power, we are resisting the powers of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties. The truth is, we are all caught up in a great economic system which is heartless. American industry is not free, as once it was free. American enterprise is not free. The person with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, finding it more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak. Woodrow Wilson.

And the laws never can protect the weak and small against the big and strong, because the big and strong are too much all over the lawmaking and law-enforcing processes. A US Senate committee concluded that big business was bigger than government in the 1950s, so what is it like now? You can tell how it is now from the fact that now no Senate committees are saying such things as Wilson did against big business. Now Senate committees are run by big business. Society has a duty to prevent anyone from being bigger and stronger than the government. Fortunately it is not necessary to be unjust to do this. The largest just, self-earned fortune cannot be more than twice the size of the average fortune, because no one can work more than twice as hard as the average person, and because, after paying students, none of the reasons for higher-than-average hourly pay is sound, is real.

• I am not for a return of that definition of liberty under which for many years a free people were being gradually regimented into the service of the privileged few. Franklin Roosevelt.

• The true conservative seeks to protect the system of private property and free enterprise by correcting such injustices and inequalities as arise from it. Franklin Roosevelt.

But did Franklin get a team of professors working on finding exactly where pay justice lay?

more from chapter 8 (broken to post in sections)

• Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the state itself. That in essence is fascism, ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. Franklin Roosevelt.

• The methods of the priest and the parson have been very curious. Their history is very entertaining. In all the ages, the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorised and encouraged her children to trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had freed their slaves, the Church still held on to hers. If any could know, to absolute certainty, that all this was right, and according to God's will and desire, surely it was she, since she was God's specially appointed representative on the earth and sole authorised and infallible expounder of his Bible. There were the texts. There was no mistaking their meaning. She was right, she was doing all this thing that the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position, that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery. Yet now at last, in our immediate day, we hear a Pope saying slave trade is wrong, and see him sending an expedition to Africa to stop it. The text remains, it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it, and also never fails to drop in at the end of the procession, and take the credit for the correction. During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. The Bible commanded they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church, after doing its duty in but a lazy and indolent way for 800 years, gathered up its halters, thumbscrews and firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night and day during nine centuries, and imprisoned, tortured, hanged and burned whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with their foul blood. Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry. Who discovered that there was no such thing as a witch. The priest, the parson? No, these never discover anything. At Salem, the parson clung pathetically to his witch text after the laity had abandoned it in remorse and tears for the cruelties it had persuaded them to do. The parson wanted more blood, more shame, more brutalities. It was the unconsecrated laity that stayed his hand. There are no witches. The witch text remains. Only the practice has changed. Hell fire has gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than 200 death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorised them remain! Mark Twain.

Therefore the church is no infallible guide to what is right and good. We must use our own fallible wits, as hard as we can.

• God delivers everyone to disobedience. Bible.

Everyone, including the church, as we see in the biblical portrayal of the church in Jesus's day.

• I acknowledge no civil power. I am subject to no prince. I claim more than this. I claim to be the supreme judge and director of the conscience of men, of the peasant that tills the field, and of the prince that sits upon the throne, of the household of privacy and of the legislator that makes laws for kingdoms. I am the last, supreme judge of what is right or wrong. Cardinal Manning.

What can we say to this, except that there is no lack of people who issue themselves a license to be moral police, and no lack of people who take their license as legitimate? We can advise, we can recommend, we can remind, we can inform, our fellow humans, but the conscience of every person is sacred and inalienable. We are doomed to make mistakes, for we have only finite wits, but his claim to be in a superior position with a right to judge is megalomania and sociopathology. It is the root of sadism.

• Hell is paved with priest's skulls. St Chrysostom.

• God delivers everyone to disobedience, so that he can have mercy on all. Bible.

I take this to mean that it is in the nature of life that we shall all make mistakes, but that life is forgiving. That we are indeed free. That there is no punishment except the natural consequences of error. That life no more judges us, and punishes us, than a parent judges and condemns the child for falling over in learning to walk. By replacing the activity of the conscience to determine as best we can the best course, by replacing activity of conscience with the fear of hell, churches have destroyed the activity of conscience, the exciting and challenging pursuit of happiness, the foundation of ethics. Life is a game to maximise happiness with limited wits. It is a fun, exciting, dangerous game. And we are not supposed to be chained by fear in venturing to play it. God is the I AM, that is, existence, life, reality. It is God that delivers to disobedience. And it is everyone that God delivers. Certainty is a mental disease. The person who is most right is the person who most knows he or she can be wrong at any time, in anything. Moral superiority, happiness, lies in always being eager to test, doubt, prove, examine, check our opinions. To plunge our opinions in the purifying fires of reality again and again, forever. We are never perfect. That is the fun, the game, the alivening, of life.

• The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious discussions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate the truth. But when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error. Thomas Macaulay.

In other words, there are sick people who are incapable of grasping that they could be wrong, like anybody. And the rest of us too easily fall for that sick person's estimate of his superiority. It is a trick that has taken humanity in for 1000s of years: Instead of saying: I am right, which wouldn't go down so well, these self-elected moral police say: God says this, and God is right, and I agree with God.

• Religion is not a hearsay, a presumption, a supposition. It is not a customary pretension and profession, is not an affectation of any mode, is not a piety or particular fancy, consisting of some pathetic devotions, vehement expressions, bodily severities, affected anomalies, and aversion from the innocent usages of others, but consists in a profound humility and a universal charity. Benjamin Whichcote.

Humility is the remembrance that life has given us the great loving gift of limited wits, so that we can ever have the joy of learning. Charity is remembering that to every injury there is an equal and opposite injury, that what you give is what you get.

• All belief that does not render us more happy, more free, more loving, more active and more calm is an erroneous and superstitious belief. Johann Lavater.

• The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top, there is no limit to oppression. H.L. Mencken.

• When morality is up, goodness is in decline. Lao-tzu.

• For many years I have exhorted you in vain, with gentleness, preaching, praying and weeping. But according to the proverb of my country, where blessings can accomplish nothing, blows may avail. We shall rouse against you princes and prelates, who, alas, will arm nations and kingdoms against this land, and thus blows will avail where blessings and gentleness have been powerless. St Dominic. Father of the Inquisition.

That is, we can't make you pretend to agree with us by words, so we will get you to pretend to agree with us by swords. How mad is it to care whether people pretend to agree with you or not? Every animal is mature, that is, takes full responsibility for its life and happiness. There are no tyrants, nor adult babies, in the animal kingdom. There is not one animal that is not down-to-earth, practical, realistic. There is not one animal that for one second flirts with unreality. There is not one animal that is not in perfect charity with itself. There is not one animal that can be persuaded to give up pursuit of its happiness.

• Once love was used in the church, now fear. Giordano Bruno.

So you cannot be sure the church is right. If you don't think, and you make yourself a robot of another's ideas, you can't know whether you are getting a St Francis or a St Dominic, a Jefferson or a Hitler, if you are aiding good or evil, sanity or madness, love or selfdestruction. If you don't trust your own intelligence in the pursuit of your happiness, how can you trust your decision to trust someone else's intelligence in determining your life path? And if you trust your decision to trust someone else with your pursuit of happiness, how can you not trust yourself in your own intelligence to decide what is best for you? To let someone else decide what is right for you is like getting someone else to drive your car from their car when you are sitting in the driver's seat of your own car. Tyranny is caused by the abdication of freedom and responsibility, which is abdication from living, alive life, which is the game of pursuing happiness with our limited wits.

• If there were but one person in the world, it is manifest that he could have no more wealth than he was able to make and to save. This is the natural order. Henry George.

In job-specialisation society, no one can rightly have more than he or she would make and save in nature, plus an equal share of the benefits and disadvantages of job specialisation.

• Lenin's method leads to this: the party organisation at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole. Then the central committee substitutes itself for the party organisation, and finally a single dictator substitutes himself for the central committee. Leon Trotsky.

• The Russian dictatorship of the proletariat has made a farce of the Marxist vision, developing a powerful, privileged ruling class to prepare for a classless society, setting up the most despotic state in history so that the state may wither away, establishing by force a colonial empire to combat imperialism and to unite the workers of the world. Herbert Muller.

When a ruling class gets soft and is replaced by another ruling class, that replacement is always the next biggest group of thugs, never the meek people, who are last in line. Think of Robespierre. But in time the yin people have always washed away the yang, arrogant, brutal, greedy rulers.

• Anacharsis laughed at Solon for imagining that the dishonesty and covetousness of his countrymen could be restrained by written laws, which were like spiders' webs and would catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but be easily broken by the mighty and the rich. Plutarch.

• The very rich are not good. Plato.

The very rich make an error in pursuit of their happiness and so do the people, in allowing the very rich.

To allow overfortunes is to be responsible for all the extreme excesses, brutalities and evils that those you allow to be above the law commit. And, with some people, what limit on viciousness will there be where there is no law to hold them back? Some of those above the law will kidnap, rape, torture and kill anyone at will and whim, for financial and sexual gain, and be able to pay, by bribery, blackmail and killing, to cover up, in the rare cases in which their deeds are revealed. One Pope was tried for piracy, rape, incest and murder. There will always be sociopaths in any sample of society, and there will always be a far higher percentage of sociopaths in any sample of the extremely power-greedy and power-mad. How many of the missing persons are victims of sociopathic over-wealth? Certainly some. But we keep painting respectability onto our leaders. The exposures of people in high places and the evidence of history of the Neros and Borgias, Hitlers and Mousilinis, do not pop our self-delusion that there cannot be sociopaths among those we have put above the law in our own country. When a criminal is successful enough to get above the law, will he stop being a criminal? Because we hear only of the unsuccessful criminals, we cannot imagine the successful ones. We are victims of our idolatry of over-wealth. Idolatry of over-wealth is complicity in the greatest evils. Rockefeller had miners' families burned alive in their strike hovels. Why did the miners put themselves in a situation like this? Because they could not imagine how arrogant and vicious those above the law are.

• Why shouldn't the people take half my money from me? I took it all from them. Edward Filene.

The people should take from him all that they have earned, and leave him with all that he has earned. Nothing else is justice.

• Either virtue is an empty name, or honor and recompense are due to the person who nobly enterprises. Horace.

It sounds stirring and wonderful, but it is just egotism and confusion. Sense tainted by emotionalism. The enterprise is for his gain, a sprat for a mackerel. We don't need to get carried away and throw money at him in return for nothing. It is like being moved to give money to a fisherman for risking his bait. We don't get sentimental like this about the workman's risk, or the prospector's risk. The credit for the fact that some people are more energetic, enterprising and active, aggressive and greedy, is due to nature, not the individual. The individual who enterprises only when there is recompense is not naturally enterprising. The natural range of energy is sufficient. It hardly helps us to impoverish ourselves to create artificial enterprisers surplus to requirements. Natural human energies are plenty sufficient to provide. We are not animals that need to hunt and eat all day.

• Men must have profits proportionable to their expense and hazard. David Hume.

Emotionally, it sounds so reasonable. The man is suffering, let him have profits proportionate. But the sentence is selfcontradictory. If he makes profits, where is his expense? And if he must be compensated, where is his risk? And what rational argument can justify taxing others to fund this pursuit of wealth? The gorilla beats his chest magnificently, and the others feel impelled to give him a banana. Instead of the modesty of the worker who risks and asks nothing, this one demands gifts when he comes home tired from the hunt. If a person opens a restaurant, and fails, as so many do, no one feels emotionally driven to compensate him. The pirate goes out and returns with plenty of Inca gold taken from Spanish pirates. Look at his fine house. Yes, he deserves it. He could have been killed.
You are poor? Ah, but you didn't risk, you see.
A thief robs a house. You got a good haul? The owner had a gun? You could have got killed. You deserve it. If the owner hadn't had a gun, I would have said you should give some of your haul back.

We have this inexplicable and quite mad generosity towards the rich. We swallow all their false arguments for the right to unlimited pay.
You worked 60 hours a week? My goodness, that is working almost as long as the person who grew this apple. You singlehandedly invented, designed, built, packaged, marketed, and distributed these millions of PCs? You singlehandedly created the demand for these things and thus created jobs for thousands of people? You risked US$5 million your parents gave you? You actually risked all that money? My hero! Here, take this US$50 billion. You worked 60 hours a week writing songs and performing them? Please accept this half billion with our sincerest thanks and our deep love. You swing a mean golfclub? Please, take this $100 million a year. You work 60 hours a week heading a talk show? Please, I must insist on you taking this half billion a year. You must be tired. You must keep your strength up for your wonderful work. You must have a very rare talent, because you are so wellpaid. Don't worry. There's plenty where that came from. I economised on protein for millions of children's brains in Africa. I save 4c a person by not spending on vitamin A to prevent 2 million people a year going blind. I've got a million new girls every year pulling in big money from sex slavery. I've got up to US$200,000 donations coming in from 99% of families in the world.

• The matter I allude to is the exorbitant price exacted by the merchants and vendors of goods for every necessary they dispose of. I am sensible the trouble and risk in importing gives the adventurers a right to a generous price, and that such, from the motives of policy, should be paid, but yet I cannot conceive that they, in direct violation of every principle of generosity, of reason and of justice, should be allowed, if it is possible to restrain them, to avail themselves of the difficulties of the times, and to amass fortunes upon the public ruin. George Washington.

• Is the paltry consideration of a little dirty pelf to individuals to be placed in competition with the essential rights and liberties of the present generation and of millions yet unborn? Shall a few designing men, for their own aggrandisement, and to gratify their own avarice, overset the goodly fabric we have been rearing at the expense of so much time, blood and treasure? And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust for gain? George Washington.

Washington failed, and everyone failed, to distinguish what should and what shouldn't be paid for. If anyone should have been paid for risk, it was the ones at the bottom of the sea who didn't make it through the British blockade of imports, not the ones who did make it through, since they didn't lose. And they shouldn't have been paid for the scarcity, which again was no sacrifice on their part. Paying for scarcity is paying them for the things they didn't import, is paying them for absence. America was well-enough established that it was not dependent on imports for food and shelter. The imports had to be more at the luxury end of the spectrum of necessities and luxuries. Insofar as the imports were necessities, America would have done better to put the money into guns and ships to defend their necessary imports, than to throw it away so that a few could play lords and ladies, and America could be weakened by wealth-poverty differential. Giving the money away to a few did nothing to protect shipping. If the merchants got rich, they therefore didn't spend it on guns to protect their ships. And the payment was in inverse proportion to risk, as the bigger players could afford more defenses for their ships, and could spread their risk over more ships.

It is sad to see Washington's agony of confusion. He says they should be paid for their risk, and then that paying them for risk is going to kill the nation, which is true. And it is a pity that there is not more such egalitarian sentiment in the world. How many people are as passionate and caring and real as Washington was?

• In the progress of time, and through our own base carelessness and ignorance, we have permitted the money-industry, by the virtue of its business, to attain a political and economic influence so powerful that it has actually underminded the authority of the state and usurped the power of democratic government. Vincent Vickers.

• I needed the good will of the legislature of four states. I formed the legislature bodies with my own money. I found it was cheaper that way. Jay Gould.

Where are these quotes in schools, so that the people can be aware of the dangers to be vigilant about? By what subtle, unconscious propaganda instinct are these vital warning quotes kept out of schools without anyone issuing a command?

• After eleven years of research, I have come to see that food production and food distribution are in the midst of a revolution, a revolution that puts people's needs for food last. And the revolution is led by the largest corporations on earth and elite-based governments. It isn't fought in the name of liberty or equality or fraternity, but in the name of profit. Frances Lappe.

• Much land which might be growing food is being used instead to grow money, in the form of coffee etc. Frances Lappe.

The World Bank forces third world countries to stick to cash crops, instead of being free to diversify and thus reap the benefit of selling rarer tropical products, and being free to reduce the supply and cheapness of cash crops.

• Land can be healthy or sick, fertile or barren, rich or poor, lovingly nurtured or bled white. Our present attitudes and laws governing the ownership and use of land represent an abuse of the concept of private property. You can murder land for private profit. You can leave the corpse for all to see, and nobody calls the cops. Paul Brooks.

• Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power. Benazir Bhutto.

• The oldest and greatest monopolist of all, Holy church herself, the monopolist in god, had to be assailed if the new middleman, the soldiers of the market, were to grow and prosper. John Strachey.

• Rouse up, O young people of the new age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings, for we have hirelings in the [military] camp, the court and the universities who would, if they could, forever repress mental, and prolong corporeal, war. William Blake.

Higher and lower hourly pay is the glue of the monolithic, unlimited-fortunes, totalitarian state. Everyone is bribed by higher pay, threatened by lower pay. Bribery sounds good, you get money, but it is slavery. You get money for sacrificing freedom of speech and thought. What is not said is soon not thought. You sacrifice mind and honour. The soldiers of bureaucracy, military, and politics sacrifice their lives and their honour the second they agree not to think and speak freely. To think is to live. To agree not to think is to commit suicide. Happiness is everyone's everything, happiness depends on truth, truth depends on freedom of speech and thought, therefore we sacrifice everything in sacrificing free speech. Where are the guardians of the constitution who rush in to punish anyone who attempts to hinder free speech in politics, bureaucracy and business? The suppression of free speech in the military, the bureaucracy, politics, business, the media and even the universities, is the norm. Higher and lower pay is the death of happiness. With equal hourly pay, there are many other places to go if you speak out. With very unequal hourly pay, there are the strongest motives to stay in the monolith of lies, untruth and unhappiness. The higher in the monolith you are, the more you lose financially in leaving it for integrity. Equal hourly pay is freedom, unequal hourly pay is slavery. Good people, sensing the nature of things in unlimited-fortunes systems, tend to stay out of politics etc, or to leave it sooner, and thus leave the field to the worst, those who least know the importance of truth in happiness. So concentration of money is concentration of evil, that is, of ignorance, denial, unrealism, disinformation, flattery, immaturity and all other forms of poverty of sense.

• Neither the lords nor the shogun can be depended upon [to save the country], and so our only hope lies in grassroot heroes. Yoshida Shoin.

Present governments have very little need to reflect the people. And perfect governments can at best only reflect the people. Government can only be as good as the people's awareness and insight. Change from driving on Catastrophe Street towards Extinction Corner can only be made by a sufficient number of people heroically determining to seek better opinions and understandings. Discipline is learning. Closemindedness is lack of discipline. There is no happiness without learning. Governments can only be a shadow of the people. What if the people are just shadows of the government?

• You can say that this administration will have the first, complete, far-reaching attack on the problem of hunger in history. Use all the rhetoric, so long as it doesn't cost money. Richard Nixon.

Can we fully grasp how evil this is? This is the normal soul of leadership in unlimited-fortunes systems. How much ground have we lost from pursuit of happiness when we have such high tolerance of this level of cynicism? Do we deceive ourselves that his utter lovelessness is reserved for the hungry alone?

• The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled land with people of our own kind, the same economic situation, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives. Florence Luscomb.

The human tribe is the greatest fun in life. And unlimited-fortunes systems have cut us off from it. We know in our hearts that there is widespread injury, because we are careful who we mix with. We are not free to mix freely with our own kind. We are anxious about mixing with people with lower incomes, we are forced to be careful with people with higher incomes, and we may be mistreated by people beside us who use us to get higher. The number of people in the same socio-economic stratum declines with higher income. The more overpaid, the smaller the tribe.

• Plenty overwhelms us and we do not know how to distribute the wealth we can now produce. H.G. Wells.

• Practically everyone now bemoans Western man's sense of alienation, lack of community, and inability to find ways of organising society for human ends. We have reached the end of the road that was built on the set of traits held out for male identity: advance at any cost, pay any price, drive out all competitors, and kill them if necessary. Jean Miller.

• Let the revolting distinction of rich and poor disappear once for all, the distinction of great and small, of masters and slaves, of governors and governed. Let there be no artifical differences between human beings. Since all have the same needs and the same faculties, let there be one education for all, one food for all. Francois Babeuf.

Against this is the human vice of loving to be king of the castle, and others to be the dirty rascals. But it is a vice, because it produces unhappiness, not the happiness people expect of it. It is a vice born of gross lack of imagination, inability to imagine that people are unlikely to enjoy being dirty rascal. This sentiment of equality would save the world if it were common. Babeuf was in a position, between the robber and robbed classes, to see the lack of superior merit of the robber class. If anything, the merit lay on the side of the working classes rather than of the leisure classes. The main difference between nature and society is that in nature humanity is largely wrestling with nature. In society everyone is largely wrestling with each other to grab from each other.

• I am talking about myself as the type of the idle, rich young man, not myself the individual. I have an income between US$10,000-20,000 a year. [In 2000 dollars, around one million a year.] I spend all of it. I produce nothing. My income doesn't descend upon me like manna from heaven. It can be traced. Some of it comes from the profits of a daily newspaper, some of it from Chicago real estate, some from the profits made by the Pennsylvania and other railroads, some from the profits of the US Steel Corporation, some from the profits of the American Tobacco Company. It takes to support me about 20 times as much as it takes to support an average working man or farmer. And the funny thing about it is that these working men and farmers work hard all year round, while I don't work at all. The work of the working people, and nothing else, produces wealth, which, by some hocuspocus arrangement, is transferred to me, leaving them bare. While they support me in splendid style, what do I do for them? Let the candid upholder of the present order answer, for I am not aware of doing anything for them. Joseph Patterson.

