Work - wages

Pretty interesting stats on CBC today - here.

The poor-rich gap is widening. The trickle-down effect is clearly not trickling enough down.

I wonder what an equitable society might look like - without leading to the grinding poverty of communism.

Wages capped at 5x minimum wage? After all, an hour of work is an hour of work. Forget the training and expense that goes into doing the job - though allowances could be made for those. Say university tuition costs - loan repayments could be taken from the employer rather than the employee, directly, and then fed into a fund so that future generations wouldn't have to take on the debt at all.

From that arises the question - how would you get people to do the boring pointless jobs? And what incentive would there be to work hard, to get "ahead"? Depends if you think people get ahead tend to do it on the backs of the hard work of others I suppose!

We might not have so excellent football teams - or go back to the *national* teams being the best, with local talent leading to the rise or fall of any club, rather than international owners paying millions. Would that be a bad thing?

One thing that is clear to me is that, to some extent, the very rich just lock up money that would otherwise cause huge inflation. Say all the money in the country (UK, Canada, doesn't matter) was distributed equally - each person got an equal portion.

What would happen to the price of milk? Bread?

Those prices would rise because everyone would have more currency. In a short enough time, some people would become very rich, and most would stay poor.

Perhaps we need to zap! public and private debt, impose very high death duties and gift taxes, and cap all wages to something "reasonable" (which could easily be done by tax - 95% tax on all income above $60,000, say).

I don't know. I need to read up on why communism failed (just corruption? Surely a fair price for bread is, er, fair!). But I know that getting money simply through having money is just crazy - and unjust.

Perhaps some yearly redistribution of wealth - based on relatives, averages, percentages rather than numbers. The richest 50% will have their income reduced while the poorest 50% will have theirs increased. Not to promote laziness through state hand outs - there would need to be a counter for that.