In yesterday’s posting we noted that, in addition to the
fact that paying people on the basis of need keeps them in a condition of
dependency, that is, having the status of children or slaves, there is another,
really big problem involved. We have to
face up to the fact that paying people more (or less) than they are worth is
contrary to principles of justice, that is, to nature.
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| Judgment Day: Weighing a heart against the feather of righteousness |
We know that paying people less than the market wage rate is
unjust. That’s obvious. It’s practically the definition of injustice,
to pay people less than the market rate, or to withhold pay. Even the Egyptian Book of the Dead has
something in it about a righteous soul not cheating workers by paying them too
little, or withholding what they have earned.
But how is paying people more than the market wage rate unjust?
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| Out of Balance |
Stop and think about it.
An employer is buying someone’s labor.
If labor is worth X per day, but an employer is forced to pay 2X per
day, isn’t the employer being cheated?
And isn’t cheating a form of injustice?
Justice, after all, is a two-way street — or a double-edged sword, if it
comes to that.
Injustice is contrary to nature, that is, it is not
natural. Since justice means rendering
to each what each is due, rendering more or less than what is due is, by
definition, unjust to at least one of the parties in a transaction.
That’s obvious. What
might not be quite so obvious is the fact that doing more with less is also
natural. People tend to want to do
things in the most efficient way possible, and get as much as possible for the
least amount of effort or cost. R.
Buckminster Fuller called this “ephemeralization,” but the fact preceded the
term by as long as the human race has been around.
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| Capital Owners at Work |
Doing more with less comes naturally if you work for
yourself, or you own whatever is doing the work, e.g., capital. You want as
much as you can get for as little cost or effort as possible. No one is harmed, because you bear the cost,
whether high or low. You benefit,
because you pay.
The wage system distorts this natural tendency, a virtue,
into something vicious, that is, a vice.
A worker who has only his labor to sell is going to want as much as he
possibly can get for it. Naturally, he
is also going to want to give as little as he can get away with.
If he was the only one involved, there would be no
problem. Unfortunately, there is the
person who is buying the labor, and the people who are buying the good or service
that the labor, in part, is being used to produce. If the worker has power, the employer pays
more. If the worker does not have power,
the employer will pay less. Wages will
be just only in the rare instance in which the propertied employer and propertyless
worker have equal power.
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| Much better than the U.S. Fuller stamp |
Thus, where Fuller’s ephemeralization means doing more with
less, the wage system twists that into getting more for less. Employers and consumers get cheated, demand
falls, and workers lose their jobs.
The only way out is to give workers a stake in keeping costs
low so that the natural tendency to “ephemeralize” (if Fuller can make up
words, so can we) works in favor of everybody, not against them. An aggressive program of expanded capital
ownership, such as Capital Homesteading, is therefore not only consistent with
nature, it is in everybody’s best interest, morally and economically.
#30#