First, we can ruminate on the fact that quotes like this are vanishingly rare.
Second, we can wonder why people are so comfortable with this state of affairs. Justice produces happiness. Injustice produces unhappiness. Justice is equal pay for equal work. The state built on injustice cannot stand. Never has. Never will. Therefore this state of affairs, this present order, that is, this present dystem or dystopia, produces unhappiness and decline and fall. Is anarchic. Therefore this state of things is incompatible with pursuit of happiness and patriotism, love of country. Everyone who is comfortable with this state of affairs is an enemy of the state, is anti-state, anti-happiness. Therefore it must be either that people's will is to the destruction of happiness and order, or that they are ignorant, unaware. I am guessing that it is the latter, but it is hard to see how people can be unaware.

Perhaps they think unlimited wealth is bad, but they don't feel powerful enough to do anything about it. Or they just assume that everything in society is good, the same way that animals 'assume' that everything is good. Or they think that the rich don't take that much of the pie. For millenia, people have joined armies for plunder, or because they thought they were defending their country from bad people. For millenia, ordinary folk have murdered billions of other ordinary folk, manipulated by the super-rich. For millenia, ordinary folk have been willing to take orders to plunder and to defend against plunder, and to watch the generals take the profits. For millenia, they have bought the myth of the evil of the ordinary person on the other side of the battle. They have been easy to convince that the enemy rank and file is the enemy, that the generals and kings on both sides who order the wars are not the enemy. The people have been unable to doubt the virtue of their own generals. It ought to have always been obvious that as no one can work more than twice as hard as the average person, anyone with far more than twice the average fortune has more money than they deserve, has somehow got ownership of wealth not theirs, is a plain thief. People have been willing for millenia to be robbed, to be killed, to be forced to murder.

Will they now be willing to become extinct for this dysfunctional system, this dystem? Or will they now part company with their strange love affair with unjust and unnecessary, deep and vast poverty, suffering, pain, disease, horrors and terrors? Or not? Will it be left to some other intelligent universe species to wonder why, why, why, we pursued accelerating danger and suffering unblinkingly to extinction? Is it that people have never absorbed the fact that pay injustice will ever-grow if left unattended? If it is just that people do not know that the super-overpaid take 90% of people's earnings, they will do something as soon as they know it. But somehow I do not think that they will do anything if they learn this fact. It seems that there is something, I cannot begin to imagine what, makes people not want to acknowledge that fact, makes people hide from that fact. Is it that people simply do not see big things, as Plato, Heraclitus, Jesus, Thoreau and proverb say? Can't see the forest. Is it that most people would really rather suffer and die than think? Is it that most people simply can't think? The goddess Isis is supposed to have said: If they knew they were blind, they wouldn't be blind. That is, it is far worse not to know you are blind than merely to be blind. It is 1000 times worse. People who know they are blind take precautions. But the humblest creature pursues its happiness 100%. What has happened to us that we don't or can't pursue our own happiness? Has evolution in us reached a point of self-defeating over-complexity? How hard is it to know that if someone runs off with the money, it is bad news? Something tells me that, when you tell people that 1% of people get 90% of world earnings, it has no impact at all. All extremes are vices. The leading vice, destroyer of happiness, for most people seems to be unlimited over-generosity. Are people sucked in by a circular argument? Do they think: He is rich, so he must be respectable, and I know he is respectable, because he is rich?

• The lawcourts are open to all people, like the doors of the Ritz hotel. Lord Darling.

• The law, as manipulated by clever and highly respected rascals, still remains the best avenue for a career in honourable and leisurely plunder. Gabriel Chevalier.

The impartiality of the law will always be bent from the vertical by the partiality of the overpaid. Judges are corrupted from justice by belonging to the ruling class. Shoplifters get proportionately far harder sentences than embezzlers, and serve in worse prisons. This is another element in relative slavery of the so-called lower classes. White-collar crime is 500 times the size of welfare fraud. Police vigilance against white collar crime is far less.

• The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes. Stanley Kubrick.

Prostitution is mostly economic, rarely promiscuous.

• When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being, which it is his chief occupation to avoid, his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip. Doris Lessing.

This is not happiness for the white man.

• An unjust society causes and defines crime. An aggressive social structure, which is unjust, and must create aggressive social disruption, receives the moral sanction of being law and order. Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice. Edward Bond.

• The continuance of the inheritance idea, the idea of living on through things, property, children, subtracts any possibility of the communal society proceeding. For people to live communally [constructively] instead of competitively [destructively], the bonds of inheritance must be completely broken. Ti-Grace Atkinson.

• Wealth? Poverty? Seek neither. One causes swollen heads, the other swollen bellies. Kassia.

• It's pretty hard to tell what does bring happiness. Poverty and wealth have both failed. Frank Hubbard.

• Wealth begets insolence. Theognis.

• The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mineral rights. Paul Getty.

The meek, the less rapacious and aggressive, do not inherit even the earth. And why don't they inherit the mineral rights also? Natural birthright means that every living person has a right to an equal share of the land and the mineral rights, to an equal share of all of nature's gifts. Society must be judged against nature. Society should add rights to people, not subtract any natural rights. 90% of people earn far less in society than their work would earn in nature. Unlimited-fortunes society has failed most people financially and failed everyone happiness-wise. Private ownership of everything of nature means that every new generation must buy its rights in nature from the preceding generation. Whereas animals automatically have an equal share in nature's gifts of food and place to live, animals automatically distribute their share when they die. Private ownership of land is useful, but there should be a social mechanism of restoring lost natural gifts caused by private ownership. State ownership of nature's bounty causes fascism, is intrinsically unjust. Ownership of nature and all her gifts should be invested equally in every living person.

Those without land have a natural right from birth to landrent from those who do own the land. This is another major legal theft. Just limitation of maximum fortune and distribution of overfortune will automatically compensate for these stolen ownerships in diamonds, gold, oil, minerals, the economic value of tourist attractions, natural food supplies, etc. Society takes nature's bounty and converts it to ownership by the older generation, leaving the younger generation to buy their share of nature's bounty, with their underpay. That this is wrong is simple rational justice, but people have never been strong on rationality or justice, although rationality and justice are friends, and the ruling classes are biassed against practising it and against teaching it. Most people are unaware of their rights to nature's bounty, as obvious as it is. This is the negative power of custom and convention, of assuming that society is not wrong. This is the extremely high cost of not thinking. Loss of 99%, soon 100%, of happiness and survival.

• The agricultural population produces the bravest people, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given to evil designs. Cato.

• Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates, and men decay. A bold peasantry, their country's pride, when once destroyed, can never be supplied. Oliver Goldsmith.

Ownership of land or landrents is the best national defense. If most do not have a share in the country, most will not defend it firmly. And they will sometimes betray it. The spies who betrayed Britain to Russia, because they believed that Russia was more just. Another example of the state-weakening effect of injustice.

• The more princes abstain from touching the wealth of the people, the greater will be their resources in the wants of the state. Aelia Pulcheria.

• He represented to her that the greatest glory of a monarch was the liberty of the people, his most valuable treasure in their crowded coffers, and his securest guard in their sincere affection. Eliza Haywood.

But plundering nations are forced to rob the people to pay for the defense costs of being under attack from plundered nations. National pay justice will make a country internally strong, and international pay justice will make nations externally strong. $1000 on justice saves $1,000,000,000 on defense.

• The greatest nations, like the greatest individuals, have often been poor, and with wealth comes often, what is more terrible than poverty, corruption. Olive Shreiner.

What has been great about great nations is not poverty so much as equality, pay justice. The corruption and decay comes not exactly from wealth but from pay injustice, extreme range of wealth and poverty. Nations can be greater by being both wealthy and just. Injustice will impoverish and endanger a nation far more than overwealth will enrich and strengthen it. It is not the poverty that has made nations great, but the equality attendant on poverty. Equality is the equal right of all to equal reward for equal sacrifice. The World Happiness Index has found Bangladesh, Nigeria, Columbia, Mexico the happiest countries, but they would be far happier with the same equality they have with poverty, plus the wealth they deserve.

It takes only two halftruths to make a lie. Poverty is not a virtue. Frustration of needs and desires does not lead to happiness. We are ethically bound by selflove to avoid underpay as much as to avoid other-earned wealth.

Overpower corrupts. What are we doing about it? Far too little. Corruption etymologically means thorough breaking. Therefore overpower is incompatible with patriotism.

• Now we have discovered war to be derived from the unlimited accumulation of wealth which is also the cause of almost all the evils in states. Plato.

• Injustice creates divisions and hatreds and fighting, and justice imparts harmony and friendship. Plato.

Plato has a myth in which love is the offspring from the marriage of wealth and poverty.

• The beginning of reform is to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more. Aristotle.

• The love of money is the root of all evils. Bible.

This Biblical statement is at best an inaccurate statement of a truth. At worst, an error. The love of self-earned money is the root of all good. It is the love of other-earned money that is the root of virtually all evils. Nowhere in the dialogue through history has the vital distinction been made between self-earned and other-earned money. Nowhere in economics or philosophy or theology have the true and false meanings of this famous statement ever been clarified. To work twice as hard and thus create twice as much wealth and then to take out twice as much from the social pool of products of work is entirely good and harmless.

And why is it that after realising that wealth, that is, other-earned money or overpay, is the root of virtually all problems and troubles in society, did Plato and the Bible and Christianity not make this the central subject of ethics and philosophy? What is more important than the diminishment of the root of all evils? How did they manage to overlook the subject that would have paid the highest dividends to clearly understand? Christianity has strained at the gnats of faith versus works, homosexuality, masturbation, adultery, is Jesus the same or only similar to God, etc, etc, and swallowed the camel of not fighting the root of all evils. False religion has made false evils to hide real evils. Christianity has been from early times usurped and hoodwinked by the greedy, the overpaid and overpowerful. Just as communism, the dream of justice, was hijacked five months after the revolution. So education against the root of all evils has been suppressed, except by occasional genuine reformers like St Francis. Who have often been looked on with suspicion by the church. Of course it was the church of the time that put Jesus to death. The usurping of Christianity and other religions has prevented humanity from reaping the huge benefits from conquering the root of all evils. I cannot recall one book that explains in detail what ought to be understood by love of money is the root of all evils, and why and how it is true, and why and how it is false. 2000 years' opportunity to avoid the pitfall of money has been wasted. 99% of human happiness destroyed.

The inaccuracy of the statement, the obvious untruth of the statement, has made humanity miss the truth in the statement. Love of self-earned money is wholly good, wholly natural, wholly proper and innocent and noble. Love of self-earned money is the root of virtually all good. Love of self-earned money is exactly as good as growing vegetables and eating them. Since money is a universal good, good for virtually all good things. The arguments against overpay are simple, and yet the ethical leaders have never taught them. The ethical leaders have often been false ethical leaders. They have been the greatest victims of the root of all evil, they have been those who have fallen worst for the apparent goodness of unlimited fortune. It is they who have conspired to prevent the teaching against overfortune, so that they might attain unlimited fortune, mistakenly thinking that unlimited fortune would be unlimited happiness.

• When our fathers [the American founding fathers] prevented entail [and primogeniture, and fixed clergy salaries], when they thus provided for the distribution of estates, they thought they had erected a bulwark against the money power that had killed Britain [and every other state]. They forgot that money could combine, that a moneyed corporation was like the Papacy, a succession of persons with a unity of purpose, that it never died, that it never became imbecile. Wendell Phillips.

Lincoln warned against the corporations. Even Jefferson, at the beginning of the 19th century, warned against the corporations, which did not really get away till the end of the 19th century. It is not only the corporations that have brought America and the world from the American dream of freedom from tyranny, to tyranny in 200 years. It is the general belief that unlimited fortunes are innocent, are harmless, are even good.

• Lycurgus's second political enterprise was a new division of the lands, for he found a prodigious inequality, wealth being centred in the hands of the few, and by this reform Sparta become like an estate newly divided among many brothers. Each plot of land was sufficient to maintain a family in health. Plutarch.

This quotation shows 1. that wealth concentrates, 2. that re-equalising can be done, and 3. that poverty is illhealth.

• By abolishing covetousness, Lycurgus removed all motive for civil broil and contest. Polybius.

Covetousness is the love of other-earned money. Covetousness, otherwise known as greed, avarice, pleonexia, theft, injustice, taking out more than you put in.

• Inequalities between rich and poor had come to a head, Athens stood on the brink of revolution. Equality breeds no strife, was widely repeated. Plutarch.

Where are these quotes in schools? The first duty, the prime duty of education is to teach the existence of overpay, and how overpay destroys 99% of happiness of 100% of people. If education taught only this, it would teach something of far more value to humans than all it teaches now. If people were as convinced of the evil of overpay as they are of the 'evil' of genital exposure, they would be 100 times happier, safer and less self-destructive than they now are. False education teaches things. True education teaches the most important and valuable things for happiness.

• Slavery always has, and always will, produce insurrections wherever it exists, because it is a violation of the natural order of things, and no human power can perpetuate it for long. Angelina Grimke.

• Human beings are not so constituted, that they can live without expansion, and, if they do not get it one way, must another, or perish. Margaret Fuller.

• Life can be viewed as a perpetual battle between the rich and the poor. The former have dug themselves in behind walls, and their stronghold is well stocked with guns and ammunition. The latter go round and round it, wheel this way and that, attack, and, despite the gates, the ditches, the artillery of defense, it is rare that those who lay siege fail to carry off some advantage. Honore de Balzac.

• The history of power shows us that the victims of unfathomable oppression have arisen to claim their rights, that power is persistently being broken down and overturned. Every new insight into its workings provides a new road to its overthrow. Nancy Henley.

Overwealth is precarious, is never safe. This is one reason that CEOs are scrabbling to rake in as much as they can while they can. They know that at any time, they can be tipped out of office by someone more cunning, ruthless or tricky than they are.

• No person can profit except by the loss of others, and, by this reasoning, all manner of profit must be condemned. Michel de Montaigne.

Once again, the sense of this has been lost to the general understanding in the untruth of this. Lacking here is the all-important distinction between 1. profit in the sense of what is left over in a business after paying the bills, and out of which the owners pay themselves a reasonable sum for their work, and 2. profit in the sense of that left over after the owners have been paid fairpay for their services, sacrifice and work. Profit in the second sense is legal theft. Such profit, by definition, cannot belong to owners because they have been fully compensated for their contribution out of costs. Such profit must belong to overcharged customers and underpaid workers.

Montaigne does not make clear exactly where the condemnable profit begins. Nor does he see that such legal theft must ever-grow, and be ever-growing injustice and injury, and cause all the violence, almost all evils, all destruction of happiness in society. And Montaigne does not make clear that profit in the second sense must be tolerated, because business must have a safety margin against accidental undercharging and thus going broke. The accidents of business mean that if businesses aimed at nonprofit in the second sense, they would more often fail, by underestimating costs. It is sufficient if individuals are prevented from profiting limitlessly from the legal theft by profits. By seeing that profit is legal theft, we can with justice and reason prevent the legal theft by profit from destroying society and happiness, by setting the maximum fortune at the lifetime maximum one person can earn and contribute to society by their own work. In this way people can still commit legal theft up to the maximum fortune, but not beyond this. And this allows the margin of safety needed in business. And it saves the enormous cost and waste of lives and money in monitoring every business. It also means that popular businesses can grow, by reinvesting profits in their growth. We could try to make every business nonprofit in the second sense, but the labour would be enormous and maximum fortune is sufficient to destroy most evils.

But, on further thinking, how true is it that companies need the safety margin of profit? Do nonprofit organisations without volunteers fail more often than profitdriven companies? Perhaps not. It is possible that driving for profits actually increases the likelihood of failure. Research is needed on this point. Can companies aim at being nonprofit, and make a loss some years, and get by with loans until they have increased charges and prices in order to break even, after paying all costs, including fairpay to all?

• All riches come from inequity, and unless one has lost, another cannot gain. Hence that common opinion seems to be very true, the rich man is unjust, or the heir to an unjust one. Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the possessor, then by his predecessor. St Jerome.

The private heir commits theft also, by getting money without working, which has to mean working without money for others. If the heir has been underpaid, then part or whole of the inheritance may rightfully belong to him. Public inheritance gives everyone their fairshare.

It seems that in Jerome's day, it was obvious to more people that wealth is unjust. Also, it was commonly understood before 1500 that payment for scarcity was unjust. Attachment to injustice seems to have grown with the steady growth of inequality ever since the effective egalitarianism of the so-called Dark Ages, caused by the collapse of the unjust Roman Empire.

• Where there is profit, there is loss nearby. Japanese proverb.

But this fails to see half the truth. Where there is profit, there is loss, not just nearby, but in the same place also. Saying that loss is only nearby allows people to feel that the loss doesn't matter, that it only happens to others, and that loss to others doesn't affect the profiter.

• I affirm that gain is precisely that which comes oftener to the bad man than to the good, for illegitimate gains never come to the good at all, because they reject them. And lawful gains rarely come to the good, because, since much anxious care is needful thereto, and the anxious care of the good man is directed to weightier matters, rarely does the good man give sufficient attention thereto. Wherefore it is clear that in every way the advent of these riches is iniquitous. Dante Alighieri.

Part of the argument is weak. I take it that by lawful Dante means righteous, just. Just gains come only by work. There is not necessarily anxious care involved. And if there was always anxious care involved, that would not be a reason not to pursue just gains. And what is weightier than making just earnings to keep yourself? There seems to be a little snobbery here. A distaste for humble honest work, a personal aversion from the trivialities of trade, a pride in doing 'higher' things. And Dante contradicts himself by starting with a soft statement, oftener, rarely, and ending with a hard statement, in every way. If he had been able to define overwealth, by knowing the maximum that a person can earn by his work, Dante would have been able to make a truer statement. If we take riches to mean overwealth, then he is right that they are iniquitous. But gain can be just and good and proper.

• And what else, day by day, imperils and slays cities, countries and persons so much as the amassing of wealth? Dante Alighieri.

• Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose is the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist. Wars are bred by poverty and oppression. Peace is possible only in a relatively free and prosperous world. George Marshall.

Wars are bred by poverty and oppression. Oppression goes with poverty, that is, underpay. Underpay is underpower is oppression. Since wars are caused by underpay, we can get rid of war by getting rid of underpay. We can get rid of underpay by getting rid of overpay. Only 500th of 1% have more than US$30 million. That is, 99.998% of people will get higher pay by limiting fortunes to US$30 million, 2007 dollars. Unfair underpay will be minimalised, and war will be minimalised, if fortunes are brought right down to the maximum self-earnable fortune.

America invested 2% of GNP in the Marshall Plan to revive Europe after WW2 because they realised that it was a good investment, that the cost of another global depression and WW3 would be far greater than 2% of GNP. There are at present calls for similar good sense to be applied to the third world, a Marshall Plan for the third world. Because it is a good investment, because the costs of poverty and oppression are far, far greater than a Marshall Plan for the third world. But America is not now in the hands of people as wise as the Marshall Plan. The security costs, in lives, time, money and labour, of defending the plunder against the plundered will wear away, are wearing away, all the plunder. A global 1% tax on incomes would raise US$750 billion a year, which would pour much water on the fires of poverty and extreme underpay, and would destroy terrorism. 90% of this money would come from the super-overpaid, since the super-overpaid get 90% of world income. But a just maximum self-earned fortune, and the return of earnings to everyone, would go far further, would go virtually all the way to destroying virtually all violence and misery. There would still be crimes of passion, but those crimes would not be exacerbated by wealth-poverty stress.

• We are free today substantially, but the day will come when our Republic [the American nation] will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of the few. A Republic cannot stand against bayonets, and when the day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be concentrated in the hands of the few, then we must rely on the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed condition. James Madison.

Once again, a failure of seriousness, a suicidal casualness. It is not enough to say that, when the nation has fallen into misery, it will be up to the best elements to resurrect it. Where is the commitment to preventing its fall? 1% get 90% of world income. The only way this can be changed peacefully for the colossal benefit of all is by the great majority being clear that unlimited fortune is the root of all evils, that unlimited fortune is fascism and tyranny, leading to global extinction, whether in capitalism or in communism. Fortunately it is true that everyone benefits enormously, so there is no need for coercion, except for the 0.01% who may be incorrigibly unthinking, immoveably attached to the mirage of happiness via overfortune. Fortunately it is true that everyone in the world can learn this easily and quickly, just by everyone who learns it passing it on to just two people. It is now or never. It is in the interests of everyone who can think to think, think, think on this with the greatest sincerity, seriousness and sobriety. Unfortunately, it sometimes looks as though humanity is at present committing suicide by entertainment, by a suicidal aversion to seriousness, by a manic triviality. And nature has not equipped us to think globally. But there is no global democracy if everyone is not thinking globally.

• One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding among those who have the same interest. Niccolo Macchiavelli.

A confusion of principles. Christianity could not have been more emphatic regarding the evil of wealth concentration. You cannot serve God and Mammon. Mammon means wealth. Why was the word Mammon not translated? Easier for a camel unblended to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to get into heaven, that is, to get happiness. Do not get money by deceit. Do not attempt to get more money than the right amount.

