The average impoverished manual laborer works as hard as, if not harder than, the average corporate billionaire. And yet people often claim that the poor are lazy. Wealthy people will often attempt to justify the absurd disparity of wealth in this country by claiming that they earned their success, that their circumstances are fair because their situation in life is proportional to the work they put in.
   

The principle of fairness in the present economy is fundamentally incorrect. To demonstrate this, let’s say that someone in the 1% has a billion times more money than a construction worker-- though it is probably even more than that.
   

“That is fair,” says the wealthy person. “I have worked harder than this construction worker to a degree proportional to my financial advantage over him.”
   

What the wealthy person does not take into consideration is that, in order for this economic outcome to be fair, the wealthy person would have had to have worked a billion times harder than the construction worker. Now, I understand that some rich people-- plenty, in fact-- work hard. Many wealthy people do indeed work incredibly hard, and come up with innovative ideas that help the world in significant ways. But construction workers work hard too, and few things are more fundamentally important than adequate housing. To say that anyone works a billion times harder than the average construction worker is absurd. It is not within the realms of human achievement; it is quite literally impossible. So why does our government and culture continue to treat the wealthy as though they invariably do work a billion times-- or more-- harder than construction workers?