Some enjoy extremely excessive income and wealth, while many starve. Is this difference due to extent of hard work or luck? Does choice of family or place explain such inequality and injustice?
What had happened in the childhood story that happens in real life now? There were two cats. Every day one of the cats would get steals some food but the other would demand a share. And they started quarrelling, fighting and settling among themselves. A Robinhood monkey came and suggested that they should not do this exercise of fighting over sharing - they should share on a fair basis. But they did not know how to divide fairly. The monkey offered help. He became the arbitrator. He divided the food into two unequal parts and offered the bigger part to Cat B. Cat A complained that it was not fairly divided. So the monkey ate another portion of the larger part and asked for the opinion. The Cat B now objected that this share was not fair. So the monkey ate a portion of the other part. And, this process continued. At the end ,the cats reluctantly received smaller shares each compared to the average sharing when they used to quarrel and fight every day. This monkey took away quite a large share doing nothing but eating away. This made the cats weaker and weaker. As a result, the quantity of food they could manage to procure/ steal from households became lower (deflation). So sometimes, the monkey would take smaller share so that Cats become stronger enough to steal more food. Once the Cats get stronger, they get more food and the monkey would takes away greater portion of the food as his arbitration fees.
Let us look at a simple case. Let there be a rich New Yorker and a poor starving old man in the same city. You do not like this. Good. One economic policy is to take away 50% of the income of the rich by tax and transfer the amount to the poor guy. That should be fair. But once you do that would there be any one willing to work or inherit wealth just to be disposed off to the extent of 50% for the benefit of a person who is starving? Would some one not like to be idling and starving for a while to get 50% of the income and wealth of a rich person?
Why would any of the two cats steal/ procure any food at all: they would prfer to remain hungry for a while, demand a share from the earnings of other cats and elect a Robinhood monkey to take away some food from the earning cats and distribute to these two poor, starving cats for days to come. Are all these fair transfers at all? Why should even 1% of the income of the rich be reached to the poor? Bill Gates and his friends beat IBM: Gates was a weak poor person and he could beat such a huge organization like IBM? Is it fair that Bill Gates did that? These questions do not bother civilized minds anymore as the business of transferring income and wealth has become a fabulously prospering industry worldwide. The modern-day Robinhoods are no more outlawed: they themselves make laws that suit their business.
Forget fairness and create a Robinhood institution called Government (Govt.), if necessary by forming political parties and getting through elections. Then, the Govt. can take some money away from Bill Gates and give to the poor IBM or poor children all over the world. There is no need to depend on the whims of Bill Gates giving away his wealth himself by creating charitable foundations of his own? Instead, let the politicians and governments take the role of Robinhood monkeys, the most inefficient and useless constituent in the civilized world, enjoy life without doing anything.
The cats are of different types: rich and poor. Earlier the rich voluntarily shared with the poor. The monkey is the philosopher/ social scientist and politician. The whole system is democracy with concern for the weaker. And, each government says that they are potentially the best in ensuring social justice and equity. These systems - political systems are called by various names: Capitalistic or socialist mixed economy democracies or republics. They are designed to cheating and fooling cat citizens by elected or self-appointed Robinhood monkey arbitrators. Exploit the rich cats and make the poor cats dependent on the Robinhood Monkey Govt.: that is the motto of democracies and republics. To be fair to them, the Robinhood monkeys are, of course, very articulate and do everything based on written documents called constitutions, election manifesto, economic policy statement, budgets and social transformation strategi\y committee reports.
One important policy the Robinhoods often pursue is called fiscal policy. These are designed to ensure fairness, reduce inflation and arrest/ cure depression, though these policies seldom, if ever, achieve all the intended goals. That however is beside the point. Their intention is to serve the people through arbitrary arbitration and redistributive transfers with huge arbitration fess and leakages by force of law. The pious intention is what counts.
In some countries, the Robinhood monkey is replaced by a bold wolf who declares that the cats should be slave citizens and steal/ procure food as per the commands of the wolf (and his relatives, friends and fans) and give everything to the wolf. The Wolf will give them some share as it thinks fit. This is communist or military dictatorship command economy. The wolf (and his pack) has his own perspective about what is fair and the cats can have no opinion on this after they have gone through a cultural revolutionary brain-cleaning. This is the second answer to fairness.
The third solution to fairness does not need either a monkey or a wolf. When the monkeys who do business of promoting and selling concepts of fairness and providing service to implement such fairness policies, they force down a concept of fairness of their own to sustain and grow their lucrative business to fool the common citizens - rich or poor. The wolf is more straight forward: he makes everyone else accept that he is the fairness personified as the supreme leader. But the cats do not need the wolf also: they can just kill the problem because it does not make any sense.
Some of the cats say that enjoyment of life, starvation, accidents, deaths, births and birth locations - everything is beyond human beings: these are the outcome of random chances generated from a probability model not yet known to mankind. Whatever happens just happens - beyond fairness and unfairness, irrespective of the differential consequences on different individuals or groups of individuals. The whole idea of conceptualising fairness is unfair, unrealistic and illusion-driven, jealousy-driven activity that we are trying to define and achieve. The monkey or the wolf may continue to enjoy the game of fooling some cats, but other cats may just ignore the issue of fairness. These few saint cats sacrifices the desire to share any specific portion of wealth and income and yet food and clothes flow to them. They greet the poor weak cats with love and affection. They preach everyone to give away income and wealth to feed the poor. Some cats follow their advice and some others continue to fight. The saint cats remain unperturbed.
Why do they do that? Is that fair? Are they rational? They believe thay are rational but do not impose their belief on to others, not they fool and cheat the ordinary cats. Only some fake saint cats may do that.
We have these three solutions to fairness: (a) the monkey model, (b) the wolf model and (c) the saint cat model. The first two models do not like the third model. But the third model helps ordinary cats to live in peace with the first and second models. When one is with the saint, it does not matter who oppresses or fools you under which model!