But the clearing up of the confusion has never been made in the general mind. The good reasoning behind these views has not been laid bare. Wealth is associated with abundance, plenty. So the general opinion has never said a genuine aye to the Christian view. Instead of wealth, the Bible should have said other-earned money. But in order to have been able to say this, they would have had to have had an idea of legal theft. It needed to be made crystal clear that legal theft existed. So people have inwardly quietly disagreed with the Bible and so have never got the point. Wealth continues to be thought a friend when other-earned wealth has been the root of all troubles and terrors. There should have been enough respect for the Bible in Christians to ferret out the wisdom of the sayings instead of just quietly disbelieving them.

What is the right amount? The right amount is total costs including fairpay for personal sacrifice, service and work contribution. In order to know the border between self-earned and other-earned profit, it is necessary to know what is the fairpay for one hour's work at world-average hardness of working per unit of time. For which it is necessary to know the world annual income and the number of hours worked in the world. Then and only then do we know where to correctly draw the line between fairpay and legal theft. The lack of this data has made it easy for people to cross that line with abandon. It is the lack of knowing the world-average fairpay for an hour's work that has prevented people seeing pay injustice even when it is super-extreme, when overpay and underpay are revolution-causing. We can prevent the tiresome and pain-filled cycle of revolution and regrowing injustice, of pulling down overpay and letting it grow up again, by knowing the fairpay for a unit of work. It is also necessary for everyone to see clearly that, provided tertiary students are paid, all the reasons for higher-than-average pay per unit of time are wrong, full of holes, specious, false, mere rationalisations of greed, which in fact hurt everyone enormously.

Again, the concept of private property needs to be divided into private property by self-earning, and private property by other-earning, before we can say private property is good or bad. The failure to make this distinction is the reason that communism destroyed private property. They saw something was wrong about private property and thought private property was all wrong. And they, very naively, thought giving private property to the state would not be giving it to individuals. Capitalism erred the other way, saying that there was nothing wrong with private property.

The answer is seeing the tremendous, wide-open legal thefts in the system, seeing that there is such a thing as other-earned fortune, seeing the mechanisms by which money shifts automatically from earners to non-earners.

It is easy to see the maximum lifetime number of hours a person can work, so the crux of seeing legal theft is seeing that, provided tertiary students are paid for studying, none of the reasons for higher-than-world-average hourly pay stands up to examination by common good sense. It certainly helps if people realise that higher-than-average hourly pay has to be funded by 99% of people getting underpay, and by seeing that higher-than-average hourly pay causes 100% of people being embroiled in ever-escalating violence. It is also important for people not to fall for the false argument that we have always paid individuals for nature's gifts, so it cannot be wrong. There are plenty of examples where people have been wrong about things for millenia.

Imagine if governments tried to introduce a system of cards, so that individuals paid anything from a millionth the price to 1000 times the price of things. Everyone would say the system was mega-insane, super-unjust. And yet the present system is effectively identical to this. Obviously, for a person to be able to buy 10 US$1 million houses, or other items of equal value, in return for one hour's work, it is irrelevant whether this is because they get paid fairpay but have a card allowing them to buy anything at one millionth the ticket price, which is uncustomary and is instantly seen by all to be mega-insane, or because they get paid a million times the fairpay, which is the present accepted custom, thought to be normal and sane. It is only the enormous power of custom and convention that prevents us seeing that pay from a million times to a thousandth of fairpay per hour is in practical effect as unjust, as insane as the insane card idea. We just cannot see that they are identical, although our reason can see it. The 1% cortical brain hears, but the 99% reptile-mammal-herd brain does not, unless we put in the hard, hard work of driving it to hear it. Custom and convention casts such a thick layer of varnish over the customary, that the mega-insane seems not insane. All the animus that we would feel against such a system of cards evaporates against the mega-insane universally accepted custom. Can people brush away with reason the befogging varnish of custom and traditional error? Can they work that hard to save themselves from misery and oblivion? Can our 1% reason conquer, control and dominate our 99% reptile-mammalian herdbrains that follow custom unthinkingly?

• That armament firms have been active in fomenting war scares and in persuading their own countries to increase their armaments. That armament firms have attempted to bribe government officials at home and abroad. That armament firms have disseminated false reports concerning the military and naval programs of various countries in order to stimulate armament expenditure in others. That armament firms have sought to influence public opinion through the control of newspapers in their own and foreign countries. That armament firms have organised international armament rings through which the armament race has been accentuated by playing off one country against another. League of Nations.

• You believe you are dying for the fatherland. You die for some industrialists. Anatole France.

This great evil is still going on, but the concealment is better. Any reporters or whistleblowers who get close to these facts are stopped, with money or bullets. People have difficulty believing that people with unlimited power are up to no good, are up to great evil. Unfortunately, ordinary people project their own relative decency on to the super-powerful. It is very hard for them to imagine the enormous depths that corruption of humanity by enormous power goes to. In fact, people often enough project onto their leaders their idealistic longing to be better. They fondly imagine that their leaders, because they have been given such great power, relent from their human natures towards nobility and love. Alas, it is the most aggressive and heartless who are most impelled to power. Like the Mafias. With whom the politicians make their peace and get cozy. The Mafias are above the law, buy the politicians. Why else are the Mafias still about? The most powerful are Mafias, not patriotic angels. Lord Acton's famous dictum, that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, was formed in historical study of the church. Yet look at the idealisation of the church even now. Idealism must be balanced with realism, just as skyscrapers must have deep foundations, and roses must have dung.

• If we ask nature, who are the fittest, those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support each other, we at once see that those animals which have habits of mutual aid are the fittest for survival. Peter Kropotkin.

• Nature's stern discipline enjoins mutual help at least as often as warfare. The fittest are also the gentlest. Theodosius Dobzhansky.

Where would we have been without the gentleness of parents? Love is the most hardnosed realpolitik. Non-injury is survival. That is, the core of sanity is the grasp of the simple truth that injury is generally retaliated. You spit on someone, they knock you flat. I see figures for slavery in the present times put at 200 million. That is a fifth of one billion. About 4% of humanity. But the reality is 100%. Everyone is enslaved relative to those with more wealth and power, with higher pay per unit of work. Everyone with higher pay per unit of work than others is enslaved by the danger from those below.

Like people in a heap, everyone in that heap is enslaved by the attacks from above and from below. And they could all stand on the ground. And be free. The truth will set you free. Happiness depends totally on truth, on the reality principle. Where is the greed for, the unbridled lust for, truth? Where is the unlimited energy for pursuit of truth?

Imagine a country fair, with everyone having fun. And imagine everyone becomes infected with a desire to be physically just somewhat higher than others. You will soon have everyone trying to climb the flagpole, standing on others, and being pulled down by those below. The fair is transformed from happiness to tragedy. That is history, and it is madness.

• Most of the simplest things in economics have never been put in such a way as to carry conviction to the mind of the sort of person who is in a great majority of every public, and the blame is to be put in large measure on the unnecessarily complicated expositions offered by economists. Edwin Cannan.

Did this author put these simplest things in economics in a simple way? If he did, was his exposition rejected by the establishment erroneous instinct for selfpreservation? That is, by the people at the top of the heap trying to stop people below from getting strength from clarity?

The academic who puts anything simply would be accused by his peers of being simplistic. So the academic is forced to wrap his statements up in so many qualifications and details that he cannot say anything to ordinary people. And it is far safer for the academic to concentrate on little corners of knowledge than to survey the whole scene. So the academic is bribed and coerced to fail to see the forest for the trees, to fail to see the tree for the leaves. The journalist-economists George and Bastiat who made powerful, simple, broad points are largely ignored by the professional economists.

• Professors in every branch of the sciences prefer their own theories to truth. The reason is that their theories are private property, and the truth is common stock. Charles Colton.

The force of egotism, making people not wish to recognize truths coming from others. And another force, making people not wish to think. And yet happiness depends entirely on reality. And we will not accept thought from others nor produce it ourselves. So of course we are unhappy. How did we become so sure that not accepting thoughts from others and not thinking were good things? The delight in useful information is a rarity. The thinker is a stranger.

• There is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does. Samuel Johnson.

Neither Johnson nor Einstein was up to the challenge. Einstein certainly would have done so if he had seen anything, because he was a man who wished humanity well.

• A Vanderbilt may sit in his office and manipulate stocks or declare dividends by which in a few years he amasses fifty million dollars from the industries of the country, and he is one of the remarkable men of the age. But if a poor, half-starved child should take a loaf of bread from his cupboard to appease her hunger, she is sent to prison. Victoria Woodhull.

This is the mega-mystery, the utter cretinism of humanity in regard to the super-overpaid. The total tolerance of the obviously super-overpaid. A million dollars gives an income of $100,000 a year forever. One billion dollars gives an income of $100,000,000 a year forever. Even Thomas Paine, the friend of mankind, could not see anything wrong in unlimited fortunes. Apparently, there is not the ghost of a suspicion in the human head that super-overpay may cause super-underpay. Or that super-overpay is super-overpower. Or that anyone has to fund this license to take vast amounts of work from the social pool of work products. And to fund this license to have vast amounts of political power relative to others' power. And apparently there is not a ghost of a suspicion that super-overpay and super-underpay may cause war and other violence. Although money buys all needs and satisfies almost all desires. Although everyone gets angry at theft. It is a black hole in human intelligence. Well worth the study of the psychologists. This age-long tolerance of unlimited wealth and poverty and the consequent ever-escalating violence.

• All great events have been distorted, most of the important causes concealed, some of the principal characters never appear, and all who figure are so misunderstood and misrepresented that the result is a complete mystification. If the history of England ever be written by one who has the knowledge and the courage, the world would be astonished. Benjamin Disraeli.

Any corruption and evil you see is only the tip of the iceberg. Concealment is the homage evil pays to good. As long as we do not understand legal theft and overpay, history remains essentially the same. So any history of any place will give us an idea of what is happening behind the concealment now. The skullduggeries of the Byzantine emperors are the skullduggeries of the leaders of our own time. Different names, same patterns, same evils.

• Let me control a nation's money and I care not who writes its laws. Mayer Amschel. Who changed his name to Rothschild.

This is another very big legal theft. Banks lend on credit. Credit means belief, faith, confidence. It refers to the confidence people have in the bank's cheques, and the confidence people have in the cheques written based on the bank's cheques. But confidence in money is based on the health of the work force. All the money equals all the products of work. It is the nation's work that is the basis for national confidence in money. The confidence is also based on the infrastructure, all the systems in place for the operation of the economy. But the infrastructure is products of work. If all the workers do no work, there are no work products, and the money is worthless. So the credit, the faith and confidence in money belongs to the nation as a whole, which does the work, maintains the systems, comprehends and uses the infrastructure. But the banks steal this credit. They adopt this credit, and take credit for it. And take interest for lending it. And the interest repayments are often several times the size of the loan.

So the banks borrow the national credit at no interest, and lend that credit out at interest. It doesn't matter if the money supply is in the hands of public bankers or private bankers. What counts is if individuals profit from credit and confidence in the nation that doesn't belong to them. American money supply has been in private hands since 1913, and Americans are only now waking up to its meaning! The situation is not essentially different in many other countries. And there is no guarantee that people will stay awake to the reality. It is hard to credit that nations can remain unaware of this vital reality, and can fall asleep so easily after it is explained. But Henry George explained the legal theft in capital gains, and people fell asleep again. Consciousness must be very tiring.

The banks increase the money supply, by say 10%, thus diluting the value of all the previous dollars by 10%, thus robbing the nation of 10% of its wealth, and then lend this 10% back to the nation, taking several times this 10% as reward for stealing the national credit. The national inability or unwillingness to understand this vital matter costs all nations everything. This is the major reason that 1% have 90%. Everyone has seen figures for the concentration of wealth. A quarter of 1% owns half the world. Why is there so little opposition to this colossal theft? Of course this theft is the cause of all the violence, but why isn't everyone enraged, and adamant about having it fixed? People are more likely to regard any move to reform as dangerous, borderline criminal, antisocial. The people have a blind faith in the bankers. The people adopt the bankers. People are in awe of the bankers' seeming mastery of seemingly arcane matters. As easy as taking candy from a child is the bankers' ease in taking the national wealth. Is it that the people generally simply cannot be bothered to recover their property? How easy is it to understand that no one can work more than twice as hard as the average per week, so no one can justly be paid more than double the average per week? But then people think: Oh, if we put limits on pay like that, I won't be able to be rich, it will restrict me. People don't think that it also means they won't be able to be poor, able to be robbed of earnings and political power, able to be robbed of democracy and freedom, safety and peace, leisure and life. The glittering vision of a 1% chance of being unjustly overpaid wipes out the vision of the 99% chance of being unjustly underpaid. And it wipes out the vision of the 100% chance of being embroiled in ever-increasing worry, chaos, disorder, injustice, violence, cruelty, terror.

People say: But I am only one, what can I do? But if one person teaches just two people, so that those two tell two, everyone in the world will know in just 31 times the time to teach two. That is just by word of mouth, without internet, books, tv, films, magazines, newspapers, telephone, lectures, radio. What is it that stops this very, very, very, very, very good news spreading like wildfire? That is the giga-question. The superich have taken 90% of the benefits of machines and computers and people are content because their lives are 10% financially improved, and despite the fact that people's lives are 99% disimproved. This seeming improvement is only because of denial of the ever-increasing downside. The great decline of our safety since we were somewhat defenseless against the tiger. The great decline of our freedom from violence. The great increase in our exposure to warmongering and theft from the super-overpowerful. It is mostly in the 20th century that there have been enormous civilian casualties in war. The more energetic are also the more rapacious. The very rich are rarely good. They are the best at self-destruction and other-destruction. They are the biggest fools. People like Hitler, Ceausescu, Shakespeare's Richard the Third. People who, against all the evidence of common sense, experience and history, rely on people being doormats when people are not doormats. People who try to be strong by killing everyone around them. How foolish was it of Hitler to think that America would stay out of the war, that America would let Hitler take Europe and Russia for the German industrialists?

• Humanity is still far from that stage of maturity needed for the realisation of its aspirations, for the construction of a harmonious and peaceful society and the elimination of wars. People are not yet ready to shape their own destinies, to control and direct world events, of which instead they are its victims. Maria Montessori.

Perhaps not so very far. Perhaps on the brink. If I can begin to see it with the help of my great teachers, perhaps most others can begin to see it with the help of this book, which is really written by my many teachers.

• All intelligent thoughts have already been thought, it is only necessary to think them again. Goethe.

Not just to read them, but to realise them.

• The very essence of all life is growth, which means change. Some societies, particularly ours, attempt to divert the need for change by entertainment and rapid succession of fads. All of these circuses may convey the illusion of change, but in fact they accomplish the opposite. They do not meet the need for growth and enlargement of the mind [the self]. Instead, they often confuse us so much that we overlook the terrible frustration of this need. They thwart rather than fulfil it. Jean Miller.

• Social reform is not to be secured by noise and shouting, by complaints and determinations, by the formation of parties or the making of revolutions, but by the awakening of thought and the progress of ideas. Henry George.

• If you have a fresh view or an original idea you will surprise the reader. And the reader doesn't like being surprised. He never looks into history for anything but the stupidities he knows already. If you try to instruct him, you only humiliate him and make him angry. Do not try to enlighten him. He will only cry out that you insult his beliefs. Anatole France.

• There is no necessary connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead, and there is even less connection between the desire to lead and the ability to lead somewhere to the advantage of the led. Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torment than by any demand for their guidance. Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues. Many governors and senators have to be seen to be believed. A cultured college professor has become as much a rarity as a literate newspaper publisher. A financier interested in economics is as exceptional as a labour leader interested in the labour movement. Bergan Evans.

The aggressive elbow out the able and goodwilled wherever there is higher-than-average pay per hour. Bishops, doctors, lawyers, politicians, the myth of their goodness is kept alive by concealment and by the people's passion to have something good to look up to. You might call it Smashem's Law: With overpay, bad people force out good people. Plato was wrong to suggest paying good people more to take on the job of ruling. He was thinking that good people, being ungreedy and unegotistical, would not naturally be tempted to rule, and would need some encouragement. Plato overlooked the fact that the greedy and aggressive would be far more eager to take the reins where there was more money in it.

• I spent 33 years in the Marines, most of my time being a highclass muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for [unlimited-fortunes] capitalism. I helped Tampico purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honours, medals, promotions. I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate a racket in three city districts. The Marines operated on three continents. Smedley Butler.

• War, like any other racket, pays high dividends to the very few. But what does it profit the masses? The cost of operations is always transferred to the people who do not profit. But there is a way to stop this racket. It cannot be smashed by disarmament conferences, by peace parleys at Geneva, by resolutions of well-meaning but impractical groups. It can be effectively smashed only by taking the profit out of war. The only way to stop it is by conscription of capital before conscription of the nation's manhood. Let the officers and directors of our armament factories, our gun builders and munition makers and shipbuilders, all be conscripted, to get $30 a month, the same wage paid to the lads in the trenches. Give capital [unjust overfortunes] thirty days to think it over and you will learn by that time there will be no war. That will stop the racket, that, and nothing else. Smedley Butler.

Understand that this reality is alive today, and alive every day that unlimited fortune, for what is necessarily limited work, continues.

• The wicked have a solid interest that the good never seem to possess. The good are grand for one great rally. Then they go home and work at their business. The cohesive power of public plunder stays on the job. Nicholas Butler.

The good produce wealth by their work. The super-rich produce misery for themselves and all others by theft legal and illegal. It is because people have no idea of legal theft, no idea that there is a point where more money becomes necessarily stolen money, money with violence attached, that people think that virtue or goodness is proportional to money. The money that people experience is mostly self-earned money, so they tend to think that all money is self-earned, and therefore good not bad, and that all fortunes are earned, and therefore that all fortunes are admirable.

• The military problem, psychologically speaking, resolves itself into taking every advantage of the herd instinct to integrate the mass. Constant repetition of the item to be inculcated, unsupported by any reasons, will have an immense effect on the suggestible, herdminded human. An opinion, an idea, or a code acquired in this manner can become so firmly fixed that anyone who questions its essential rightness will be regarded as foolish, wicked or insane. John Barns.

This from an American General, thinking of people like cattle. Rationality itself has been made so rare as to seem totally strange. The war of the rulers against reasoning.

• The workers should be the first to suffer in an economic downturn, because they contribute nothing to the business. George Pullman.

Only the top block is necessary to make the pyramid says Pullman. Why hire workers, then, and pay them?

• Once I built a railroad, now it's done. Brother, can you spare a dime? Edgar Harburg.

• We must rouse in our people the unanimous wish for power, together with the determination to sacrifice on the altar of patriotism, not only life and property, but also private views and preferences, in the interests of the common welfare. Friedrich von Berrhardt.

A wish for power seems not a bad thing, but then he talks of sacrificing everything, life, property and mind. This common welfare he talks of is a mystical entity lodged in the symbols of state and the few who control the state, not the real common welfare of the real people of the state. The selfishness of the German General inclines him to wish the self-interest of the people away. He slanders self-interest, pursuit of happiness, as selfishness, to try to get the people to sacrifice themselves for him. Everyone wants to be noble and good, so they are gulled into mental and physical suicide. One can imagine people, men especially, thinking: Yes, I will do it, I will empower myself by cutting off my life and mind.

The General is really only saying: Gimme, gimme, I should have heaps. But what a noble way of saying it.

The people project their strange willingness to sacrifice themselves totally for complete strangers, their leaders, onto their leaders, and imagine the general as making tremendous sacrifices, greater than theirs, although the general's sacrifice is going to be far less, if he has anything to do with it. It is the 'top of the pyramid is the pyramid' fallacy, again. And the general projects his own selfishness onto the people, subtly telling them not to be selfish, but to sacrifice themselves. I don't think the general does this consciously, I think his tunnel-vision nature does it for him automatically.

As if the only important block is the block at the top of the pyramid, so you don't need to worry about the lower blocks. Although the top block is identical to the other blocks, and sits so high, only because it sits on other blocks.

People do not knowingly give their money away to complete strangers for no reason. Therefore it is only necessary to make it perfectly clear to people that people are giving away their money to complete strangers for no reason, for people to stop doing it.

• When its existence is threatened, the church is free of moral edicts. Unity as an aim blesses all means: perfidy, treachery, tyranny, simony, prisons and death. For every holy order exists because of the aims of society, and personality must be sacrificed to the general good. Dietrich von Nieheim.

That is, everyone in society must be sacrificed to society. Must be sacrificed to the good of generals and cardinals. Or rather to what generals think is their good, overwealth, overpower. Generals swallow their own arrogant selfdeception, and then the people swallow it.

We see this error even in friends of humanity like J.S. Mill. He and many others talk of the individual's debt to society. Society gives the individual many wonderful things like museums, art galleries, safety, law and order, so the individual is in debt to society. Wrong. We can see the error if we think of a canoe paddled by 50 people. Now the individual in that canoe is in debt to the community. Without the community, he couldn't be in a great boat going along at speed. But wait. The society is made of nothing but individuals and their contributions. The individual's debt is for a 50th share in the canoe ride. And his contribution is 50th.

