At times, the best way to describe a situation that has come
and gone, or one that we dare to imagine may take place in the future, is to
tell a fictitious story in which the characters and situations are exaggerated.
This approach allows the creators of such works to vividly
illustrate the points they are making without the fear of being told that the
story they imagined is too unrealistic to have happened the way it unfolds.
Believe it or not, it is science fiction – more than any
other genre – which allows the creative mind to greatly inflate the characters
and situations it selects for a given setting, and get away with it. This
happens because the audience accepts that science possesses magical powers
rivaling those of the witches and warlocks of an earlier era. When properly
used to get the storyline moving, science can be both entertaining and
informative.
This in mind, let's imagine a futuristic society where all
the problems have been solved except the principle of sharing the wealth of the
nation equitably. The issue to resolve is not how to achieve equality when
distributing the wealth, but how to achieve equality when offering
opportunities for everyone to get ahead. At the same time, however, no one in
that world is allowed to get in a position where they can exploit the
organization of society or its accomplishments to accumulate wealth in such
amounts they cannot spend it on themselves to enjoy life.
Because the desire to accumulate wealth in vast quantities
is considered an aberration, the economic system of our futuristic world has
been designed in such a way as to defeat the practice when someone tries to
dabble in it. To this end, cash has been abolished, and the entire society is
regulated by two giant computers.
One computer monitors the productive activities of every
individual in the jurisdiction, assigning a dollar value to them. The
information is sent to a second computer; one that's in charge of maintaining a
balance sheet for the income and expenditures of every individual. Thus, anyone
can check with the computer to see how much he or she has in their account.
This done, they can decide whether or not they must do extra work and earn the
money they will need to buy the luxurious items or services they covet.
To defeat the attempt made by individuals who might try to
abuse the organization or the accomplishments of society to get fabulously
wealthy, an economic system has been devised for the distribution of wealth
according to agreed upon guidelines. Subject to amendments or the replacement
of the entire system, the current guidelines – enforced by the computers – go
as follows:
No more than 5 percent of the wealth of the nation can go to
the top 1 percent income earners. That is, if the economy is worth 20 trillion
dollars, and there are 160 million earners in the jurisdiction, one million six
hundred thousand earners cannot earn more than a trillion dollars between them for the
year. This comes to an average of 625,000 dollars per earner.
Going down the line, the next 5 percent of earners can earn
no more than 5 percent of the remaining wealth. That is, 8 million earners will
each receive – from work, from rent or from transfer – an average of 118,750
dollars. And so on down the line with the appropriation of a minimum guaranteed
income for everyone to live on well above the poverty line.
This being the case, everyone agrees that the principles
underlying the system are sound, and need not be changed. What the pundits
argue about, however, is the amount of money that the different brackets of
earners are allowed to earn.
Some pundits believe that the gap between the brackets is
too wide. They say that no one operating alone can produce more than 2 or 3
times as much as someone else. Why then, are some individuals allowed to earn
as much as 20 times or more than other people when working in concert with
those people?
Other pundits believe that the brackets are too narrow. They
say that the existing system does not give enough incentives for the truly
creative minds to create more of the wealth that's enjoyed by society as a
whole. And they want to see the situation modified or replaced entirely.