Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
I think absolute ceilings and floors on income and wealth will be needed. The wealthy are basically black holes that destroys everything within reach, if given time. Preventing such singularities of excess will have to be through a system designed to give everyone UBI, while making jobs rewarding but with a fixed scope of wealth accumulation.
IMO, a system of classifying entire job classes, and giving them a fixed income rank, would make it harder for wage theft, hoarding, and corruption to happen. By making it so that everyone of a job class has a clear income regardless of location or hours, it will be easier to track who is unnaturally wealthy, thus their hoard can be more easily confiscated before it can do harm to society.
Also, through having fixed incomes, it might prevent inflation. Sellers will have to price according to income brackets, otherwise their goods cannot sell easily to a demographic. In the rankings that I proposed, a basic worker has $30k, while the highest earners get $60k after taxation. This essentially means that CEOs and other high-end careers are only double the value of a waiter’s income. Goods will have to be priced accordingly, making it harder for inflation to take place.
I personally don’t think it’s healthy for a society to force a caste system like that. And I’m not really sure there’s truth to the “if everyone gets paid the same then nobody will want to be a Dr” argument. People would still probably pursue more difficult work even without a profit incentive.
It isn’t a caste thing. Typically, castes are all about locking people into a social strata forever. What I proposed includes education paying people for learning, which allows the students to be fully educated for the higher ranks of jobs, if they so choose. Also, people who work earn retirement pay at a 1:1 ratio of days worked - eventually, people get to quit working outright if they want, regardless of rank, simply because two or three decades of work is also fully paid retirement. People who quit working the high end jobs, coincidentally leave those jobs to other people.
In any case, there isn’t a huge gulf of incomes in the proposed system. The real-world elite of our time has over a 1,000x the income of an entry wage worker. Merely double the income for the hardest professions doesn’t even register in comparison. More importantly, the increased money for a high position is to reward the effort, risk, and knowledge needed to hold that position.
Over the next two centuries, I expect automation to make work into a leisure activity, rather than a necessity. Until utopia is obtained, however, we should try to reasonably reward people to work the more difficult jobs, simply out of pragmatic utility and humanity for society as a whole. By ensuring the pool of experts is large, we can spread thin the amount of hours each individual has to work, preventing burnout and allowing them all to live fulfilling lives.