That extra mile

Keep circling back to the same topic, so I suppose must be kind of important to get a good steer on it. When is reward enough and more is obscene and socially divisive? See also my Tax, Salaries and Rewards and Higher Aspirations.This is the core question nagging at me. To better your lot is the principle drive that makes people go that extra mile to achieve the extraordinary. We all benefit hugely from all those around us striving beyond the norms to achieve. We want and need them to do it. Maybe even our best athletes are not just seeing how far they can push their skills, to find their own limits. More than likely the distant prospect of fame, notoriety and possible rewards to come are the spur on those so long cold dark mornings when every fibres protests, stay in bed. Switch athlete for skill or expertise, there is in each of us that internal desire to see just how good we can become or far we can go. Excellent. Just not sufficient justification on its own, it needs that added bolster. Fame, recognition and then the dosh that might follow. Reward of an achievement reached is not enough. Fame absolutely, or at least the attention it brings. Without the bonus of creature comforts? Most cases, not.

What we all want is release from the worry of survival from day to period, we want our progeny to have as good or better start and we want to provide for our kin. Good and wholesome aspirations. Incentives enough to push on and try harder. Proper just reward for making that extra effort, to stand out above the crowd of wannabes. But how much reward is adequate and when is it over the top? Enough to have and enjoy a relaxed none caring lifestyle through to your final days. Spared from the haunting, will I, can I afford relief from discomfort, pain, lack of care and nurture. Sufficient so that comparisons to equal or comparable peers is not unfavourable to you. There is a rub, of course we have a predilection to compare ourselves much beyond our actual modest achievements. There is this built in escalator here to be resisted. Lets assume our peers operate a 'higher or lower' wall to approve or contest comparison claims. Next of course we need enough to ensure our progeny receive the benefits of all our hard efforts. Somewhere along the line of a good home, nice clothes, private education, mind-expanding holidays and leisure, connection to similar influential families, protection from the costs of education, helping hand to set up a home and positive introductions to potential employers or clients, somewhere we pass from fair and reasonable to the inequitable. Where your hard efforts so set up your descendants so that, without any effort on their behalf, they can coast on your successes to the detriment of other aspirants.

Inheritance tax is both the final insult and a social leveller. After a lifetime of hard taxed effort the State seeks to take away any residual value. By doing so it reduces your descendants to well off but not excessively so. With the sting in the tale. Why bother in the first place to put money into permanency when none of your kin will get to benefit? If you follow the logic, might just as well paper over with polyfilla and save yourself the time, cost and effort. Then the Nation loses out, instead of accumulating treasures from the past, it gains just puddles of decomposing goo. No, providing we can keep a lid on excessive rewards, then, on past evidence, the second generations will squander their inheritance and in doing so provide opportunities for upcomers to profit from them. Keeping a lid on excessive rewards is the key. Enough to make the extra effort worth while but not so much as to distort the social fabric and threaten the underlying goodwill of all, to see success rewarded.

Finally, having exploited the benefits of living within our society and utilising it as their base to make their fortunes, when the rich complain as the State takes back or regulates the excesses of rewards accruing, they have a stark choice. Either turn their backs on the society that nurtured them on their road to success or accept that this is the price demanded from all those other tolerant people also wanting a chance to make the big time. The makings of a fair and equitable society.