Wealth Distribution

I was taught by my father that if you do not work then you do not deserve pay. It is an attractive and logical axiom - in "the state of nature" one is led to believe that mankind flourished on the work that he did. One has a wealth of belief connected with this - things like laziness, madness, criminality (a complex syndrome).

If one looks with fresh eyes it does quite work. The existence of voluntary and charity work suggest that there is lots of work that people think needs doing which does not get directly paid in the normal market structure. You have artists also like Van Gogh whose work was never recognised by the contemporary market. You have parents who do the single most important job in the community. Not so long ago well over half the population was unemployed - children, wives and the elderly. Some how the 30% or so of the population, the working men, distributed their wealth quite successfully to the rest of society.

On the other extreme you have people being paid without working for example the capital holders upon which the current system is founded. They get paid twice. Once for the work they did (or their forefathers did, or their subjects did and were taxed) and then again many times more on the capital they have accumulated. There are also lottery winners and those with inheritance who have wealth without working.

Looking again even at the micro level the distribution of work doesn't fit the pattern. We know that the concept of a salary does not correlate with a fixed amount of work - sometimes more and sometimes less.

The relationship between work and pay is almost indefinable - it is a myth upon which the current hegemony is founded. I always like the analogy with the game Monopoly - the current system for all its pomp and seriousness is no more than a huge game of Monopoly that has been championed because the winners like being"winners" - which they wouldn't be were the rules to change as they did during the switch from aristocracy to bourgeois. (Which was just a change of name because the structure remained the same.)

The question however once we accept that the economic hegemony has no foundation in reality is what exactly is "reality", or what system could we have?