Governments should value economic equality before prosperity

I notice a number of my opponent's other debates are forfeits, and so I hope that won't happen with this one. Nevertheless I'm excited to get this going. Why are government here? The indigenous people of New Zealand, who called themselves Maori, had a very wise saying. "He aha te mea nui? He tangata. He tangata. He tangata. " What is the most important thing? It is people. It is people. It is people. It is not Maori that are the most important thing, nor is it non-Maori, nor is it the poor, nor the wealthy, nor the elderly, nor the young, nor the politicians, nor the bankers, nor the generals, nor the priests - people as a collective are the most important thing. Why? It all comes down to a fundamental virtue called compassion, the golden rule, "do unto others as unto yourself". Karen Armstrong makes a very good case for this, which is why her charter for compassion project won the TED prize in 2008 (. http://charterforcompassion.org... - her talk should also be on ted. com). Compassion is so important because without it, we would be a society of psychopaths (literally - psychopathy is a clinical condition that disables the brain functions allowing compassion - there's a great documentry called "Fishhead" suggesting we're already moving in that direction, unfortunately I can't link to it as it's under copyright). That's bad for the economy because it reduces our ability to understand what's happening in the market, leading to bubbles and busts - compassion is rational. It's even worse for society, because psychopaths tend to stop at nothing to get what they want, as Hollywood films tend to emphasize well. The most important thing for us all is to have compassion for others. In the first part of the BBC documentry "All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace" (again under copyright but available in lots of places), filmmaker Adam Curtis showed that the recent American depression was the direct result of the philosophical influence of Ayn Rand, who promoted self-determination, and was entirely opposed to the idea of compassion, because of her influence over Alan Greenspan. Curtis argued that Greenspan's policies mirrored Rand's philosophy, and that it was Greenspan's policies, such as convincing Clinton to lower government spending and cutting interest rates, that led to the speculative property bubble in America, just as it had done a decade earlier in South-East Asia. That's the economic outcome of lacking compassion. That's why we had all these Occupy movements spring up. But compassion makes no distinction as to social class. A compassionate government policy gives a fair shot to everybody. A government by the people must be a government by everybody, not just lobbyests. A government for the people must be a government for everybody, not just politicians. In the famous words of Dr Martin Luther King "Ain't no justice anywhere, unless you have justice everywhere". Government exists to protect our equality. Specific DetailsI don't think these are highly important to the debate, as they do not form part of the resolution, but I will outline them anyway. Economic equality does not mean we are all the same. Equality is often confused with socialism, and that's a mistake. A capitalist society can have equality, where all peoples have the same access to a standard of living. It can do that if the government implements three simple policies. First, it must ensure fair work. The most effective way to maximise prosperity is with slave labour, because slaves don't need to be paid. That means your costs of production are incredibly low, and your output can be increased phenominally. The market value of all the goods would be incredibly high relative to what all the slaves could ever hope to afford. Such a society has existed before. In Ancient Egypt, the prosperity was enourmous. Their skyscrapers were the tallest in the world for thousands of years - today we can only be the tallest for a few decades. People flocked from all over the world to marvel at the Egyptian king's wealth and power. But all of this was off the backs of millions of slaves. Imagine what could have been achieved if all that effort had been instead put to compassionate causes - to helping the people. Imagine our great advances in science and art that have been stolen from us by centuries of Egyptian progress. Egpyt was a society with much progress, but no equality. Ensuring fair work means that people can't be exploited by their employers. An example would be the controversy surrounding the Foxxcomm factory in China - governments should work on fixing problems like these. Only in the last few years has China shown any signs of compassion for their struggling people at a government level. It also means fair access to work. That implies fair access to education, as some work is more specialised than other work. Where the private sector is not providing this, governments must get involved. Second, there must be a fair wage. Henri Fayol, the great industrialist, thought this one of the fundamental principles of management - "Fair pay for fair work". His argument, in French (but Wikipedia has a good summary), was that when people see themselves as peers in terms of compensation relative to their output, then they become inspired to work harder. Therefore, if a government promoted equality, they would in effect be promoting prosperity. If they only focused on prosperity, however, equality would not necessarily result by the same mechanism, because the incentive would be gone. That's very important. But what is a good measure of compensation? Output is becoming increasingly hard to measure in our knowledge-based economy, as we move away from the industrialist era. What we can do is ensure that the wage gap isn't too large, to ensure that nobody dominates the market, but while still allowing the market to determine compensation. This is the basic rational behind the minimum wage and progressive taxes - they ensure that nobody is able to use their disparate wealth to exploit anybody else, guarenteeing a standard of living for all. For those that don't work so much for some reason or another, they get more leisure time under that system, meaning their standard of living is also provided for. Wages are not just in money terms, however. You can't reduce the value of people's assets by polluting them and not polluting others. Pollution generally is something the government should be more concerned with than progress, both because it promotes equality and because it has the potential to kill us all. You also need laws against fraud and deciet among companies, who would otherwise lie and cheat their way into poor people's pockets. That's happened so many times around the world that it defies belief governments still allow it to happen. And it means crime must be fought - police do little for prosperity, but so long as they remain objective, they can help contribute to public safety, and thus to equality, as no neighbourhood has to put up with much more crime than any other (if police are correctly deployed etc). Third, there must be employment. Without jobs, there can be no standard of living, because ultimately all happiness and utility we derive is either of the work of ourselves or others. People thus need to work. Humans don't amass utils by sitting around in bed until they die. I won't spend too long on this because less unemployment is good both for prosperity and for equality. GDPGDP is a terrible measure of progress. New Zealand's GDP is doing wonderful right now, but only because we just had a massive earthquake. Wars increase GDP but not real prosperity. Research in areas like psychology does little for GDP but wonders for prosperity. Polluting the environment is usually associated with GDP increases. The resolution is affirmed.