• Christianity has need of thought, that it may come to the consciousness of its real self. For centuries, it treasured the great commandment of love and mercy as traditional truth without recognising it as a reason for opposing slavery, witchburning, torture, and all the other ancient and medieval forms of inhumanity. It was only when it experienced the influence of the Age of Enlightenment that it was stirred into entering the struggle for humanity. The remembrance of this ought to preserve it forever from assuming any air of superiority in the area of thought. Albert Schweitzer.

God delivers everyone to disobedience. New Testament. In other words, the way of life is that everyone makes mistakes. This is obvious. We all have finite minds in an infinite or very, very large world. The game of life is to ever open this limited awareness to better approximate to the infinity or very great largeness of reality. That is, to repeatedly die to whatever we have become, and to what we believe, and be reborn in a bigger self, closer to reality and happiness. To go beyond our actual and limited selves and ever-increasingly realise our infinite potential selves, our infinity, our divinity, our identity with the infinite energy and consciousness of existence. So the church should be the first to know that we all make mistakes. The churches should be the first to know that our best happiness is in constantly growing out of our actual selves and into new, larger selves, nearer to perfect understanding and pleasure. The essence of pride is attachment to our finite actual selves, to our selves as we are so far, to the image of our finite selves. Unless a seed die. The churches, instead of being the leaders in dying to limited selves and being born into larger selves, are attached to the way they are. They try to preserve themselves rigidly, through claims of infallibility and by persecution of other opinions. This is the chicken that refuses to break out of its shell. Resists the natural way, of egg to chicken to egg to chicken, the immortal life rhythm through life and death, the bliss of energy's play in eternal formation and deformation, materialisation and dematerialisation. The timeless joy of life is learning and growing and expanding. The churches have often been bastions of ungrowth, of unlife. The churches have often assumed superiority in the area of thought. Despite the fact that they have repeatedly taken on board the wisdom of new teachers. The churches have often acted more like rocks than like seeds. Humility is willingness to learn, openness to growing out of mistakes. We grow up the first time we have a good laugh at ourselves, that is, admit our fallibility. The churches have rarely, or never, laughed at themselves. Jesus was perhaps warning us not to idolise the church, not to expect perfection from it, when he, with a joke, founded the church on the man who lived by the sword, by cutting off the ear of an arresting officer, and who betrayed Christ three times before breakfast.

Some other points.
Commanding is incompatible with love. No loving person commands the beloved. Except in a few cases where the beloved gets a great sexy thrill from being commanded, in which case there is mutual consent. A loving person suggests, advises, explains, gives reasons.

It looks like Schweitzer is kidding himself that inhumanity has diminished in modern times. Inhumanity will diminish only with diminished pay injustice, diminished wealth and power disparity.
Torture, people-burning and so on are branches of inequality, of pay injustice. They cannot be got rid of by talking against them. They are merely symptomatic, and they will always be used where they are felt to be necessary or good. Getting rid of the extreme power differential between people that generates them will get rid of them.
Not giving reasons for the loving suggestion to love makes following the suggestion irrational even if there are reasons to love. Love seeks to strengthen the beloved by increasing understanding, not to increase dependence and weakness by withholding reasoning and fostering atrophy of mind by obedience. To in any way discourage the use of reason or fail to encourage the use of reason is total injury. There can be no pursuit of happiness, which is the whole of ethics, without reason, so failure to give reasons and encourage by example the use of reason is the essence of immorality. Reasons can be given even to toddlers who cannot understand language, in order to get them used to reasoning as normality. A parent, and a ruler, are good and loving and constructive in proportion to the number of times they reveal reasons.

• What is generally called the religious world is so engrossed by its struggles for power and money, or by its sectarian disputes and enmities, and so narrowed and circumscribed by dogmatic orthodoxies, that it has neither inclination nor liberty to turn back or look around, and to endeavour to gather up, from past records and present observation, such hints as are now and again dropped in our path, to give us an intimation of what the truth may be. Catherine Crowe.

• A strong suspicion prevails that the human intellect has been kept in fetters by people who have boldly assumed superior wisdom, that their dictates might pass without enquiry, men who deal in concealment, darkness and mystery, and who fatten upon human ignorance. Thomas Cooper.

• Every politician, and every member of the clerical profession who becomes angry at opposition, and endeavours to cast an odium on free enquiry, ought to incur the suspicion of being an interested supporter of false doctrines. Only fraud and falsehood dread examination. Truth invites it. Thomas Cooper.

• Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from ignorance, and to aid them to judge for themselves. William Channing.

• The one real object of education is to leave a person in the condition of continually asking questions. Bishop Creighton.

The wise person knows that much of his happiness is dependent on his environment, and that much of his environment is other people. How much would it affect you, if you woke up one day and found everyone very lighthearted and happy? Greatly. The wise person strengthens others in order to strengthen himself. The intimate interconnection of everyone's destinies should be obvious to everyone, but isn't.

• The money-power preys upon the nations in times of peace and conspires against them in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. William Bryan.

• We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can't have both. The greatest factors making for communism, socialism and anarchy among a free people are the excesses of capital. Louis Brandeis.

• Long ago he had decided never to be afraid of the deafeningly obvious, it is always news to somebody. P.J. Kavanagh.

• In the construction of a country, it is the idealists and planners that are difficult to find. Sun Yat-sen.

Too many Indians, not enough Chiefs. The same is true of the maintenance of a country or planet. To have a global democracy, everyone needs to grasp the democratic plan and become a Chief. We got where we are because nobody thinks taking care of the whole can be their responsibility.

• By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secret and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. John Keynes.

• It is ideas that are dangerous. John Keynes.

Governments can confiscate should read governments DO. It is only improvement of ideas that produces improvement in society. Physical revolutions are useless. After the physical revolution passes, the same wrong ideas remake the same old misery.

• Not even god is wise enough. Yoruba proverb.

But consciousness increases with every idea we test, increases every time we look freshly at reality.

• The bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create deposits, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough deposits to buy it all back again. However, take it away from them, and all the great fortunes like mine disappear, and they ought to disappear, for this would be a happier and better world to live in. But, if you wish to remain the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, let them continue to create deposits. Sir Josiah Stamp. President, Bank of England, 1920s.

Banks are allowed to lend 10 or 20 times the amount of money they actually have as real, over-the-counter deposits. The government can do this safely because the money is backed by the credit of the nation. But this credit is the property of the people, and therefore neither banks nor governments should profit from it. If money seems mysterious, it is because money is a deliberate mystification. It is intended to seem impossible to understand by those who profit from it. Economics is loaded with nonsense with the intent of confusing the honest person, and driving him to leave economics to the professionals, the great thieves. The success of the bankers is the success of priests, who make mysteries and appoint themselves masters of it, and gull the people into supporting them without limit. Unjust overwealth is the great con, which engulfs the con-artists in the universal destruction.

Why do people not take in the truth when it is told to them by people they can trust, like the president of the Bank of England? Because the truth is incredible. Because the wolf in sheep's clothing looks like a sheep. Because bankers seem so respectable. Because bankers have so much money and the people believe money is always good. Because the truthtellers are so few, they are outside society, they are nonherd. Because anyone of social status has an investment in the error or lie or untruth. Because the person who digs out the truth has no social status. Because a person of social status telling the truth does not compute. Because people's idea of a thief does not include anyone in expensive clothes. Because people's idea of a thief is the idea of an unsuccessful thief, a poor person.

The biggest lie in sheep's clothing is the one that formed the basis of the science of economics in the 18th century, and is still going strong. The lie or error that the merchant's self-interest is beneficial to all. That the merchant's pursuit of profit makes him provide goods and services to people, and thus his self-interest serves the community. It is true that the merchant is forced to provide goods, so that he can have transactions out of which he can take unjust profits. But by definition, the goods and services are worth less than the price, else there are no unjust profits. If the merchant takes only his product costs and the cost of his personal sacrifice, there are no unjust profits. There is fair exchange no robbery. The merchant gives A, his time and products, and gets B, and B is larger. The argument is that because the merchant gives A, he gives to the community. But the net gift to the community is A minus B. The net gift is negative, he takes more than he gives, unless he is honest and he takes only enough to pay for his sacrifice of time and to pay his bills, and he returns any surplus to the overcharged customers and underpaid workers. The net gift from the people to the rich is positive. Despite the great simplicity of this error, it has been joyously bruited in economics for at least five centuries. Economics so far has mostly been the propaganda ministry for overwealth. Even Adam Smith, the canny Scots father of economics, fell for it. The greater giving by the customer is hard for all to see, even when it is pointed out.

In a nonprofit organisation without volunteers, everyone gets fairpay, so what are profits? Clearly they cannot be fairpay. It is the easiest thing in the world to charge $11 for $10 worth of goods and service. It is the same as begging $1 for nothing, but it seems better, because the customer leaves with $10 worth of something he wants.

The point is seen in the story of a prisoner of war making a small fortune in cigarettes by trading in Red Cross items. Who can tell how many cigarettes a can of sardines is worth?

The point is seen in the stories of people trading up from a $2 coin to a house in 50 trades. The legal theft that is hard to see in one trade is clearly seen after 50 trades. And yet most people hearing of this story will go, Whoopee, I can do that. Wars are caused by buying a can of spaghetti. By the tiny imp in every transaction, who grows to the monster of global violence, like a dripping tap rotting the house in time.

Again, the point is seen in the Woolworth story. If you can sell $10 million worth of 5c and 10c items, that cost 4.5c and 9c for you to buy, transport, display, advertise, sell, manage, etc, you legally steal $1 million.

The magician of trade makes these huge piles of money appear, and everyone is happy, although the magician hands this money out only to 1%. And no one makes the connection between the appearance of these huge piles of money and the severe depletion of our own pockets, and the battles in the streets.

A very popular modern error or lie is the one that the social pool of wealth is infinite, so that there is no injustice in taking unlimited money out of the social pool. This is taught in economics classes. People easily believe what they want to believe. It is easily exploded. How many things are infinite? The number of workers is finite, the hours of work are finite, the pool of work products is finite. The great power of the computer revolution to steal money legally has led to the euphoric feeling that the social pool is infinite, that knowledge is being turned into money, that knowledge is infinite, and that the money doesn't come out of the social pool of work. Knowledge is infinite, but knowledge that we know is finite. And the right to be paid for knowledge is limited to the amount of work we put into having it. And the unself-earned profits are used to buy products from the social pool of wealth made by work.

This great power to steal legally is due instead to the new-technology factor, scarcity, huge demand and low supply, and the fact that competition has not yet geared up to reduce the scarcity prices. As competition gears up and prices fall towards costs, the fabulous returns dry up, and the dot.com bubble bursts. New technology can argue that the development costs explain the price. But there would be no unjust fabulous profits, no billionaires, if the development costs were absorbing the cash from the prices. The very euphoria tells you that the profits are not being earned. Self-earned, just profits or fairpay do not induce euphoria.

The euphoric talk of the knowledge revolution. As if the plough and fire-making were not knowledge.

Another untruth widely propagated. Trickledown theory. A trickle?! If you let the big boys get a gusher, you'll get a trickle. Isn't that nice? Just shower me with money and some will be sure to splash on you. Let me empty your wallet and I may drop a coin you can pick up. The trickledown theory is taught in all seriousness in economics.

Another very common fallacy, I call the ' the top of the pyramid is the pyramid' fallacy. People say: Bill Gates gave us the computer, wonderful, wonderful guy, give him 50 billion. Easy to explode: simply imagine Bill Gates without anyone else.

We think: The businessman employs people, we should be grateful, we are dependent on him. But a business runs because of demand, which is the property of the customers. No demand, no customers, no business. It is hard, and boring, to imagine the reality, that ultimately the whole of society is responsible for computers, and employment. It is much more fun to fix all the gratitude on symbolic figures at the top of the pyramid. It is for no other reason that Sheiks and Sultans are rich on national oil, and are thus empowered to rob and oppress 'their' nations, and thus to put themselves in danger. It is the power of the image, of the more easily imagined. The president rules the nation. The general wins, or loses, the war. I am a success because I went to the Oprah show. We have a golden calf, so we are rich, though we give up our gold and jewelry, and imperil our very lives, to make the idol.

• Man is simply the most formidable of the beasts of prey, and, indeed, the only one that preys systematically on its own species. William James.

• Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours its own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe and to the general prey of the rich on the poor. Thomas Jefferson.

• Lords devour poor people's goods in gluttony and waste and pride, and poor people perish for mischief and thirst and cold, and their children also, and so in a manner lords eat and drink poor people's flesh and blood. John Wycliffe.

But why do we shovel most of wealth to the biggest predators to make their job easier? All the rhetoric of liberty down the ages has been about liberty from the overpower of overwealth, but we still give wealth a good name. Liberty is always liberty from overpay.

• Misery exercises such a paralysing effect over the nature of people, that no class is ever conscious of its own suffering. Leo Tolstoy.

This applies to the overpaid as well as to the underpaid.

• Poverty brings down the price of crime. Sebastien Chamfort.

We want the price of crime to be as high as possible. A person with a billion dollars can employ a million soldiers for 1000 days at $1 a day. And they are doing so. With pay justice, one person will hardly be able to employ one soldier.

• As wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself. Edmund Burke.

Wealth and power go together like ears on a rabbit. And power corrupts. Corporations, foundations, governments and churches are safe, constructive and patriotic as long as the individuals in them are not overpaid.

• When most Americans read about the corruption and ruthlessness of the rich, they are inclined to grin. These malefactors are their dreamselves. The American does not aspire to overthrow the thieves and oppressors half as much as he aspires to become one of them. Ben Hecht.

• The landlords oppress the peasants, may I become a landlord. A Pakistani.

• The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people. E.B. White.

• The trouble in America is not that the top 100 companies are violating the laws, though they are. The problem is they are writing the laws. Nicholas Johnson.

• Merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person. Mercantile morality is nothing but a refinement of piratical morality. Friedrich Nietzsche.

Merchants, businesspeople, are pirates after a visit to the tailor. Why do we glamorise murderous thieves in pirate movies? Will we be glamorising muggers in 50 years? We glamorise Nazis, and Napolean, and Alexander.

• Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures. Simone Weil.

The easy-to-imagine versus the harder-to-imagine. This is the root of the human catastrophe. We think: Money is very, very good, therefore more money is better. So much easier to imagine than: Money is very very good, but more money is global catastrophe, because satisfactions run out and self-earned money runs out.

• It is easier for people to see little things than big things. Plato.

• Straining at gnats, swallowing camels. Jesus.

• The amount of time spent in committees on a subject is inversely proportional to the importance of the subject. Laurence Peters.

• A person awake sees the common world, a sleeping person sees a private world. Heraclitus.

That is, only the people who see the big picture are awake. People who see only part of the picture are asleep.

• There are a thousand striking at the branches of the tree of problems for every one striking at the root. Henry Thoreau.

• Can't see the forest for the trees. Proverb.

Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels satirised this self-destructive human characteristic in his portrayal of the people fighting over whether one should open an egg at the big end or the little end. Swift also said that we have enough religion to hate one another, not enough religion to love one another. In other words, most Christianity is anti-Christian.
This is the missing intelligence. The 360vision. The ethical consciousness, the whole awareness, which is love.

• Desire and pursuit of the whole is love. Plato.

• Economic truth emerges only when things are examined whole. John Galbraith.

• Most of the serious errors in economic policy committed by governments through the ages, and most of the layman's errors in thinking about economic affairs, flow from a failure to consider the second order or third order effects of policies over time. Irving Kristol.

For instance, economists fiddle with the various economic elements, interest rates, etc. But it is very simply obvious, with the big picture, that the only thing that can really alter the national economy is more work, more work products. So all their focus should be on the things that increase national production, like pay justice, which uses many energies productively, and on health, which, again, is partially dependent on pay justice, and on unemployment, again partially dependent on pay justice. The economy is like a waterbed. Fiddling with the indicators can only raise or lower parts of the bed. Raise some parts and lower others. And make waves, which are again wasteful of energies. They cannot add more water to the bed.

And endless fiddling with the indicators gives endless opportunities for legal theft by financiers buying and selling at the right time.

Unemployment is another legal theft. Governments in unlimited-fortunes systems are biassed to employers, to the rich. And keeping unemployment holds a sword over people's heads. The fear of unemployment keeps people working in underpaid, unsafe jobs. It allows employers to lean on workers, to enslave them. Unemployment can be destroyed at any time in any economy by floating the official work week, the point at which overtime kicks in, to encourage employers to hire more people rather than pay overtime. Lowering the official work week in downturns, raising it in upturns. Unemployment is a feature of usurped, oppressive governments. Unemployment is oppression. It works for the overpaid financially and against everyone happiness-wise. Everyone in nature has the freedom to work. Society must do better than nature or have no reason for being. Freedom to work is a right. Robbing people of work for the profits of few is tyranny and slavery, a divided and crumbling state.

The unemployment benefit was never a nice thing governments did for the people. It was for the overpaid, so that after a downturn, the surplus workforce was not halfdead from starvation and illhealth, and unfit to go back to work in the upturn. Therefore unemployment is mostly dependent on pay injustice.

• A friend is one who warns you. Proverb.

A false friend flatters you, a true friend tells you the best guess at truth they have.

• To find out the true state of facts, to report them with fidelity, to apply to them strict and fixed principles of justice, humanity and law, to inform as far as possible the conscience of nations, and to call down the judgement of the world on what is false, or base, or tyrannical, appear to me to be the first duties of those who write. Henry Reeve.

99.999% of writers fail in this first duty. That is, they promote ignorance, error and misery.

• Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress of wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice? John Adams.

• When you have convinced thinking people that it is right, and convinced humane people that it is just, you will gain your cause. People always lose half what is gained by violence. What is gained by argument is gained forever. Wendell Phillips.

People always lose all that is gained by violence. The American and French revolutions put in place systems to ensure avoidance of unjust wealth concentration, but the failure to correct errors in thinking meant America and France, and humanity, lost all that was gained. The only means of gain is improvement of ideas, and that depends on the nobility of a majority of individuals to test our accepted ideas.

• Every manufacturer ought to remember that his fortune was not achieved by himself alone, but by the cooperation of his [her] workers. He ought to acknowledge their rights to share in the benefits of that which would not exist without their faithful performance of duty. Not until the capitalist is just enough to recognise this truth can he ever join a group of workpeople and feel himself among friends. Peter Cooper.

It is hard to get even the workers to realise this obvious truth.

• The social progress, order, security and peace of each country is necessarily connected with the social progress, order, security and peace of all other countries. Pope John XXIII.

• The Labour Movement means just this, it is the last noble protest of the American people against the power of incorporated wealth. Wendell Phillips.

Not the last, we hope.

• When wealth and splendour, instead of fascinating the multitude, excite emotions of disgust, when, instead of drawing forth admiration, it is beheld as an insult upon wretchedness, when the ostentatious appearance it makes serves to call the right of it in question, then the case of property becomes critical, and it is clear that it is only in a system of justice that the possessor can contemplate security. Thomas Paine.

The case of other-earned property.
What does overwealth do? It robs 99% of people of between 0% and 99.9% of earnings, it robs 90% of humans of 90% to 99.9% of earnings, thereby causing 100 million deaths and a greater number of serious injuries, diseases and sufferings, it causes fascism, tyranny, terrorism, torture, genocide, Hiroshimas, concentration camps, refugee camps, it creates dangerous tyranny for 1% and dangerous slavery for 99%, it puts governance into the chaos of corruption, and it puts humanity on its rapid and accelerating course to extinction. What could be more evil? What could be a greater crime against humanity? The removal of what else could do more for human happiness? And yet we have not yet got the slightest antipathy or fear or abhorrence of overwealth. It is the hammer we smash ourselves to pulp with, year after year, century after century. And yet we have more care and caution in handling a pair of scissors. Limitless overpay is by far the greatest war criminal.

It puts the Great Train Robbery in perspective, as infinitesimal by comparison. The theft of US$70 trillion every year, US$70,000 average per family, theft of over US$70,000 per year from 90% of humanity, as against a one-off of several million.

It might be tempting to blame the super-overpaid, but the blame is due to a human error. The robbers are victims too. The accepted ideas of everyone are telling the super-overpaid that they are virtuous. The chopping off of ruling classes in revolutions and revolts has achieved nothing longterm. Even the whole of humanity is not to blame. We are not our own creators. Mother nature, life, or, if you prefer, god, is to blame. Blame god and pursue happiness.

• I make peace and I make trouble. Bible.

Life is like that.

• Wherever possible, the wage-contract should be modified by a partnership contract, where the wage-earner is made to share in the ownership, the management and the profits. Pius XI.

The more that trade unions encourage worker ownership of shares, the more the interests of employers and employees will agree, and the more that profits will be spread justly and democratically. But such a move will not be sufficient to create full justice and social safety.

• This great labour question cannot be solved except by assuming as a principle that private property must be held sacred and inviolable. A small number of the very rich have been able to lay upon the teaming masses a yoke little better than slavery itself. If the working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land, the consequence will be that the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over and respective classes will be brought nearer one another. Leo XIII.

