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If you ever lived in a big city when the garbage collectors go on strike, it doesn't take many days before you realize that while - for example - a brain surgeon might matter more to the few individuals on whom he operates, garbage collectors - again just an example - are more important to the community as a whole.
Once you start thinking along those lines, objectively, not from a political perspective, you start to wonder if it really makes sense that a company ceo earns more than a school teacher. Without the teacher, he would be pressing buttons in a factory somewhere. Doctors can't function without nurses. Neither can function without janitors. How much money could an NFL player generate if there were no-one to build the stadiums or run the cameras, clean the toilets, man the turnstiles?
Non-communist countries have bought into the myth, put around by people who have awarded themselves large paychecks, that such is the natural order of things. Why would someone study for a job if he could earn as much for doing something less demanding? Well maybe because a lot of people would rather be architects than supermarket cashiers, and if that isn't true of everyone, so what: you only need 1 architect for every 100,000 cashiers (or whatever the ratio is).
Start paying people (who either go to work or opt for recognized further education) as soon as they graduate high school, and I guarantee you will still fill every job that needs filling. And I suspect that when genuine inclination is more of a driving force than short-term money needs or long-term purely financial ambitions, you might even get a better match between people and the jobs that they do. And therefore get the jobs done better.
The other popular myth is that when the incentive of extra pay is removed, so is the incentive to work harder. Bullshit. Anyone who has attended business school learns in their first semester that money isn't much of a motivator once someone is earning enough to pay their bills. Communist countries screwed up because their systems were corrupt: there is no fundamental reason why competition for the most desirable jobs couldn't be just as tough as it is now.
Communist, capitalist or whatever label applies, we all live in societies structured like pyramids: lots of people at the bottom and just a few enjoying the wealth and power at the top. None of these systems are inherently corrupt or inefficient, but they all can be. And if there is a shift from one system to another, or from one group to another within the same system, the only real difference is who is at the top and who at the bottom. The essential pyramidal structure remains.
We may have been taught that slogans such as "everyone is born equal" are anathema. But isn't it ludicrous that more than 90% of us settle for living our whole lives in varying degrees of relative poverty, some in absolute poverty, so that a handful can enjoy lifestyles most can't even dream about?
Craziest of all is that the privileged few don't even have to defend themselves: lots of middle class and even working class people actually fight to retain the "natural order", apparently in the belief they should be grateful for the meagre padding on their treadmills.
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