Fair or Equitable?
 

The world operates according to natural laws and rules. Some laws are immutable from nature and some are arbitrary from humans. In combination, those rules determine the quality of life for everyone.

Simple observation demonstrates that wealthy people live better than poor people and that the poor vastly outnumber the wealthy. Why?

Perhaps the explanation is just talent or luck, but maybe some of those arbitrary rules have more to do with the distribution of wealth than many people imagine.

Certainly many wealthy people have expended a lot of sweat equity to obtain their well-deserved wealth, and a handful of people win lotteries. A person could argue that the wealthy pay most of the taxes and that the free market is fair because its rules are uniform and anybody can, through hard work, become successful. However, that argument avoids mentioning that fair is not the same as equitable.

Consider a 20-year chess master veteran playing a twelve year-old novice. Both play the game according to one set of rules. When the veteran wins in a minimal number of moves, nobody will argue that the rules were unfair. Yet, almost everybody will agree that the competition was one-sided.

In the last decade compensation for management increased by more than 500% while compensation for labor barely exceeded inflation. About 80% of the nation’s workforce produces close to 100% of the nation’s goods and services but more than 50% of those goods and services are consumed by the wealthiest 5% of the people. Under current rules, that may be fair but definitely is not equitable.

Consider a national lottery. Uniform rules are fair because everyone has the same chance to win but, by the nature of the game, there are few winners. Seems reasonable for a lottery game but somewhat less reasonable as a means to achieve social justice.

Suppose a highly paid manager receives compensation of perhaps $100 per minute. She derives self-satisfaction by focusing on the $30 or so per minute she pays in taxes, justifiably claiming that the wealthy pay most of the taxes, but never mentions the $70 or so per minute she keeps. Meanwhile, the bottom 20% of the work force, many who work just as hard as this manager, would see $10 to $12 per hour and a 40 hour work week as a real success story.

Nor can the manager claim hard work and talent as the sole source of her success. True, she probably wouldn’t be successful without those elements, but there must be thousands of others who are just as talented and work just as hard without achieving that level of success.

A socialistic solution would provide each talented manager an equal opportunity to manage and reap the rewards of that $100/minute. Our talented well-paid manager gets her turn once every thousand or so days, obviously not a workable solution. This simple example demonstrates one of the failings of socialism; that is, an equal distribution is not necessarily a practical solution.

The challenge is not that the highly paid manager should be deprived, but that the common laborers are suppressed by arbitrary rules they did not create. Those arbitrary rules often benefit only a few people and create gross inequities in the social order.

Continuing inequities breed social hate, discontent and class struggles. The problem begs for a solution, something other than the failed strategies of socialism and the Robin Hood approach of governments legally stealing from the wealthy to give to the poor while they concurrently appropriate a portion of the legal plunder to perpetuate their own existence.

The National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act, NESARA, offers such a solution in the form of proposed legislation for basic revisions to the nation’s fiscal and monetary policies.

NESARA replaces the Federal Income Tax, dollar-for-dollar, with a National Sales and Use Tax, a progressive sales tax because most of the necessities of life are excluded from taxation. The proposal also replaces the Federal Reserve System with a new Treasury Reserve System and a new Treasury Reserve Board, returning Congress to its proper role of setting monetary policy standards and returns most of the benefits of ownership of the nation’s monetary system to the people.

The net effect of both changes enable that 80% of the nation’s workforce which produces almost all of the nation’s wealth to keep more of the wealth they produce.

The following articles outline some of the social prospects of adopting NESARA as the nation’s new fiscal and monetary policy.