Governments should value economic equality before prosperity

Here's my case. The Great Prosperity ExperimentBack when Henry Ford was still around, and the ideas of industrialists like Fredrick Taylor were still cool, the aim of managers - both at a national level and at a business level - was to optimise productivity, and by extension, prosperity. They called it "scientific management" because they applied scientific learning and axioms to find new ways to increase their prosperity as much as possible. The great thing was that it worked wherever it was implemented. After Tsar Nicholas II demolished the Russian economy, Vladimir Lenin turned to scientific management to provide a solution, and Russia rebuilt itself. After German hyperinflation, Adolf Hitler also used scientific management, and the German economy started working again. And just like Hitler and Stalin, Henry Ford used scientific management (even if he didn't call it that), inventing one of the most productive systems known to man. Russia went from poverty to prosperity. Germany went from poverty to prosperity. People in US cities where there were major production lines, such as Michigan, saw their production soar as well. As a result, the average income increased dramatically in all of these cases. The crucial thing about all of these experiments was that they failed. Neither governments nor businesses could successfully manage to create an economy based on trying to maximise average incomes, and it was always for the same reason. Lenin did increase average income dramatically, but it came with the cost of equality, in effect creating the very opposite of the socialist ideal (. http://www.wsws.org...). Hitler also increased average income, but again at the cost of equality (. http://en.wikipedia.org...). And Henry Ford faced the wrath of the unions - Ford even hired boxers to physically assault employees who were suspected union members, but eventually had to succumb to the inevitable reality that without worker support his business would fail. What were the unions so upset about? You guessed it - inequality. They didn't want Ford to have too much dominance over the labour market, creating lots of unemployed while paying his workers so well as to create a class system wherever he operated. The Radical AlternativeMy claim is that government exists to preserve the interests of all the people, not just an elite. According to the IMF (. http://en.wikipedia.org...(PPP)_per_capita) the countries that do best at that are countries like Qatar, Luxembourg, Singapore and Norway. It's no surprise that on the UN's Human Development Index, which my opponent cited, all of these countries are listed as having "very high" human development. On the Satisfaction of Life Index he cited, Luxembourg and Norway are among the best in the world, and Singapore and Qatar are each in the top 10 for their world-region. Why? Perhaps the answer lies in the Gini coefficients. Gini coefficients measure statistical dispersion of wealth, with zero meaning wealth is perfectly equal. If you arrange the world's countries by Gini coefficient (. http://en.wikipedia.org...), you get (with only a few outliers because the data is somewhat older) something that looks suspiciously like the Satisfaction of Life Index. The answer is clear - equality leads to happiness. But as Hitler, Stalin and Ford have shown us, prosperity does not lead to happiness. There is another force at work here. Equality leads not only to happiness, but also to prosperity. The idea that equality is means everyone is poor is completely unfounded, for two reasons. First, companies are likely to invest in places with high equality, because if people are happy there, then company employees want to be in on that happiness. This investment brings money into the economy, increasing the average wage. Secondly, when people are being paid a fair wage relative to their output, there is an incentive for everybody to increase their output. In an unequal society, there is no incentive on those who are suffering poor working conditions and low wages to work harder, because they'll still be in poverty. This increase in work translates to an increase in prosperity and an increase in the value of money - and assuming we see GDP per capita in terms of purchasing power parity (which is a wise idea, since otherwise my opponent is arguing hyperinflation is the best macroeconomic policy), that means more prosperity. The choice for governments is simple - choose to promote equality and bring your people prosperity, or choose to promote prosperity and some of your people will fall to ruin. Which should government choose? My belief is that the latter is hands-down better, both for the people of the government and the government itself. For the people of the government, happiness is the ultimate goal, and it is equality that brings happiness, not prosperity. For the government itself, when their people are unequal, that reflects back on them, especially since they'd be creating the inequality by pushing for prosperity. How does this translate into reality? Well, first it means employers need to be fair. If one person has to do more of the same work to earn the same wage, then clearly that's inequality, a point that feminism has been raising for a few decades now. Con argues that this is independent of standard of living - to some extent he is right, but it does help determine one's standard of living. Would you rather work for Ford and get beat up by a boxer in order to earn your wages, or work at some other factory and earn the same wages under good working conditions? Everyone would at least agree that the two scenarios do not have an equal standard of living attached to them, so clearly it's not completely independent. Governments must ensure there are fair conditions in factories, both in terms of wages and conditions. Con also makes the assertion that fairness is completely subjective. This is true only when one considers future policy - in hindsight it is easy to see what policies led to a fair outcome and what policies didn't. I will admit that politicians, like all people, sometimes get it wrong, and in the interests of fairness push policy that's incredibly unfair. That doesn't mean, however, that governments should not push for economic equality. That's a great argument for telling governments to learn from their mistakes, something which I wholeheartedly support. I also agree that unemployment is a concern to both of our cases, but I think my opponent's criticism is directed at my too general use of words. Let me qualify it therefore by saying that where I said unemployment, I meant the involuntary part of it. Involuntary unemployment is not equal as it polarises society, with some stuck on some government safety net while others get ahead. This is particularly pernicious because it's always the poor who end up getting laid off first. Again, I don't think this will be a point of clash since we both agree on the policy, so I'll move right along. Finally con argues that a significant minimum wage always increases unemployment. In the long term, I argue that societies that maintain a high minimum wage maintain equality, and thereby create prosperity. This can be seen in many of the European nations, such as Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which have the highest minimum wages in the world and yet very low unemployment (The Netherlands has the lowest in the EU right now). In the short term, there is a small jump, but this can be almost entirely attributed to employers not feeling so bad about firing their employees, as they have less dependence on their jobs. After a while they realise how stupid this philosophy is, because without skilled employees their businesses will not get far. The basic idea is that equality works.