This is interesting. It contains an implicit admission of the existence of legal theft and of something wrong with private property, because it says that there is something unjust in the system. And this contradicts the first sentence. The Catholic church and unlimited-fortunes capitalism have come down on the side of private property, communism has come down on the side of public property, and the Catholic church has gone so far as to support Hitler because Hitler was fighting communism. Communism correctly saw that there was something wrong with private property, and chose public property, as though it were an alternative to private property, whereas it meant only that property concentrated in the hands of very few, with all the necessarily attendant state terrorism and leader paranoia, the whole bucket of opposition between rulers and ruled. Communism said: Private property no, unlimited-fortunes capitalism said: Private property yes, and the two sides have broken millions of heads in their disagreement.

Whereas the answer lay in the middle, self-earned private property yes, other-earned private property no. And, although Leo comes down on the side of private property, his words contain an implicit admission of the existence of legal theft and of something wrong with private property. And the above words of Pius XI contain this same implicit double admission. His words imply that workers should be getting a bigger share of ownership, management and profits. That is, in blunter, more truthful language, that the workers have been robbed. Millions of heads have been broken because of a disagreement which is based on a failure to find the distinction which is implicit in the Popes' words.
But look at some other words of Leo XIII.

• To despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful, it is rebellion against god's will. The highest duty is to respect authority. It is in no way lawful to demand, to defend, or to grant, unconditional freedom of thought, of speech, of writing, or of religion. The toleration of all religions is the same thing as atheism.

And then he contradicts himself by saying,

• If the laws of the state are openly at variance with the laws of god then indeed it becomes a duty to resist them, a sin to render obedience.

The question is, what is legitimate authority? Not merely legal authority, because the laws can be wrong, as Leo says. And not church authority, because the church is subject to human limitations, such as failing to distinguish self-earned and other-earned private property. And not god authority, because we can never be sure we are reading god's word, and not the words of fallible humans, who may have written, or added their own beliefs to, or imposed their fallible interpretations on, the scriptures. There is no legitimate authority. The wisest of men have said erroneous and even silly things, and it is only our own judgement we have with which to discriminate. Our authority is not certain. But our own authority is, as far as anyone knows, as good as anyone else's. And we have 100 times more information on our personal situation than others do. The argument to authority has been known to be fallacious at least since Aristotle, and common sense tells us that it is fallacious. That someone who has been raised up in reputation believes something is no guarantee that it is true. The only ground for belief is that it makes sense. Even good sense can be wrong. We have to test our opinions all the time. If we hug our opinions just because they are ours, we may hug a viper, a destroyer of our happiness. Another's opinions can at best be suggestive to our own thinking. Even if some being calling himself god spoke directly to us from a 1000-foot-high body, it would be our decision whether to take this to be god or something else. Since god is infinite, any finite bodily thing might not be god. And if the giant being had a threatening attitude, we might fairly conclude that this was not love, and therefore was not god.

Thoreau's and Gandhi's civil disobedience puts responsibility back on us, the only beings who are certainly here. All questions are open. The obedience of people towards churches that have burned 1000s of people alive is surely taking thoughtlessness and irresponsibility far, far too far. A healthy skepticism of authorities seems appropriate.

• Godman says: Live in sky when you die. Maybe, maybe, but I don't know. Aboriginal.

The more certain you are that you are right, the more likely it is that you are wrong.

The churches disagree with much of what is in the Bible, but they still appeal to the Bible as an authority. The Bible, and any book, can at best be suggestive of possible truths. The Bible disagrees with itself doctrinally over 200 times. Even over whether god is good, whether Jesus is good, and whether the world is good. God says that he himself commits evil, god says the world is good, Jesus says he himself is not good, and that only god is good. That is, that nothing else, including the world and Jesus, is good. Buddha says that only the blank scripture is true. Words are full of pitfalls.

Ethical obedience is in fact logically impossible. To obey someone conscientiously, you would have to really know that they were better than you, and you cannot know that they are better than you if you are a worse judge of things than them, and of course you certainly can't know that they are better than you if they are worse than you. If your judgement was good enough to know how good another was, your judgement would be good enough to trust itself and not another. Obedience is necessarily mindless, and mindlessness is blindness, not pursuit of your happiness, which is all of duty, all of ethics. Mindlessness is throwing yourself over a cliff, and obedience is necessarily mindless. Obedience is a survival strategy for infants who don't know anything, to mindlessly rely on their parents till they themselves grow a mind and get knowledge of the world. Life is a game of trying to pursue truth, and hence happiness, with our desperately limited intelligence. There are no alternatives.

The children's film Antz, with Woody Allen as the voice of the hero, makes the point that it is a choice between thinking for yourself or fascism. Dictators take over when the people abdicate.

The doctrinal contradictions in the Bible are possibly a deliberate invitation and incitement to think. For instance, the gross contradiction at the opening of the New Testament, that Jesus was and wasn't the son of Joseph, is surely deliberate.

A book that does not give reasons propagates unreason. A book that does not give reasons is unreasonable. And therefore is ungodly if god is rational.

• Test everything and hold on to what is good. Bible.

And keep testing it. Words are always loose, and the silver hammer of your acuity can grow. The Bible, and other books, use words ten different ways, besides the literal.

• The letter that kills and the spirit which gives life. Bible.

The letter and the spirit are two different things.

• The Old Testament prophets and the New Testament writers denounce the exclusive privileges of the rich and the usurpation of the rights of the poor, and strenuously enforce their demands for righteous dealings among people. The Bible, like an unfailing arsenal, has supplied the ammunition for the age-long struggle for liberty. Charles Eldridge.

Reasons instead of demands would be loving.

• In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical. His religion has been so long identified with conservatism, often with conservatism of the obstinate and unyielding sort, that it is sometimes almost startling for us to remember that all of the conservatism of his own times was against him, that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him. Phillips Brooks.

So-called conservatives are erroneously interested in conserving overwealth, which is the destroyer of everyone.

• Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a god, because, if there is one, he must more approve of the homage of reason that that of blindfolded fear. Thomas Jefferson.

• Religion brought forth riches, and the daughter devoured the mother. St Bernard of Clairvaux.

• I belong to the great church which holds the world within its starlit aisles, that claims the great and good of every race and clime, that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed, and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul. Robert Ingersoll.

• Happiness is the only good, reason the only torch, justice the only worship, humanity the only religion, and love the only priest. Robert Ingersoll.

• Injustice, suave, erect and unconfined, sweeps the wide earth, and tramples over mankind, while prayers to heal her wrongs move slow behind. Homer.

What is this thing that can rob 99% of humanity financially, and rob 100% of humanity of peace and easy living? How can humanity, king of beasts, first of creatures, be robbed of so much for so long? In what cave lives this invisible supreme beast, injustice, that so cruelly robs and enslaves humanity?

• What a piece of luck for leaders that people don't think. Adolf Hitler.

Not so lucky, Hitler, as it turns out. Hitler could have saved himself a lifetime of futile labour and hardship by thinking.

• If we are right in holding that the most urgent business of our age is to devise better laws of conduct in the arts of human government, success depends upon stimulating, in as many spots as possible, the largest number and variety of independent thinkers. Those who in vague rhetoric dwell on education as the substitute for force and revolution often mean a doped, standardised and servile education. But such education affords no safety in this dangerous world. Free-thinking alone can furnish the energy and the direction to human government, helping to bridge the chasm between physical and moral progress. J.A. Hobson.

The term free-thinker is a sad reflection on the others.

• No person ever ruled others for their good, no person was ever rightly the master of the minds or bodies of his brothers, no person ever ruled others for anything except for their undoing and for his own brutalisation. The possession of power over others is inherently destructive, both to the possessor of the power and to those over whom it is exercised. The great person of the future is one who will seek to create power in the people, and not gain power over them. The great person of the future is one who will refuse to be great at all, in the historic sense, [she] is the one who will altogether diffuse [her]self in the life of humanity. George Herron.

The god of the Old Testament is against kingship. Leaving things up to leaders has been disastrous. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Vigilance about pay justice.

This paragraph illustrates the biggest piece of nonsense in economics.

• There can be no trade unprofitable to the public, for if any prove so, men leave it off, and whenever the traders thrive, the public, of which they are a part, thrives also. Dudley North.

• The fable of the bees, or, Private vices, public benefits. Bernard Mandeville.

• The public becomes powerful in proportion to the opulence and extensive commerce of private men. David Hume.

• Commerce is no longer exploitation. It is human service, and no business concern can hope to prosper which does not meet a human need and add to human happiness. Elbert Hubbard.

• What is the benefit done by a good King Alfred, or by a Howard, or Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, or Florence Nightingale, or any lover, less or larger, compared with the involuntary blessing wrought on nations by the selfish capitalist, who built the Illinois, Michigan and the network of the Mississippi valley roads, which have evoked not only the wealth of the soil, but the energy of millions of people? Ralph Emerson.

The selfish capitalist built the railroads. Rolled up his sleeves, did he? Didn't hire any workers, did it all himself. Peak-pyramid fallacy again.

• No man ever manages a legitimate business in this life without doing indirectly far more for other people than he is trying to do for himself. Henry Beecher.

• Inventions and mechanical arts are not working half so much for the rich, the strong and the wise, as they are for the poor, the weak and the ignorant. Henry Beecher.

• Priests pray for blessings, merchants pour them down. Edward Young.

• We advocate nothing but what is agreeable to the highest behests of Christianity, to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest. Richard Cobden.

• Commerce is virtually a mode of cheapening production, and in all such cases the consumer is the person ultimately benefited. J.S. Mill.

These quotes range over 500 years. I suppose the explosion of trade, transport, weaponry, conquest, plunder, piracy and enslavement from 1500 went to people's heads, and they got quite emotional and swept away from sense by the explosion of wealth they saw around them. America was built on cotton, and cotton was built on slaves. Gold flooded into Europe from South America. The financial supremacy of the first world was donated involuntarily by the third world. With their technological, weaponry advantage, the first world simply robbed the third world. And then patronised it with the names, third world, and developing countries.

Mandeville, a Dutchman, was being lighthearted and satirical, half tongue-in-cheek, but his words were read seriously and literally, by the English, as being cynical and wrong, or as being cynical and true. The truth in what he was saying, or mis-saying, was that self-interest is not necessarily bad, proper self-interest is regarded as a vice and is in reality part of virtue. Proper self-interest is indeed the root of virtue, but at the time people were convinced that virtue required complete lack of self-interest, which is absurd. Love others as [much as] you love yourself. Because what you do to others is done to you. Because there is an equal and opposite reaction to what you do. The love you get is equal to the love you give. The hurt you get is equal to the hurt you give. Self-interest as a vice, as a misery-maker, forgets this first law of ethics. Self-interest as a virtue, as a happiness-maker, remembers this first law of ethics.

Obviously in an exchange, the work-input values of the two things have to be x and x+y. So that one person goes from x to x+y and the other goes from x+y to x. So that one gains y and the other loses y. One slips towards wealth and power, the other slips towards poverty and slavery. Necessarily. Unavoidably. The idea that transaction can produce gain on both sides is absurd, ought to be patently so. And yet even Emerson and J.S. Mill, great friends of humanity and freedom, and Adam Smith, canny Scots father of economics, fell for it.

Why are all these authors energetically arguing for the selfish capitalist? Obviously because it requires effort to try to justify.

If inventions and mechanical arts were working half as much for the rich as for the poor, the poor would of course be twice as rich as the rich.

Commerce is no longer exploitation? So commerce was exploitation. What happened to change commerce from exploitation? Commerce didn't change.

J.S. Mill is right in that the customer is benefited by the cheapening caused by competition. But he confuses together relative benefit and absolute benefit. The customer benefits relatively to higher prices, but not absolutely. The customer still comes out worse off, having most of the time given more than he got.

To add a comic touch to the tragedy of self-deception and self-destruction, the heirs of the oldfashioned, outright conquest and plunder, sword-slaughter and peasant-slavery, looked down their noses at the slightly subtler conquest and plunder by trade.

O humanity! For how long will you be your own dupe, your own crucifier, your own murderer? Injury ricochets as untiringly as atoms.

People got high on the upside of trade, lost their sense, and only slowly noticed the slaves, the third world. And now they kid themselves that there are no slaves, or only 200 million slaves, when 90% of people are paid 10th to 1000th of world-average pay, when 0.25% legally own 50% of the world, and when the economically very thin third world is still being squeezed of US$200 billion every year.

And the first world is quite unaware that 500 years of plunder is about to turn into 500 years of being plundered. Or rather, less than 500 years, because by 2100, the first world will be only 2% of human population. The third world has been getting hard, and the first world has been getting soft. Third-world Sicily has already conquered America. The first world is riddled with the criminal products of poverty. With the passing of Hong Kong back to the Chinese, the world is flooded with Triads, born of poverty. Poverty is a luxury we cannot afford. Deny blood to any part of the body, and the whole body is flooded with gangrene. To be conscious of part of the picture is to be unconscious.

• If we had to point to one single notion which is calculated to damage our industrial performance, to prevent us from competing effectively in the world and ultimately to undermine the basis of a free and diverse society, it is the idea that profit is somehow wrong. Margaret Thatcher.

A brilliant piece of demagoguery. All those people out there raising doubts about the benefits of making a profit, including Dante, Jerome and Montaigne, are against freedom, diversity, industry and economic power in the world. We people in here are standing up for freedom, diversity and national strength. Thatcher does not think to herself: There are people saying that profits are wrong, or that profits can in some cases be wrong. As a person interested in happiness, as a person in some degree responsible for the happiness of all the people in this nation, and also for the happiness of people outside this nation whom this nation affects, and knowing that happiness is totally dependent on the truth, I will investigate, examine and objectively judge the arguments against profit, in order that I may be equipped with the best knowledge and insight in my responsibilities. I will gather, examine and digest the rational arguments against profit, and extract all the good and truth they may have in them.

She is conscious of voices raised against profit, that is why she addresses the matter. But she comfortably, arrogantly assumes that all the people arguing against profit are lesser beings, incapable of rational thought, who can be dismissed without argument. Whatever they say, it has to be nonsense. There is no possibility that the intelligence of those who are for profit is less than complete. Those utter rogues who are against profit! They are trying to restrict freedom, they are against diversity, they are trying to destroy the nation's health and strength, whereas we are trying to save the nation from these enemies, these destroyers, by pulling in big heaps of lovely money for ourselves. We made heaps of money, we can't be wrong. She is consolidating her position by pandering to the unthoughtful, unobjective prejudices and egotism of her audience.

Wealth breeds insolence, arrogance, complacency that they are right. Without any basis in reason, she connects the profittakers to freedom, diversity and national strength, and throws mud at those who are against profit. Anyone who says anything against profit will feel a little more afraid, a little more marginalised, a little more of a traitor.

She is supported by everyone thinking that profits are what employs people. It stands to reason, doesn't it. No profits, means no people setting up companies, means no jobs for employees. The employers are doing all this for the nation. It is harder for people to see that it is demand for goods that employs people, it is everyone having fairpay that maximises the spending and therefore employment, like Henry Ford giving high wages so the workers could afford the cars. It is the bear's desire for a fish that gives the bear the employment as a fisher. It is something like the magician's misdirection. People, even employees, see the employer, not the employees. People's desire for parent-figures is grafted on to the employers. People's meekness says: What, us? It is us who are creating employment? Obviously employment would disappear if demand disappeared. It takes no effort to have needs and desires, so people attribute employment to the employer, who is making an effort in setting up and running the companies. People also forget that the employer is being overpaid for his effort. Being overpaid out of the people's efforts. Most or all of the capital the employer uses belongs to the people, has been legally and unjustly extracted by the transaction imp.

She is supported by everyone thinking that you have to have overpaid and underpaid in order to have capital, whereas capital formation is highest in egalitarian countries like Norway, where everyone gets a fairshare, everyone is and feels safe and secure, where internal defense costs and taxes are lowest, where most have money to save, and therefore everyone puts away spare money for a rainy day. Whereas super-overpaid and super-underpaid countries like Middle Eastern countries have near zero capital formation. See the writings of 'the Dean of economists', John Galbraith.

She is supported by everyone thinking that more money is always better, and that therefore people with more money are always better.

Thatcher's remarks are irresponsible, unaware, and designed to flatter and solidify the ignorance of her party, and to slander and marginalise the voices of reason. She is a bully, and the voice of bullies. Without courage to leave prejudice, and to venture on the seas of thought towards truth and happiness. She is using the force of slander, not the sanity of selflove and otherlove. All the miseries of humanity, all the failures and disorders of human government, do not move her to doubt, to test, to examine, to search, to think. Arrogance is ignorance of our ignorance. There is nothing more certain than the limitation of our intelligence, so we ought at least to ridicule the absolutely confident. Children should at least be taught to recognise the wellknown false arguments.

Thatcher here commits the fallacy of the argument without an argument. She gives no reasons for her views. It is so just because I say so. It is a gross, shameless, ludicrous and hateful slander. It is especially ludicrous to say that the people raising doubts about the goodness of profits are against diversity. She is just invoking buzzwords to pull votes. A head of government should be unimpeachably rational, and be a model of rationality to the world.

One can be more savvy about reality by remembering that there is always a natural range in human characteristics, and many errors arise by thoughtlessly attributing one's own character to others. There is a natural range in humility and arrogance. More modest people are inclined to attribute the same modesty to others, although some others are further along the humility-arrogance continuum. Thus modest people are inclined to assume that if a person speaks positively, that they have done their homework, their thinking and research, before speaking, because they themselves would not speak positively without having done their homework. Especially if the speaker is a head of state. Forgetting that leaders in unlimited-fortunes systems are not aristocrats, the best people, but plutocrats, the worst people, the pseudo-aristocrats, as Jefferson calls them. They are people who have the immodesty to speak positively without having done their thinking and research. So modest people are inclined to believe anyone who speaks positively. This is the power of the argument without an argument, an argument without any reasoning.

• They hate us for our freedoms. George W. Bush.

A simple sentence can be full of stuff. What are the chances of it being true? Oh, they have freedoms, I hate them! It makes much more sense that they hate us for our tyrants' bullying, killing and robbing.

The subtext, the subliminal messages. One, that we have freedoms. People might doubt that, if it was not in subtext. Subtext, subliminal messages slide under the radar of our critical intelligence. Especially as the subtext message is pleasant and flattering. We are a superior people, equipped with freedoms, unlike others. Two, we needn't worry about hurting them, as they are envious and hateful, hating the good. A simple sentence, yet full of bigotry, dishonesty, selfdeception, hate and pride, assisting us and encouraging people to evil, that is, selfharming by hurting others.

What sort of mind would come up with such an odd idea, that people would hate another people for their freedom? An envious, hating mind. A petty, mean mind. Someone who has hated being inferior, hated others having more gifts of nature, especially hated others having more kindness. Someone heartless enough to be blind to the suffering. Someone capable of avoiding the question of justice, of the pragmatic necessity of the golden rule. Someone desperate to prove that it is hate that makes the world go round. Someone desperate to find social acceptance for their hating soul. It takes modesty and selflove to ask: Have we hurt others? How much have we hurt others? Is hurting others good for us? Bush is saying: It is all their fault, it is none of our fault, we are right to carry on as we have been doing. It is brilliant, because it says: Every time they hurt us, it is one more proof of our rightness. 9/11, if you swallow the idea that it was caused by foreign terrorists, proves that we are better. It says: When they hurt us, don't question your government's behaviour, be confirmed in your rightness in supporting your government. Bush is singing the anthem of bigotry and pride: We are never wrong, we are perfect, we are always good.

What is it like, to be gifted by nature with a paucity of talents and towering pride? So that every day has its hurts of humiliation? It is tough being proud, you get humiliated so often. Such a nature cries out for validation, for social acceptance, for triumph over and revenge on its 'enemies', those with less mean natures and more gifts. Such a nature is driven to get to the top, and have the revenge of getting that bitch goddess, 'success'. And yet, at the top, you are the more exposed to the mocking. It is something good to be said for Bush that he allows the mockery, he does not enforce an absolute fascist risicide, laughter-killing, like Hitler and Stalin. He is happy to be the clown that distracts the crowd away from the serious thieves, the military-industrial complex that murders millions.

The moral is that anything and everything that is good is grabbed by the wolves for concealing clothing. Unfortunately, it is the egotism and idealism of the many that drives them to believe in the sheep's clothing. Our government, our church cannot be bad. It is this which makes it so easy for wolves to sit in the heart of our institutions. The people are for environmentalism, then environmentalism will serve to conceal us wolves. The people are for diversity, freedom, economic strength, then diversity, freedom and economic strength will conceal us wolves. The people are for good god, then good god will serve to conceal us wolves. The cover of the book of the church is good, decorated with good saints like St Francis, so the book of the church is good. People forget that Jesus advised people to be as cunning as serpents, and to learn from the children of this world, that is, from the worldly. Jesus is advising the people to be more Macchiavellian than Macchiavelli, and thus defeat the Macchiavellian, but they are not. The rapacious are more rapacious than the less rapacious. The people have continued to back unlimited wealth and power and to call it freedom. The human race may have missed the last bus when it failed to heed the opposition of the founding fathers of America to wealth concentration. The meek will inherit the earth when the 99.9% make the 0.1% behave. Can 999 make 1 behave for the happiness and survival of the 1000? Yes, they can. Most definitely. Easily. Peacefully.

