So I guess no one here has seen "The Jerk".

How sad.

What are you talking about? We all know who you are.

You both have a point but the difference is between purpose and function.

You need an income to 'function' in life, but it doesn't have to be your 'purpose' in life,

Technically member of the clergy don't have an income but yeah, who are we kidding? :P

The Dalai Lama on the other hand. I'm whiling to bet he legitimately doesn't have an income.

Mother Teresa wasn't the purely good person she is often portrayed as.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Mother_Teresa

There's also this essay by noted atheist Christopher Hitchens:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

Nobody is purely good. I have my problems. You have your flaws. tinyE's donkeys crap on his carpet.
What's your point?

No they don't, but my cat and my dachshund do.

Or rather, you just want the customers to THINK they don't.

I'm talking utopia with "equal wealth" here, which really means everybody has everything. Everybody is equally privileged. EVERYBODY is a volunteer. But we still need doctors and garbage collectors and latrine cleaners and coal miners and human drug test subjects. Are you going to find enough volunteers for every single dirty and dangerous job in the world? Or enough to study for years and years to learn the really skilled professions?

There's a way - the Brave New World way. Orgy-Porgy!

Yep, he just has a net worth of $100 million. He's a pauper like the rest of us slobs.

http://www.incomeworth.com/dalai-lama-net-worth-and-income/2/

Other than inhaling oxygen, not that I know of.

It doesn't work even if there is no greed, as long as there are too many undesirable jobs for true heroes to want to do just because they need to be done.

That's why I said we need robots or something to take care of everything, so humans would be free to do whatever they really enjoy doing. As long as the AI isn't sentient, it won't care about being the "lower class" upon which the leisure class that is humanity stands.

I'll tell it to you like I told it to one of my friends.

I think there has to be a happy medium.

For example, I did 8 years of post secondary education and will have done anywhere from 5 to 10 man years of self learning throughout my career. I work in pretty competitive market and my only job security is the extent of my skills.

So, I think it's fair I earn ~150% what someone with a non-skilled job earns (those 8 years with little income in my 20s were prime years), especially if that non-skilled work has iron-clad job security and sure enough, I earn about 150% what your average strongly unionized blue collar worker earns. That's fair.

That being said, I don't think it would be fair if I earned 1000% the wage of a non-skilled worker and I don't think it's fair that I currently earn over 3 times what someone who earns minimum wage earns.

I'm not overpaid, people who earn minimum wage are criminally underpaid. They need to bump up the minimum wage by at least 50% while freezing everyone else's income. I'd gladly sacrifice 2%-5% of my wage in inflation to see that happen.

There has to be a notion of viability for the least paid and there has to be a notion of fairness. Atm, we have neither.

Robotizing most of the workforce only works if you have the notion of a universal guaranteed minimum income that covers all the essentials (lodging, food, clothes, transportation, electricity and in our day and age, the internet... nutcases can talk all they like about how tough people had it in pre-industrial time, if you don't have the internet in this day and age, you are living by third-world standards).

Atm, we are too stupid, corrupt and inept to even pay a lot of our workforce that works full time a livable income. How do you think we'll come around to paying people who can't find a job a livable income?

You are using examples that expose the justice in the current system: a garbage collector and a toilet cleaner get paid way too little in today's society compared to doctors. Cleaning the garbage and and cleaning toilets is even more important for health, for ridding the cities of rampant epidemics that used to ravage them before hygiene, than doctors. While doctors had the pleasure and luxury of having 12 years of government sponsored education before needing to get to work after their childhood is done.

Plus work isn't just done for money. When cleaning personnel went on strike with the symbol of a household glove fitting a clenched fist, their strike was about acknowledgement and respect more than anything else. And in Cuba doctors take pride in their work, even though it's one of the lesser paying jobs in Cuba, their healthcare is such that it used to be an export product to help set up medical care in other third world countries.

The current system is completely off-balance, where you can get rich just by being rich and the ones who have the best chance to 'make it' financially are the ones with the best starting positions: rich parents that grant them the means for a good education, a network of contacts from their social environment that can get them the best-paying jobs, riches to buy lobbyists to influence the government.

Long story short: in the current system, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Let's start by creating a system in which excessive wealth is put into use for the common good instead of private luxuries and the excessively poor are sponsored to create a better way of life for themselves. If that should only stop at completely equal levels or if some differences are needed is up to question, but the current extreme differences between those that live on a dollar a day and those 1% of the population that own billions is really grotesque.



But where veering off-topic here: my purpose in life is to focus on what I CAN do to make this world a more just place and NOT to focus on those things that are beyond my power to change.