If you've listened to the likes of Michael Moore, saint to the working class, you might have heard suggestions to get everybody a decent wage. The figure I've heard is 50,000 dollars. That is certainly a pretty swell minimum salary, but there might be some problems with this approach. If you go and just raise the minimum wage astronomically then I see two main things that could happen; either inflation adjusts appropriately so that 50,000 is worth about 12,000 dollars, or, lots of people get fired and things generally suck. Neither of these options particularly appeal to me. Well, so we have to ask ourselves, how can we increase the general populations standard of living?

Basically, the situation is that we have a whole lot of people that don't make much money, and a little bunch of people who make a lot more. Well that's great, that's the American ethic, and we have something to strive for. Unfortunately lots of people end up not able to pay for a place to stay, or food, or you know, those things that Locke and our good friend Thomas Jefferson thought were so great. That doesn't seem very American all of a sudden, or does it?

So how do you get the rich people to share the wealth, but still get people to want to be rich and work hard? The work hard thing just sounds so American, doesn't it? You still have to allow people to be wealthy, and some people to be poor, or maybe they only have to be not as wealthy. As long as there is a significant ratio between the rich and the poor, material things will still have value and we'll have to work to get them. How big does this ratio have to be? Presently, someone like Bill Gates makes so much more than the average person that you would think he could just buy and sell people like free plastic poker chips in a friendly game. My idea is that nobody can possibly need more than 200 times as much money, in a given year, as anyone else. So, if you make fifty thousand dollars, Bill Gates can have a million. Everything else he's just going to have to learn to share.

With this plan, companies can still make billions of dollars, they are just going to have pay all that money to their workers or use it for the company, not for the CEO.

Everybody gets fifty grand! Yeah, I'm for it. But just because I'm so smart, I'll take the million.

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Last updated: April 11, 2002
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