• The selfish spirit of commerce knows no country, and feels no passion or principles but that of gain. Thomas Jefferson.

• The poor man pays for all. Ambrose Bierce.

• Those who have never seen the inhabitants of a 19th century London slum can have no idea of the state to which dirt, drink and economics can reduce human beings. Leonard Woolf.

What percentage of humans live in slums today? 40%? Of course the dirt is caused by the economics. The drink is caused by the despair and pain caused by the economics. And the rich drink too.

• I am a bad Englishmen, because I think the advantages of commerce are dearly bought for the lives of many more. Horace Walpole.

But wait. Both participants in a trade go off happy, so they must both profit, mustn't they? One goes off with x+y, the other goes off with something more useful to him than what he had. That is the purpose of trade, to part with something of value but no use to me. But I would be happier to trade and also not to lose work-input value in the trade. We can't avoid gain and loss in each transaction individually, because we cannot know the exact work-input value of anything, but we can counter the stormy social ocean made from these trillions of drops of injustice and theft. With justly-limited-fortune systems, we can have trade and also greatly reduce the vast dangers, to both overpaid and underpaid, of ever-increasing injustice. Prevent the engine of society overheating, burning everyone, and revving itself to pieces.

Job specialisation, division of labour, had advantages, but it required trade. Trade had the vicious side-effect of legal theft, the ceaseless automatic drift of wealth, products of work, from earners to non-earners, which has escalated for 1000s of years without us being able to analyse it correctly and see it, and so defuse it. To see it is to defuse it, and to undo 1000s of years of escalation of injustice, war and weaponry. Life is a race between catastrophe and education. Education in this key point now needs to play catch-up very quickly.

The disadvantages of division of labour, aside from the great prime one of near-extinction, are worth considering. Whereas, before division of labour, everyone was doing the same set of jobs, and therefore had much in common, now everyone does very different jobs from one another. This is an enormous loss of unity and fellowship in society. We now can't share talk about what we do most of the day. At parties, people try to get a conversation going by saying: What do you do? and after the answer, there is generally nothing more to say. Before, everyone was a farmer and a jack-of-all-trades. Now only housewives are jack-of-all-trades and can share worktalk and thus find fellowship. Social cohesion is proportional to the amount we have in common.

Adding this point to the fact that division of labour and trade, with legal theft, have made about 95% of humans financially poorer, 90% of humans 10 times poorer than they would be in simple nature, robbed 100% of humans of 99%, soon 100%, of happiness, multiplied nature's horrors and sufferings by 1000, we might well conclude that division of labour is not worth the advantages. Which explains communes.

But we can have the enormous advantages of division of labour, as well as survival and happiness, if we remove legal theft.

But do all the toys, that division of labour has added, add any happiness? Especially considering that so many of these toys are people-killing machines. Can we say that cultures without these toys are less happy than cultures with these toys, all other things being equal? That is, do the toys themselves make any happiness? Or is all the added happiness just the unreal happiness of pride in having them when others don't? Do we think that the Romans, without so many of these toys, were significantly less happy? To produce these toys, we work far longer, and spend far less time with our children, than the bushmen do, who have a 12-hour workweek even in the harsh conditions of the Kalahari. Culture is after all ultimately how much time we spend with our children, how much time we spend passing ourselves on to the next generation.

Will division of labour, with trade, and without legal theft and galloping injustice, cruelty, violence and extinction, add to or subtract from happiness?

• Land. If the whole area of terra firma is owned by A, B or C, there will be no place for D, E, F and G to be born, or, born as trespassers, to exist. Ambrose Bierce.

• As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. Adam Smith.

• No one supposes that the owner of urban land performs, as owner, any function. He has the right of private taxation, that is all. It is foolish to maintain property rights for which no service is performed, for payment without service is waste. R.H. Tawney.

And theft, and destruction.

• The laws of property have never been conformed to the principles on which the justification of private property rests. They have made property of things which never ought to be property, and absolute property where only a qualified property ought to exist. The institution of property, when limited to its essential elements, consists in the recognition, in each person, of a right to the exclusive disposal of what he or she has produced by their own exertions, or received either by gifts or fair agreement, without force or fraud, from those who produced it. J.S. Mill.

Gifts, also, are a license to take out without putting in, are a theft from those who put in. For survival and happiness, gifts will have to be limited to prevent estates moving to private heirs, to prevent huge fortunes and great individual power accumulating through gifting, as in the case of charity organisations and religions. Some will instantly react: Oh, don't let's take away gifts! They saw the upside, not the far greater downside. They shoot themselves in the foot and wonder who shot them. They probably look for someone to blame for their injury. Some minority, so that there is less seeming chance of a backlash. But the weakest can kill.

• Property: a patent entitling one person to dispose of another person's labour. Thomas Malthus.

• Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows, because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labour, is monopolised. It is not necessary to confiscate land, only to confiscate rent [landrent]. Henry George.

Justly maximum fortunes with equal distribution of overfortunes automatically takes back landrent, all other legal thefts, and all illegal thefts, and conquest and plunder, devised by ingenuity, present and future. A just cap on personal fortunes beats all methods past, present, and future for preventing circumventure of justice.

• There is boundless theft in limited professions. William Shakespeare.

By limiting numbers of professionals, professions keep their price well above their costs and contribution by work. When America was flooded with highly trained and skilled European doctors during WW2, the number of doctors in America did not rise at all. See Naked empress, by Hans Ruesch. Chemists resist the sale of pharmaceuticals in supermarkets. Optometrists garner $100s, when many people can be fitted with $1 glasses.

• I'll give you my opinion of the human race in a nutshell. Their heart's in the right place, but their head is a thoroughly inefficient organ. Somerset Maugham.

• The wise person understands equity, the small person understands only profits. Confucius.

• To be able to really listen, one should abandon or put aside all prejudices. When you are in a receptive state of mind, things can be easily understood. But unfortunately most of us listen through a screen of resistance. We are screened with prejudices, whether religious or spiritual, psychological or scientific, or with daily worries, desires or fears. And with these fears for a screen, we listen. Therefore we listen really to our own noise, our own sound, not to what is being said. Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Suspension of premature disbelief is not credulity. Premature disbelief is not healthy skepticism, it is superstition, it is credulity. Even many scientists and doctors make the mistake of arguing that because something hasn't been proved to be true, it is false, which is a false argument. Superstition is the customary force of undisproven working hypotheses. And human ignorance of the great big world is so great that we all have many undisproven working hypotheses, both inside and outside our areas of expertise.

• People are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely. Thomas Macaulay.

• It is only the truth that wounds. Saying.

• Bitter truth is sweet in the aftertaste. Shakespeare.

The popular name Mary means bitter. Truth is bitter to the pleasure principle, which is selfdestructive, sweet to the reality principle, which is selfconstructive.

• Control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself. Hilaire Belloc.

• The organisation of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by mass media notoriously phony. Paul Goodman.

• I wonder why an employee should have to be subservient to his employer, and should have to please and praise him. Joseph Ibn Pakuda. 1040AD.

• Today the large organisation is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitised much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs. Ralph Nader.

• In a society which prides itself on its democratic system of freedom for the individual and rejection of dictatorial rule, the workplace stands as an island of authoritarianism. Irving Bluestone.

The workplace, where we spend most of our time. The slavery is achieved by threat of unemployment, and the threat of getting worse pay elsewhere. So just, equal pay per unit of work everywhere, and removal of unemployment, will free employees. It is always true that all can be employed. Work can always be shared around. It ought to be. Work is an unalienable right, since all have it in a state of nature. Proportionate work for pay is also a duty. The purpose of government is justice, because no state can survive without justice, and because no one can be happy without it.

• During my tenure at Treasury I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the competition that has made this system so productive. And always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise and their opposition to the intervention into our economic life by the state. William Simon.

• I am constantly intrigued by the idea that men who receive a salary of $250,000 a year need some extra incentive to do their job well. Irving Bluestone.

• Merchants and manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages. They say nothing of the bad effects of high profits. Adam Smith.

If only Adam Smith, the father of economics, had gone more deeply into this concept of high profits, and determined the point at which high profits become injustice, theft, danger, violence, misery, anarchy, death!

• As we learn from our mistakes, our knowledge grows, even though we may never know, that is, know for certain. Since our knowledge can grow, there can be no reason for despair of reason. And since we can never know for certain, there can be no authority for any claim to authority, for conceit over our knowledge, or for smugness. Karl Popper.

Still less for beating up, torturing or killing people for disagreeing.
One meaning of god is existence, the world, life, everything, experience, reality, consciousness, creation and creativity, actual and potential. That is, the real.
Another is, the knowledge, happiness, perfection and answers we don't have. That is, the ideal. In this sense, god exists by not existing. The less the answers exist, the more this ideal god exists. Some sages say that you can find heaven is at hand on earth if you stop crying for the moon. That you can find heavenly bliss in the process of growing and learning, with roots firmly in the ground. An idealist may be a dropout from realism. A realist may be a dropout from idealism.

Freedom from overwealth is the guarantee of all freedoms.

• The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from those who live by profit ought always to be listened to with great caution. It comes from an order of people whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have upon many occasions both deceived and oppressed the public. Adam Smith.

In other words, you can bet the rich thieve wherever they can. Which, because they make the laws and execute the laws, is very freely. They thieve legally because it is so much more lucrative and safe than illegal theft.

• Egalitarian sentiment often consists of people who were born smart but not rich urging governments to eliminate all the advantages of being born rich, while preserving all the advantages of being born smart. Michael Kingsley.

• Poverty programs put very little money into the hands of the poor because middleclass hands are so much more gifted at grasping money. They know better where it is, how to apply for it, how to divert it, how to concentrate it. Philip Slater.

Legal theft again.
Milton Friedman says that the middle class get 5/6th of government transfers. To say nothing of the far larger transfers to the rich in the forms of subsidies to businesses, etc. Milton Friedman says that the poor subsidise the rich in education, because the rich more often go to university, and they go to far more expensive universities. For instance, while most American universities have fewer than a million volumes in their libraries, Harvard has over 90 million. Another legal theft.

• The relative stability of profits after taxes is evidence that the corporation-profits tax is in effect almost entirely shifted. The government simply uses the corporation as a tax collector. Kenneth Boulding.

Another legal theft. The poor person pays for all. But justice is not just wresting the overpay from the overpaid. It is universally planting the lasting idea of the vital importance of justice for the happiness of all.

• The illusion that by some means of progressive taxation the burden can be shifted substantially onto the shoulders of the wealthy [overpaid] has been the chief reason that taxation has increased as fast as it has done, and the chief reason that, under the influence of this illusion, the masses have come to accept a much heavier load than they would have done otherwise. Friedrich Hayek.

Another legal theft. The people accepted the introduction of income tax around 1900 because the rich were getting taxed at a higher rate. But the overpay was still greater than the higher taxrate. And now the overpaid are taxed at a lower rate than the underpaid.

• Economists, who are supposed to be a contentious [disagreeing] bunch, have agreed that the community at large stands to gain in material standard of living from specialisation and exchange according to the various nations' comparative advantage. Paul Samuelson.

In simple language, that it is cheaper to make things in places where it is cheaper to make them. Only vested interests, that is, firms in places where it is dearer to make things, have ever said otherwise. Another legal theft. Frederic Bastiat has made this abundantly clear in the simplest, most revealing, most readable language. Which is probably why so many agree with him. But it is the vested interests who are the great majority of voices and thinkers and actors on such matters. The rest of us are actually producing goods and services. The people need a loyal people's advocate. And the vested interests are wrong about what they think is their own interest. Profit and loss is in no one's interest in the long run. Business people often do not even know what is in their financial interest. Putting quotas on Japanese cars cost America US$7 billion. Fewer cars, with same demand, means higher prices. A gift to the Japanese.

In America today, and perhaps in other places, perhaps less openly, companies are legally allowed to insert profits into tax-deductible salaries, that is, to add billions in non-salaries into statements of salaries for the purposes of tax-assessment. Why wouldn't they, when they are free to?

In short, there are, as well as the successful illegal thefts, and the conquests and plunders, many, many wideopen legal thefts in present society. And these are injuries, which ricochet everywhere, endlessly, or till justice, with as much energy as atoms. Both physically and psychologically. At all levels of human global society. Which you can see in the news, in all of past history, and in many stories of both overpaid and underpaid.

Humanity believes in theft. It doesn't yet know that it net hurts everyone enormously.

Justice is not a cost. It is a colossal reward.

I am guessing that even egalitarians will think my position extreme. Egalitarians are arguing only for a reduction of inequality. They are soft on injustice. They still think that injustice is not all bad.

Also, inequality cannot but grow. It is a monster that grows rapidly in feeding on itself. You can have only, either equality, or relentlessly ever-growing murderous inequality. I have done my best to locate justice. That is, the place where violence will be minimised, and where the growth of inequality can be prevented. And done my best to show that this is very simple good sense, well within the range of understanding of almost all people. If they do a few evening's unprejudging thinking.

People can decide how much they want to pal up with violence, insanity, corruption, unfreedom, oppression, inequality, strikes, unfraternity, torture, undemocracy, grief, massacre, untruth, crisis, anarchy, hatred, terror, fascism, depressions, bullets, mafiaism, starvation, stress, problems, communism, paranoia, genocide, worries, propaganda, lawlessness, sadism, confusion, riots, persecution, traitors, spying, waste, destruction, assassination, kidnapping, uncontrol, danger, unreality, bombs, fear, powerlessness, war, underpay, wageslavery, non-sense, revolutions, disinformation, abuse of human rights, environmental degradation, loss of hope, loss of faith in humanity, and progress towards extinction.

Limitation of overfortune to US$30 million would reduce the overfortunes of only 500th of 1%, and yet would have an immense effect on reducing violence and misery. Reducing overpay to US$3 million would still reduce the overfortunes of less than 10th of 1%, and yet would bring every family in the world up to millionaire status, and would even more greatly increase democracy, freedom, peace, wisdom, truth, knowledge, understanding, capitalism, goodness, pleasure, kindness, order, social quietness, technological and medical progress, happiness. We would experience how very nice human nature is, comparatively, when it is free from the ceaseless savage beating of injustice.

Sorry, been away for a while. This is good. It's always convincing to quote great/famous people. Even if somebody disagrees, they'll think twice.

The problem still remains the same though. It's as old as time itself. People who are priviliged aren't going to be convinced. They may or may not think about it rationally, either way, reason has nothing to do with greed.

You're resting your argument on the idea that everybody is underpaid, even the middle class, but as long as their better off than the poor, this arrangement doesn't bother them.

I gotta go. I'll write more later.

thanks, bpj. remember, you can always write to me at payjustice at fastmail dot fm

i'm still working on shaping up more chapters. would love for you to read them. wish you could someday help me understand what i'm doing differently between the stuff that grabs you and the stuff that misses the mark. i'm too close to the writing, and cannot see it, alas.

and thanks so very much for all your comments here!

Somebody once wrote the following to me during a discussion about extreme economic inequality and injustice:

“Don't get me wrong. I am all in favor of having some kind of ideology. We all have to start from some basic premises even though those premises can't be proven one way or the other. Beliefs such as compassion, charity, the Golden Rule (or its partner ‘Don't do unto others as you would not have them do unto you’), a belief in equality of opportunity, etc. can't be rationally proven, but most moral people start from someplace like this. Besides, if we didn't start from some basic premise, how could we judge whether what we are advocating achieves the desired results.”

And this is what I say in reply:

The writer is saying: Let’s have some irrational basis and judge the results by this irrational basis. We’ll know if the results are those desired on the basis of some kind of ideology that can’t be rationally proven.

No wonder we are in such a mess! (Please note I don’t mean to put this individual on the spot, I’m talking about the culture, the very decadent culture, the moribund, decaying, dead culture. Eric Fromm: The 19th Century problem was that god was dead, the 20th Century problem is that man is dead.) People adopt moralities because it confers a bit of class, or because it gets people off your back.

A morality is either rationally based or it is irrational. If it is irrationally based, or adopted without awareness of the rational basis under it, it is insane, and all the actions based on it are insane (self-destructive). We need the basic reminder: We need rationality (sense, sanity). Irrationality is not as good as rationality. The culture has turned asking why into rudeness. Pushed out rationality! Driven the culture insane, put it on an irrational basis. Don’t ask why, just do it. That is, be a robot, a cipher, a complete waste of life. Don’t exist, don’t be genuine, don’t require rationality in your life, don’t be a nuisance, don’t think, don’t get a rational foundation, just join others in irrational activity, just throw yourself willynilly into whatever your society is doing without ever stopping to question whether what your society is doing makes sense to you as a happiness plan for your own life.

Cicero: To think is to live. Socrates: The unexamined life is not worth living. Bible: Seek, Test everything.

The culture that needs to be reminded to think, to function with rationality, is far gone. “In favour of having some kind of ideology”. That sounds like: Just grab an ideology off the shelf – any one, it doesn’t matter which, none of them is rational - as you skateboard past.

Teachers of moralities don’t bother with rationality. They don’t have the rationality at their fingertips and it is an effort to think, so don’t ask. And, over time, the rationality stopped being anywhere even close to people’s minds. Everyone is functioning without rationality, so, hey, get in the flow, join the crowd. People just hear of moralities, know that they are around, and file them away in the morality pigeonhole in the brain. Oh yeah, morality, yeah, I have one of those. Golden rule, yeah, I know, that sort of thing. What sort of thing? Well, it isn’t rational or anything, but you have it anyway. Why?

Guess what. The Golden Rule - and justice - are rationally based. They are practical, realistic, very simple good sense. The Golden Rule and Justice tell you: Don’t hit people, because they hit back. Don’t injure people, because they injure back. The quickest way to invite injury to yourself is to injure other people.

People get so much information, they lose their common sense. We never have enough time to get back from all the information dumped on us, back to common sense, the fundamentals, the very, very simple point. Be still and experience reality. We are never still enough to get to reality.

Justice is non-injury. The Israelis (and everyone else doing the same sort of thing) don’t realise that they are injuring themselves by firing rockets. If there was a rubber wall instead of Palestinians sending back rockets, the Israelis would grasp the fact they are injuring themselves. The effect is the same, rockets coming at the Israelis. The Israelis see the ‘justice’ of sending back a rocket, whenever the Palestinians send a rocket. Take that, you Palestinians. Forget the Palestinians for a moment. Think just of yourself for a change. What is the effect of your actions on you? Injury. Suffering. Horrors. Unsafety. Endless, expensive, escalating violence. Endlessly escalating misery. Endless expense. In money, time, labour and misery. The Palestinians have 20th of the average Israeli income. It would be far, far, far cheaper to give them pay justice. It would be practical, realistic, good sense. It would be self-interest. It would be rational pursuit of your own happiness. Charlie Chaplin hits the boxing machine, it hits back with equal force. Charlie Chaplin gets mad at the boxing machine for hitting him, and he hits it harder. Smart? How smart was Hitler, thinking that plundering Europe was a happiness strategy? Europe plundered right back. Hitler, bunker, bullet. Well, duh, big fat duh.

We have been taught to not be selfish. What is wrong with selfishness is not the self-interest, the pursuit of your own happiness, it is the ignorance of, or the forgetting of, the simple fact that people are too dangerous to annoy. People are totally unreliable as doormats. Give up the impractical, unrealistic dream of people being doormats. Accept that they never have been and never will be. (And there is no reason why they should be.) Money is power, but every plutocracy has been brought down. Money is the second greatest power. The largest fortune is weaker than the rest of the world. Injustice doesn’t work. It is a vice, that is, it is an absolutely certain cause of unhappiness. Even if you die a natural death, like Stalin, your life is completely ruined by the immense labour of self-defense, and by the isolation from the trust with, and belonging to, the human tribe, which is such a great part of happiness. Pay injustice is the greatest injustice, because it is theft of money, which is the joker good, good for most things, including essentials for life, and social power. People are never going to take that lying down.

The person who is totally selfish, in the right way, who is sanely pursuing his self-interest, his maximal happiness, accepts, immediately, fully and freely, that people resent and retaliate injury, and much of his ‘selfish’, self-interest energies are happily engaged in avoiding injury to others. Kindness is the real Realpolitik, it is the hardest-nosed practicality. Other people are a near-perfect rubber wall. What you give is what you get back.

Decadent morality, which we have had for millennia, has made the virtues stink. All people think of the virtues anymore is that they are a useless chore. Morality has been made odious to people, by ignorance or ignoring of the rationality in it, and by use of force or social pressure to enforce it. When force is used, you are implying that there is no other reason for doing it, you are teaching that morality is a useless chore. Morality long ago got into the hands of those who believe in injury, theft, overpay, and they have used morality as a stick and a prod. They couldn’t give the rationality, because their ‘reasons’ were irrational; they didn’t know the real reasons, all they had was rationalizations. For those who believe in God: If god is rational and loving, he has loving, rational reasons for his advice to obey the Golden Rule (which is ‘all the law and all the prophets’, which is the gist of morality). The rule makes sense, and is good for you, it saves you from suffering. It is a kindly good true wise sensible sane loving rule. It increases your happiness.

Those who have been most vigorous in irrationality, in the wrong selfishness, in the Hitlerian, conqueror stupidity, in the cretinous underestimation of retaliation, have enforced the Golden Rule on others, without reasons, to facilitate their plundering. They took God hostage. They emasculated the message that was coming through wise people till it served their mistaken ideas of their self-interest. They made themselves miserable and all others miserable. For thousands of years. No one was teaching the sanity, the rational, realistic, practical foundation of the golden rule and justice: people are no good at being doormats. Spit in his eye, get your nose broken. Aristotle says it is the obvious which is hard to see. The simple truths have so few moving parts, they are hard to see.

By putting morality on a force, threat of punishment, authoritarian, obedience, state terrorist basis, those ignorant, self-destructive, irrational, conquering-minded people have undermined rationality and love. Giordano Bruno: Once love was used in the church, now force. But the truth is still there, half-hidden, in the words: love others as yourself. That is, love yourself perfectly and love others as much as you (rightly and properly) love yourself. What is more simple sense than that you are supposed to love yourself, that you are supposed to pursue your self-interest, your happiness? Every snail does it; every bird knows this loving right. That is your right and your duty, your responsibility. Every snail accepts this responsibility and loving right. Without that, you lack the basis for the rationality of not injuring others. The reason for not injuring others is because it will mean bad stuff for you. If the injury doesn’t come back directly to you, it will certainly ricochet around in your environment of other people and get back to you some time, some way. It will pollute your environment with violence, ill-feeling, hatred, resentment, bad stuff.

We have failed to learn the golden rule, because the basis for it, intelligent, observant, realistic self-interest, has been stolen from us. It is only the rationality of self-interest that drives the boat of the golden rule. If we don’t care about ourselves, if we have been made ashamed of the right and duty to pursue our happiness, what basis is there for caring about anyone else?

The argument to authority (it is true because X said it is true) is false. It is false because the wisest get things wrong. And even if they never got things wrong, there is no way we can see the reasons just from someone’s word that it is true. Even the argument to the authority of god (it is true because (someone said) god said it) is false. The only true argument is a good reason that people can see. Don’t injure others because they will injure back. Simple as. But we have been cut off from this simple sense for thousands of years. When did you ever see the golden rule explained?

Government has been in the hands of the stupidest, the ones with least instinctive sense of the rationality and simple sense of the golden rule, and they have destroyed rationality, love, morality, golden rule, everything. They have thrown us into the mental and moral morass that the person who wrote to me speaks out of. Have you heard of one dictator, one super-overpaid, who had a good old happy relaxed free easy time of it? They are swimming like superman to stay afloat, being pulled down by the whole world. The super-overpaid are not getting more numerous, so there is as much coming down as going up going on. Like a Las Vegas needle-shaped fountain, every bit that goes up comes down. Caesar, Brutus, Cassius, Mark Anthony, Cleopatra, Ceausescu, Marie Antoinette, Charles I, Richard III, an endless stream. Like the king of the grove that Frazer writes about, who gets the role by killing the last king, and who has to meet every challenger.

Hence justice, non-injury is certainly a cause of happiness. And we have super-extreme pay injustice. So we can be super-extremely happier. And we will be, as soon as we get our thinking caps on, as soon as we get our house back on the foundation of rationality.

I'm swamped, bpj, but i should have addressed this before:

"The problem still remains the same though. It's as old as time itself. People who are priviliged aren't going to be convinced. They may or may not think about it rationally, either way, reason has nothing to do with greed.
You're resting your argument on the idea that everybody is underpaid, even the middle class, but as long as their better off than the poor, this arrangement doesn't bother them."

This problem you think you see doesn't exist, Sweets. It's not an idea that 99% of people are underpaid, it's a fact. My argument does not rest as you say on the idea that only 1% are overpaid, but on the facts in reality that people can be made aware of. My plan is fully aware that it's likely the richest will be the last to realize their survival connection to pay justice, and it isn't much concerned with what they think for the very reason they are such a tiny minority. There is no way they can resist the will of the 99% once it unites in agreement to limit fortunes justly.

Plus, some of the ultrarich are already campaigning for less material inequality, so even some of the 1% are capable to see the safety and happiness advantage for 100% of people that justice gives.

Points:
1. Money is the joker good, good for exchanging for almost all goods and services.

Therefore

2. Theft of money is theft of just about everything.

3. Every theft comes with an angry person attached; theft makes people angry. Theft of nearly everything makes people very angry. They try to get their stolen everything back.

4. This results in endlessly escalating conflict between robbers and robbed, with endlessly escalating weaponry, which produces endlessly escalating misery for all.

Therefore

5. Pay justice, the justness of the amount people get paid, is absolutely crucial to happiness. Pay justice is far and away the most important justice.

6. Pay injustice is inherent in, is built into, transaction itself. The two things exchanged cannot contain exactly equal work. The workvalue in workproducts is not precisely measurable. In every transaction, one party profits a little or a lot and the other loses by that same amount.

Thus

7. There is a drop of pay injustice in every transaction.

8. Over many transactions, this drop of inequality will make an ocean of inequality. A bell curve of personal net gain or loss will arise and widen endlessly, with a few making large net gains or losses from the sum of their personal transactions, many making smaller net gains or losses.

9. Those who make net gains will, over time, more and more control the means of production, including land. Gains become levers to operate making more gains. This will accelerate pay injustice exponentially.

10. The pay injustice in one transaction is too small to be detectable, but the accumulation of transactions will in time make the injustice detectable, and will lead to violence.

11. Without people aiming to pay justice and getting close enough to it, the violence will increase endlessly, as both sides try to prevail.

12. This violence is egalitarian, it envelops all, and therefore condemns everyone to misery. The higher the overpay, the more it is attacked. More money gives more power to protect oneself, but it also increases the forces against it. Every plutocracy has fallen.

Therefore

13. Pay justice is good for everyone, for both overpaid and underpaid. Justice is a virtue, it does cause happiness, and injustice does cause misery to all.

14. History has been a succession of rises of inequality to extremes, and falls of same, and re-rises of inequality.

15. Companies, businesses, are centers of transaction. Inequalities are gathered in them, concentrated by them. Many people buy there, but owners are few. All excess over fairpay for their work is currently gathered by owners. Corporations are just bigger companies, with more power to lever things their way.

16. Customers have few means to calculate the total costs [the work-input] in work-products. Companies have many means to monitor costs.

Therefore

17. In general, companies have the advantage, leading to exacerbation of pay injustice, leading to acceleration of pay injustice, leading to acceleration of violence [war, crime and weaponry], leading to acceleration of misery for all.

18. History is unanimous in portraying growth of inequality, leading to violence, leading to fall of states, empires, plutocracies, causing temporarily a degree of reduction of inequality, which then regrew.

19. Division of labour created the necessity for trade, to remix the workproducts separated by division of labour.

20. Before division of labour, everyone mostly consumed their own workproducts, so equality was inevitable.

21. About the same time division of labour began, wealth began to be more and more nonperishable and therefore storable. So that when trade began the drip-drip-drip of inequality, wealth was storable. If wealth had remained mostly perishable, inequality could not have accumulated endlessly.

22. When people perceive inequality, they have two choices. They can strive to decrease and remove inequality, or they can try to climb the hill of inequality.

23. If people fail to see the huge downside of overpay [ceaseless attack from both overpaid and underpaid, causing endless labour to hold on to the overpay, and inevitable loss of overpay], and if they do see the apparent advantages of overpay, they will choose the latter course.

24. The greater the underpay is, the more attractive overpay will look. The greater the underpay, the more desires are frustrated, and so overpay will look that much more attractive. The underpaid have substantial desires unsatisfied, and overpay will satisfy these. The underpaid have no experience of the limits of desire.

Therefore

25. People have historically chosen to climb the hill of inequality, rather than aim for equality, causing themselves endless increase of inequality violence misery.

26. Overpay suffers from the limits of desires, and from the endless security cost [in time, money and labour] in holding on to the overpay, so overpay is necessarily of negative benefit - increasingly negative in proportion to overpay. Fairpay satisfies all desires. This was true before machines and computers, and it is far more true now. The happiness effect of more money declines to zero below US$100,000/year per family, because of the limits of desires, and the world-average pay per family is US$200,000/year. [US$40/hr [2007] for all workers including housewives and students.]

27. Overpay causes underpay, so uncontrolled growth of pay injustice exhausts the buyer base, leading to collapse. The cycle of money between buyers and sellers is broken.

28. The purpose of money is to facilitate trade. Money is an artifical barter item, with the advantages of portability, divisibility, nonperishability over time and distance. Money in a transaction is ideally equal to the workvalue of items traded. The impossibility of measuring workvalue precisely lets the 'imp of transaction', the drop of inequality, into trade.

29. The ever-growing defense costs of overpay force the ever-increasing extortion from the underpaid, accelerating violence.

Therefore

30. The overpaid promote and support inequalities in the system.

31. The underpaid also support inequalities in the system, because they hope to repair their underpay by them. Also, they feel justified in their own injustice by the injustice [overpay] in the system.

Therefore

32. Everyone becomes increasingly entrenched in defense of injustice, and everyone becomes increasingly averse to justice, although justice would release the overpaid from escalating danger and defense costs, from oppression from both the overpaid and the underpaid, and certain fall [the greatest fortune is finite, and the attacks are relentless till the fortune is gone], and would release the underpaid [now 99% of people] from the miseries of underpay, and from the oppression from overpay. With the present super-extreme inequality, everyone is super-extremely averse to justice. Super-overpay is a beacon of hope to the underpaid, the pinion of their hopes and dreams. Justice, the demolition of overpay, seems to them the demolition of their only hope. People are psychologically blocked from examining justice and injustice objectively. They cling desperately, mindlessly, to injustice.

33. The pressure, on both overpaid and underpaid, to participate in injustice ensures that everyone has guilt, which they cannot face. This strengthens the psychological block.

34. It prevents people from criticising overpay. People cannot look at overpay, at present up to 100,000 times average, and say: this has to be wrong. The common-sense reflection that, if you gave people the same tools, materials, information, etc, and 100 varied tasks, the production of individuals would not be very different and would fall within a far smaller range than present pay from 100,000 times average pay per unit of time to 10,000th of average - is blocked. People cannot take to heart the justice implications.

35. The sense of pay justice, of equal pay for equal sacrifice made to working, is indestructible. Overpay will always be under attack, under erosion. Pay injustice, robbery of virtually everything, the joker injury, the total injury, will always produce reaction. The underpaid have less power, but they never settle for being robbed. Injury energises. As doormats, people are totally unreliable. The underpaid can only throw sand, but sand erodes rocks. None enjoy unless all enjoy. The underpaid have lost many battles, they have never lost the war. All conquerors have merely begun a war with finite plunder against a tireless host. The person who has, by whatever cause, the workproducts of 1000, merely has 1000 times what he can use, and has gained 1000 enemies and lost 1000 friends. The golden rule is harder than steel, utterly unbreakable: hurt people and they hurt back, equally or excessively.

Therefore

36. Pay injustice is impractical.

37. Weaponry is now at 60 times PDC [planet death capability] and rising.

38. Inequality [ratio of highest to lowest pay for equal work] is now at one billion, and rising.

39. Finance, communications, transport, weaponry are global. Global means every house. Money and goods flow easily through national borders. Though there are few countries with more than trillion dollar GNPs, trillions are traded daily. Therefore a national perspective is unreal.

40. Happiness is everyone's everything. Happiness depends totally on reality. There is no real happiness in unreality. Unreal happiness is a nonentity. Reality is in the big picture, in the perspective that takes in every part of the field that affects the individual. Part of the picture is nothing like the whole picture.

Therefore

41. Pursuit of happiness depends totally on pursuit of the big picture. Seeing part of the picture is complete blindness, complete abdication of pursuit of happiness.

42. The third world is rising to 90plus% of population and of world wealth by 2100.

Therefore

43. Humanity will learn the sense of pay justice, or the third world will move to overwhelm and destroy or enslave the first world, probably in the next 30 years, give or take 30 years, and the first world will be forced to use the global bombs in self-defense, and kill everything.

Therefore

44. We cannot afford the luxury of unrealism, of clinging to familiar mindsets. We must immediately begin to be heroically mature in thought, or perish. We must face and accept a steep learning curve, and dig out longheld and deeply accepted ideas that don't stand up to examination by cold hard rational sense.

45. Technological progress would be, via pay justice, on the order of 100 times present rates, because at the moment 90% of educated brains are tied up in the consequences of the super-extreme inequality, in governments, military-industrial complex, legal systems, universities, hospitals, and 90% of brains are too poor to become educated. [90% of people getting between 100th and 10,000th of average pay/hr.]

46. If a government took 90% of income off 90% of people and gave it all to 1%, there would be the loss of 81% of happiness just in the loss of the money, and on top of that, there would be the misery of the extreme violence, the severe loss of productivity from the violence and the destruction, and the extreme loss of safety for the 1%. The 1% would not gain any happiness from the overpay because of the limits of desires.

Therefore

47. Loss of happiness in this situation could reasonably be said to be around 99%.

Therefore

48. Reversal of this policy could reasonably be expected to increase happiness by a factor of 100.

49. The inequality factor [ratio of highest to lowest pay/hr] in this example is only 820.

50. The inequality factor in the real world is one billion, over a million times greater than 820.

Therefore

51. Happiness can very reasonably be expected to increase very conservatively by a factor of 100 with pay justice.

52. Decrease of happiness over 3000 years would be imperceptibly slow [1% per 30 years], and lacking an objective measure of levels of happiness over that period, we have no way of knowing the levels of happiness of former times. We assume that things have always been as they are for us. But given that violence misery is caused by inequality, and that inequality has grown over that period from equality, it is reasonable to believe that former ages experienced levels of safety, peace, and fraternity that we cannot imagine, that wars affected few beyond those who chose to participate. [It is believed by archeologists of Crete [at the point in time when division of labour, trade and nonperishable wealth were in their infancy] that Crete had 3000 years of peace, and we know that everyone on Crete had multi-room houses with plumbing, whereas now 40% of people live in terrible slums, and nuclear extinction hangs over us all. War has grown to world wars and ICBMs. It is only in the 20th Century that civilians were embroiled in war in great numbers.]

53. Violence [war, crime and weaponry] has grown for 3000 years, while human nature has not changed.

Therefore

54. There is no correlation between war and human nature. Noncorrelation proves noncausality. [Correlation does not prove causality.]

Therefore

55. War violence misery is not inevitable, and resignation to it is not appropriate.

56. Violence correlates with inequality, and there are good reasons to believe inequality is the cause of violence. [Money is the joker good, good for virtually everything, including social power.]

57. Inequality is very bad for both overpaid and underpaid.

Therefore

58. There is good hope that clarification of this reality can effect change in human culture. Culture is rooted in, and driven by, ideas. Change of ideas changes culture.

59. If everyone who masters this clarification teaches it to just two people, every adult will master it in just 31 times the time it takes to teach two.

60. If everyone, or the vast majority, masters this clarification, there is no effective opposition, and equality can be restored. 99% are underpaid, and so will be better paid, and equality will prevent nuclear extinction, and vast unhappiness to both overpaid and underpaid, so the majority for equality will be 99+%, and so any opposition will have no muscle to oppose it.

Therefore

61. The change can be made by education, and without conflict.

62. The above assumes that the fundamental will of humanity is still towards happiness and not to self-harming. The vast evil mess we have got into may have so perverted our fundamental natural will that we do wish self-harming.

63. The above also assumes that we can face, and forgive ourselves for, and put behind us, the unkindnesses that the pressures of inequality has led us to do.

Pursue your happiness with all mindfire.

You sound frustrated, as you should be. These are century old problems.

You always write well, but you're still missing my point about delivery. In order to be effective with people, you can't be direct with them, in other words, lectures don't work very well.

In a fictional story, when you want to define a character, it's best not to do so directly by listing all of the character's attributes, it's better to put the character in situations that test them, and let the reader figure out what the attributes are.

Lastly, the author should always remain impartial or ambigious in their beliefs. It's the same idea as above, really. You must let the reader make the final judgements.

The frustration is always with me to some degree. Trying to turn people's attention and careful thought to the matter of all matters feels like I'm chained in leg irons to a big tree and a toddler is heading to the riverbank. No matter what I call out, the child is too determined to get to the rushing river, and I am helpless to stop it. I have the joy of knowing i have been given the right justice map to get everyone out of the woods, but the helplessness to help others is torture - and i do not say that lightly, not one bit.

Right now exhaustion is piled on top. Lots going on, trying my best to meet too many responsibilities.

You are going straight to heaven when you reach your use-by date, bpj, for offering me the helps. (Don't tell anybody, but I have people in heaven who know the right people and I've already arranged it.) (grin grin) I'll be thinking and thinking and thinking on what you've said.

May put a little more in this thread, as I think there might be a few from elsewhere reading it. But I do know it's only here for a while longer, 'til CG re-orgs this place.

thank you again, b. i really am appreciative.

(note to bpj: please be aware this chapter has been in the works a long time, and i have scrambled like mad to just get it finished quickly and get it posted as people are waiting to get a look at it. i've had no time to re-write taking your feedback into account yet. i'm sorry i give you so damn much practice being patient with me!)

(note to Gegner: you don't even know it yet, but you helped with this chapter - so thanks! ...for having asked questions that forced more detailed clarifications.)

Chapter 12

Practical mechanisms for getting to happiness

Readers are reminded that past efforts to promote redistribution have always been based on kindness, on humanitarianism, on ‘think of others and the common good first’, which has always kept redistribution marginal, because all fiscal kindness is by implication unjust. Redistribution has never been promoted as justice, and justice has never been promoted as a peacemaker and as the only available peacemaker.

In contrast, this book’s plan bases redistribution on the principles of earned private property and self-interest. We depart from rationality when we depart from self-interest because we are ourselves and we have both right and duty to care for ourselves. The promotion of self-sacrifice has robbed us of sanity.

It may surprise readers to learn that this plan, even after exposing them, does not propose to interfere with any of the myriad thefts in human economic systems at present - except by preventing these thefts from accumulating endlessly.

We can leave in place the system as people know it, with the myriad legal thefts, the profit motive, the private property, the power to issue debt (print money) in private hands, the extreme concentration of landownership, the some getting pays for non-work things (pay for scarcity, for capital gains, for natural gifts, for experience and skills, etc.) which causes others to work for no-pay: everything – and still arrive at fairpay justice, thereby gaining our happiness, safety, peace - and universal prosperity. Yes, surprise, I am saying we can, and should, leave off trying to talk everybody into abolishing all the various institutionalized mechanisms that so effectively work to mal-distribute wealth, and concentrate instead on correcting for the inequity they cause by installing a few simple measures that stay always on duty countering the ceaseless, automatic drift of wealth from earners to non-earners.

This plan you are reading about for the first time anywhere corrects for all injustices in our economic systems, but does so indirectly, employing the solution at the macro-macro level - because it recognizes the futility of attempting to prohibit each legal theft piecemeal. The piecemeal, direct approach is an exercise in futility - partly because the primary, omnipresent legal theft is found in the very nature of transaction itself (occurring with or without being aided by human agency), partly because there exist hundreds more legal thefts than already discussed, and partly because more/new legal thefts will endlessly be hatched to game the system until the reason for doing so is eliminated. Also, legal theft is not the entire picture: the other flaws create inequality as surely. Indirect correction at the macro level is the only efficient corrective mechanism that counters for ALL of the errors, flaws, and injustices in our economic systems.

Assuming we have got a majority in the world to the point of being certain that pay justice is very, very, very good for all, we proceed. In brief, our plan counters the unjust drift of wealth into fewer and fewer hands by either distributing a 1% increase of money supply per month equally to every human, or by distributing deceased estates over US$1 million equally among every human, or by employing both methods. (Or, by any other system/method that has greater advantages in low bureaucracy, low social upheaval factor, etc, than these.)

Remember that the effort of getting everyone to the point of being certain that pay justice is very, very, very good for all is only the effort of everyone who gets this idea passing it on to just two people. There are 4 billion adults to reach, but there are 4 billion adults to reach them. In ten steps of passing on the idea, 2000 people are reached. In 20 steps, two million. In 30 steps, two billion.

Further understanding the two counter-measures

1. A simple but imperfect method of redistribution is for the governments to increase the money supply and give the added money, not to the banks, to use to suck more money from the underpaid through repayments, but directly, equally, to everyone, the true owners of all the money. The inflation effect will reduce the value of the fortunes of the overpaid far more than the overpaid receiving the equal share will increase their fortunes. Conversely, the inflation effect will reduce the fortunes of the underpaid far less than the equal share will increase their fortunes.

It is a rather elegant system in that it automatically reduces the real value of the overfortunes and increases the real value of the underfortunes in proportion to the size of the overfortunes and underfortunes. The more extreme the overfortune or underfortune, the bigger the effect will be in bringing the fortunes towards justice. Governments could run a regular once-a-month inflation of 1%, and of spreading the 1% equally among everyone, and thus gradually and gently bring the state to order and sustainability and peace. Internal defense costs will steadily decline, dramatically at first, less dramatically as the state approaches justice and happiness.

Obviously it is better if the redistribution scheme is global rather than national. If it is done globally, the benefits will be global. In that case, external national defense costs will decline also.

The weakness of this method is the power of the overpaid to inflation-proof their fortunes to some extent, and to export their fortunes if the method is national not global. Steps could be taken to inhibit these powers. The most efficient method of inhibiting these is education of the overpaid in the enormous benefits of fairpay, namely, very slightly less pleasure, very greatly less trouble.

One strength, and economy, of this method is that it requires no assessment of fortunes at all, which is an enormous saving in time and money. Another strength of this method is the immediate uplifting effect on the extremely underpaid, and thus on the vigour of the economy, world health, and world peace. Since the trickle-down theory is exactly wrong, and the ceaseless, automatic drift of money from earners to non-earners continues, money placed at the bottom of society refreshes all levels, from the bottom up.

2. Capture of overfortunes can be confined to deceased estates. This ensures a gentle, gradual shift of money back to owners, and the process will be complete in two or three generations. Again, it is better if the redistribution is global, with everyone, including the 1% overpaid, receiving equal shares. This saves the enormous expense, waste and danger of erecting a bureaucracy to decide who falls into the 99%. The overfortunes of the 1% are being trimmed anyway, so it is not necessary to exclude them from the payouts. This automatic gradualness avoids stockmarket shock by massive sale of all overfortune stocks at once. Stockmarket shocks can be further avoided by direct transfer of ownership of stocks from non-earners to earners without sale through the stockmarket. As much as possible, the transfer of stocks should be to people who are able to handle them, and transfer of cash should be to people who do not have stockmarket infrastructure and education.

This method alone, removing harm by stopping private inheritance from preventing public inheritance, would be sufficient to raise the happiness level to within around 1% of the maximum practical justice and happiness level, but it could be supported also by limitation of the individual lifetime incomes to the maximum income self-earnable in a year, multiplied by the number of years worked so far. This allows for the cases of bulk payments for several years' work.

Of course, all bodies of money will have to be assigned to individuals. Contents of family trusts and other trusts, foundations, organizations, etc, will have to be assigned in proportion to the effective ownership of the funds. The effective ownership will be with the individuals who have the say over how the money is spent, in proportions equal to the proportions of their say.

Governments will be responsible for seeing that every human has a bank account, and governments will be happy to do this as it means money coming into the country. Infant and child accounts are to be accessible by parents and guardians until some suitable age, say 10 or 12. Governments will benefit from everyone having accounts by the universal benefits of peace, social quietness and happiness, namely lower defense costs, legal costs, health costs, injury and damage costs, etc. Costs in money, labour and lives. An international inspection agency may be needed to ensure that all people have accounts.

But the foundations of any method will only be as strong as the conviction that pay justice is very, very, very good for all. Education in this principle is 99.99% of the effort. The way is there when the will is there. And the will can only be there if everyone asks the question: Is this fairpay justice idea true? through all the highways and byways of their understanding until the whole brain answers: Yes.

Every second of your life, you choose an unlimited-fortunes social system or a justly-limited-fortunes system, whether you think about them or not. And thus, whether you choose to think or not to think, you are responsible for all the goods or evils your chosen system causes.

Repeating the 2 methods we can choose to use to get to happiness:

1. A 1% increase per month in the global money supply, going equally, directly, freely, electronically to every living human being, children included, one account per person. The inflation effect will reduce overpays, the money effect will reduce underpays, and it happens without the cost of assessing fortunes. This method is not perfectly efficient in reducing overpay, but it very easily and quickly reduces underpay. A 1% per month inflation will make a 1% imbalance, which will adjust, as the underpaid spend more, generating more supply. It is gentle enough to avoid any economic social shocks, and works because the inflation effect reduces overfortunes MORE than the equal share increases them, while it reduces underfortunes LESS than the equal share increases them. The weakness is that the overpaid can inflation-proof their fortunes to some extent, especially if the idea is implemented nationally not globally. This approach is easy and quick to set up, it immediately relieves underpay stress and pressures and violence at the bottom. It is the lowest possible, most indirect interference with the overpaid. A regular inflation is very much less inconvenient than an irregular one. The fact is, governments and banks are already increasing the money supply - only at present they are giving the money increase to the banks to suck more money off people through loans. Inflation devalues everyone's money. It’s a sneaky tax, forcing people to borrow, and in effect making them pay interest to buy back their own money.

2. Making inheritance public instead of private. This will make the overpay shower gently down on humanity over three generations. It takes no self-earnings from living persons, and it reverses the perpetual concentration of wealth and political power in fewer and fewer hands. It counters effectively the natural tendency of money to concentrate unjustly, violently. Yes, making inheritance public instead of private means (almost) a 100% inheritance tax. We are preventing inequality of fortunes from growing to infinity by shovelling overfortunes into underfortunes. We know money automatically, unjustly concentrates endlessly, so any sensible species will introduce a counter to that. The simplest way is having every human being have one account (which governments will be happy to open since it means money coming into the country) into which the estates of deceased persons over US$1 million are distributed equally, electronically, directly, immediately, automatically. Private heirs can share the first US$1 million, (if we choose not to completely eradicate free gratis money). Parents would have trusteeship of children's accounts till some suitable age, say 10. (This will give parents good reason to teach economic sense before the date children take over responsibility for their own funds!) This method is low-impact, yet totally effective. It doesn't take away overfortunes from living persons, yet it will move humanity from extreme injustice and violence to near perfect pay justice and non-violence in just three generations - the time it takes for all the overfortunes to die.

Questions that may arise, and answers to them:

What of real property? Will it be liquidated, or will the progeny of the current owners be allowed to retain ownership? Will securities be liquidated as well? How will this play in Peoria? Won’t this be unpopular with the wealthy and the wannabes? Won’t this system be gamed like the current system? Doesn’t it rely on the virtue of those who administer it? And is there a roadblock in that we need to pass laws to make it reality?

Yes, we do intend to 'liquidate' real estate - although I don’t like the term. It sounds wrong - somehow sounds like murdering something, making it disappear...which of course it doesn’t. We certainly don’t intend to let the private heir have it – who did nothing to self-earn it. We certainly intend to let the true owners and earners of it have it. There are no problems with selling it that I can see. It won’t cause a flood of land in the market, which would cause a [temporary] drop in value-in-money-terms.

Method two is making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates. Everyone will understand that the deceased cannot have gained the large fortune except by legal theft, and everyone can understand the private heir has done nothing to make it. And everyone will understand that everyone has done the making of that large fortune, by doing the work that the money buys and represents - so the distribution is justice.

Only the deceased estate is settled up. Values of shares will not drop because only one person's shares are being sold, except where the deceased owned most of the shares in one company. The shares can be distributed without being sold on the market, to people in societies set up to handle shares. The rest, if any, can be sold to pay the equal shares for people in societies not set up to handle shares. But the shares are in general being dribbled into the market gently as 'overfortunateds' die.

Method two requires only a small organization to settle up the estates as they arise by death. The distribution can be very simple, electronically paying monies into all accounts. A computer program can do it, so bureaucracy is small.

And since most activity of bureaucracies is to reduce the effects of uncontrolled capitalism, with its legal thefts, and therefore unjust concentration of wealth, bureaucracies and governments can be small - releasing money from government for productivity, and lowering taxes. The bureaucracies are poor at redistributing wealth, anyway, because the governments are in the hands of the overpaid - and most [about 85%] of the recipients are middle-class, upper lower-class.
Governments are to be responsible for making sure everyone has accounts, and access to banks - mobile where appropriate. The cost to poor governments is more than offset by inflow of monies to the underpaid [plundered] nation.

Method one is even simpler. A [say] 1%-a-month increase in money supply, equally distributed to all - to the overpaid as well as the underpaid, to save the enormous bureaucratic cost of distinguishing the two. The overpaid are being trimmed at death anyway - and the overpaid are only 1%.

Inflation is not bad when the underpaid are over-compensated for it because it will not cause too much money chasing too few goods. Increased demand will be met with more production. Also, this is a regular inflation, which is far less disturbing than irregular inflation.

The inflation effect reduces the value of all monies and the equal share lifts the wealth - for the overpaid, the inflation effect is greater - for the underpaid the equal share effect is greater - thus bringing overpaid down and underpaid up. The inflation effect means the overpaid pay more [1% more per month] for everything they buy. The underpaid also pay more, but, for the underpaid, the equal share is greater than the inflation effect. We are headed in the right direction, finally.

This method needs not even a settling up of estates - it gently lowers overpay and lifts underpay without any bureaucracy at all. The money supply is increased simply by writing the new money into everyone's accounts - a computer [well guarded!] can do it. The weakness of this method is that large fortunes may be increasing faster than the inflation reduces them - so, for these, the second method in addition is needed, to make sure such fortunes do not grow endlessly from generation to generation. The equalizing inflation will be turned off when near equality, and restored as inequality gets away again.

Absolutely no other changes are involved, but many changes will take place. For instance the falling away of most, now unnecessary, bureaucracy, and there will be a point at which financial assistance, unemployment benefits, etc. will become unnecessary or the numbers needing them greatly reduced. Not to mention private hands will give up the power to print money/issue debt soon enough, once there is no super-overfortune to be made from it.

Unemployment is engineered by business, through government, to cow the workforce to accept lower wages. Unemployment can be got rid of at any time, simply by floating the point at which overtime rates kick in. Lowering the overtime point [hrs/wk] drives employers to hire more people rather than pay overtime rates. When employment is full, the overtime point can rise. When unemployment exists [above 2% --- there are always people between jobs, and people happily living off capital], the overtime point is lowered until the surplus labour is absorbed.

Right to work is unalienable. Society is bound to at least do no harm - there is no point in society if it doesn’t help, if it provides net negative benefit compared to living in a state of nature - and work is vital to health, self-esteem, etc. No society has a right to withhold work.

The stimulus to war and crime is proportional to the inequality, and war and crime generate enormous amounts of lawmaking and policing – and waste and destruction - so all this will almost disappear.
With the second method, gifting during the person's lifetime will have to be strictly limited, or the person will give the estate to private heirs in his lifetime. Gifts are unjust, are pay for no work - so gifts would have to be limited to say $100,000 per recipient, and number of recipients limited too, to say 30. And foundations, family trusts, etc. will have to be treated as belonging to persons and forming part of personal estates.

It will play well in Peoria when people realize that instead of possibly getting inheritance money from one or a few sources, once or a few times in their lifetimes, they will be getting checks every time a large fortune dies. Peoria will applaud it when they realize that the alternative is nuclear extinction soon - when they understand that inequality causes wars and crime, and that these must disappear or greatly [99%] reduce with equality [nontheft] …when they understand that any money not earned by putting in by work as much as you take out is theft, and therefore causes violence, causes unsafety, unfraternity, damages quality of life. Violence anywhere pollutes everyone's spirit.

The checks from the inflation method will be of the order of $1000 a month - $300 trillion, divided by 3 billion working people including housewives and students, divided by one hundred [1%]. It doesn’t matter that the checks are not sizeable: what matters is that it will be more than they are getting now if they are now underpaid, it will be on top of whatever they are getting now.

The wealthy will have a problem with it only if they are unable to prefer non-extinction over wealth misery [isolation from the human tribe, no greater satisfaction than the fairpaid, and constant danger from attack - ie, 1000 times more than they can use, 1000 enemies instead of 1000 friends]

People are so confident that nuclear extinction won’t happen. Their only ground for believing that is that it would be terrible - as if terrible was impossible! As if terrible things will just feel too ashamed of themselves to happen and so will simply slink away and not happen. People have such great faith in their head-in-sand trick. They just KNOW it works - although it doesn't.

The overpaid are only 1% [above US$40/hour, after overheads, before tax - doubling every 20 years or so at current global inflation] [but current global inflation is probably being run by the overpaid to suck wealth - inflation is a tax - so global inflation will probably disappear with equality], and some percentage [90%?] of those 1% are smart enough, objective enough to prefer survival and 100fold happiness to extinction and 100fold misery until extinction - so the non-consenting will be a powerless tiny minority after everyone hears.

‘Car’ was once just an idea in someone’s head - before it spread to every human’s head. Most [99.9%] of the muscle of the overpaid will be for equality, survival, 100fold happiness, 100 times faster progress, etc. Where is the downside to survival and to having a planet where everybody’s a millionaire?

A problem is that people judge this idea with the ideas they have now. The whole point is changing the ideas people have now - therefore the ideas people have now cannot judge the idea. They have to consider the idea from scratch, from the ground up, from pure sense alone - not from the ideas that this idea is challenging.

It's like arguing, when people were still at the stage of just running like mad from fire, that the idea of getting people to use fire won’t work because people don’t believe that fire can be any good. Which is a variant of: They can't understand sense, so only talk nonsense to them, so it is impractical to talk sense to them.

People just don’t have the idea that their ideas might be wrong - although many ideas humans have had have turned out to be wrong. They use their ideas as touchstones to test new ideas, never imagining that their ideas might not be touchstones. They attribute the cause of things to various things, and never suspect their ideas being the cause. They don’t use sense, a rational argument, to test their ideas.
Perhaps we should ask them: Do your ideas come from God, are your ideas certainly sound? Or could your ideas be confused and inadequate? Is it possible that your working hypotheses, your assumptions, are wrong, or is it impossible that your ideas are wrong? Must your ideas be certainly right? Or can they be wrong? Before giving the arguments, we have to prepare the ground to receive them - we have to lift people out of false certainty into doubt, into willingness to re-test ideas that are harming us.

As I say, making everyone equal heirs of large deceased estates gently dripfeeds wealth back to earner-owners over two generations or so, the time it takes for overfortunateds to die. The length of time for these estates to come to market prevents market shock - no earthquakes - just undetectable, smooth tectonic shifts.

Some may suspect that untraceable cash would be a loophole for the overpaid, but it would start to stick out like a sore thumb if anyone was still obviously overpaid, and the money would erode in value by the inflation method anyway - over 12% per year – the value of the money would halve every six years. Don’t forget the equal shares of the new money more than counterbalances this inflation for the underpaid.

This inflation method only fails in cases where the overfortune is growing faster than 1% per month - for which the other method is necessary. But as overfortunes come down, chances of fortune growth above 1% per month diminish or disappear, because high gains are often made off overfortunes - big spenders who aren’t concerned with price.

As for gaming this system, please be reminded that this plan does want to pass law, but it doesn’t seek to be implemented until education and clarification have caused the obvious to finally be seen for what it is. And once the general consciousness has shifted it will be very difficult, becoming impossible, to hide a superfortune anywhere. It all hinges on people knowing that survival and 100fold happiness depends on pay justice. With that consciousness, any skullduggery would get leaked - any operation like hiding money is going to encounter one of the 99+% who are pay justice survival happiness savvy. Plus, the skulldugger is going to be invaded by herd consciousness: living in a society 99+% conscious of the selfharming of overpay is going to erode their dedication to overpay.

It is hard for people to imagine the day when everyone knows well that overpay is selfharming, because people don’t know it now. But as I said, it is a false argument to say that this plan won’t work because people don’t believe that overpay is selfharming - since the plan is to expose people to the logical and sensible arguments to change that disbelief that overpay is selfharming.

The process of the two methods is going to make people exposed to real life experience of the vast benefits of pay justice, which is going to have a powerful effect of reinforcing the arguments. The skulldugger is going to start feeling as silly as if he were to walk around wearing a bell on his head. The herd instinct, the desire to belong, to be accepted, is going to start working for us somewhere around the halfway point of changing people's ideas.

The general human consciousness concludes it a good idea to give up the “right” to murder in order to be protected from murder, and we have laws against murder everywhere. In just that way, we can now give up the “right” to unlimited personal fortunes in order to be protected from them, too.

The money machine is more powerful than any leader, any government, any number of leaders and governments, more powerful than the Pax Mafiosa, the federation of Mafias. It is only less powerful than all of us. It generates its own propaganda, its own unconsciousness, disabling us from free speech and free thought on the vital matter, disabling us from distinguishing the vital issues from the non-vital. Very few people have an instinct to choose the most vital issue. Most are happy to attach themselves to any issue, however small, that gives them some identity. This error, which comes under the heading of fiddling while Rome burns, will destroy the human race. We are in a race to conquer all the ways we have of being less than realistic, before reality has us for breakfast.

I just re-read my chapter 12.

And I think it's excellent. I think it provides bright clarity where nothing but confusions and fundamental misconceptions have reigned too long. I think it explains, in language that average people will understand, hitherto unexplained things it is absolutely crucial all joes and janes learn. I think it anticipates arguments against it, and pre-emptively destroys them. (Now who did i learn that from?) I think it has power to shift perspectives - a requirement for survival for sure now. I think it finally exposes the obvious for what it is using perfect logic and utterly rational, unflawed arguments. I think it is the first and only plan that stops the mistake of relying on the undependable kind feelings towards others for success. I think it is perfectly jiggy with the reality that your neighbor might actually be an actual jerk you're never going to love. I think it wisely says you don't have to love him - you have to love yourself too much to do bad things to him (like rob him of fairpay) because 'people reliably retaliate injury' means bad things will come back to you.
I think this plan is the most do-able plan there is. I think it's the world's only no-downside plan. I think this plan is highly-concentrated wisdom not found anywhere else. I think many people claim that this-or-that is the root cause of human problems very casually and routinely and incorrectly, without true supporting reasons, but that I have brought the evidence and proven the case that pay injustice is the very deepest root cause and the issue that cuts across all other issues. I think it's fatal to fail to pick up this plan and spread it - fatal to fail to dig out the real root cause of 99% of unnecessary human suffering by actively sharing this plan. I think this is the Mother of the Mother of all messages humanity needs to hear. In the face of all I have written in these chapters, I think it is suicide for any person to fail to begin to campaign for fairpay justice.

And I sure wish somebody would point out to me the very good reason I shouldn't think all of the above.

Has anyone the soul left in them to either point out where I am wrong, or else agree I'm right?

Can anyone see it? THIS IS NOT JUST ANOTHER THREAD ON THE INTERNET.

I cannot save yer own asses for you, you know. I would if I could, but I am not really even in this picture.

This is between you and your survival chances.

How insane do people want to act, before they sober up?

Wake up and smell the uranium, people.

I hope you win the race between everybody educating everybody in fairpay justice, and the final catastrophe.

XO

Jesus. When asked if they think pay justice is good for all, someone from elsewhere just said this:

"I’d say justice is a bad idea. We live from grace, not from justice. But that’s just my intuition.
Approaching the question more rationally, notice that the philosophical (and etymological) root of justice is the idea of the One True Truth, of the unique supreme god. (The ju- part of justice is the same as the ju- in “Jupiter”—the sky-father.) People can compromise about worldly matters, but once they start talking with the gods, they can no longer compromise. Any disagreement about what is just can only be settled by force (unless people are willing to compromise with divine truth). And yet there are many such disagreements.
These include many sometimes very bitter disagreements about just apportionment of what we inherit from the past and the fruits of our labor, manifesting themselves in wars, crimes, riots, fights, lawsuits, strikes, boycotts, political manipulation, and so on. Hence I am not optimistic about your achieving general agreement as to the justice of equal compensation for labor.
There are quite a few people who believe that labor should trade for labor at par—it is not a new idea—and some who live that way, but they are not anywhere near a majority. Those who want to live out such beliefs sometimes live in communes or may be participants in alternative-money schemes."

Alas, I don't even know how to speak to that level of confused avoidance (a void dance?)

Justice is a bad idea? Was he joking? What is he even saying? What's with his trying to place God's grace in opposition to justice???Is he using that "gods" gobbledygook to...what? deny responsibility for doing right? Is he claiming people can and do only use force to settle disagreements about what their daddy in the sky thinks? Huh? And I notice it's MY job, not his, not anybody else's - to pursue justice? I seriously don't know how to talk to this level of craziness, irrationality, and irresponsibility! Justice is a bad idea now! Is this species really that far gone from reality and reason, from sanity, from sharing Earth fairly? Has the darkness already murdered all that is goodness and light?

HELP! I'M TRAPPED ON A PLANET WHERE NOBODY BOTHERS TO EVEN TRY TO THINK ANYMORE!

BeMeUp, Scotty - there is no intelligent life on this planet.

It's funny. Star Trek was a pretty popular show in America, meanwhile it was all about collectivism. In case anybody doesn't know this, money doesn't exist in the Star Trek world.

I'll leave you with the quote from America's favorite president.. "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". Collectivism? Nahhh..

notice that collectivism is specifically NOT called for in my plan, and right off the bat, too:

Chapter 12

Practical mechanisms for getting to happiness

Readers are reminded that past efforts to promote redistribution have always been based on kindness, on humanitarianism, on ‘think of others and the common good first’, which has always kept redistribution marginal, because all fiscal kindness is by implication unjust. Redistribution has never been promoted as justice, and justice has never been promoted as a peacemaker and as the only available peacemaker.

In contrast, this book’s plan bases redistribution on the principles of earned private property and self-interest. We depart from rationality when we depart from self-interest because we are ourselves and we have both right and duty to care for ourselves. The promotion of self-sacrifice has robbed us of sanity.