1000 Farmers

A thousand farmers lived in the country of Equalitopia and each farmer had 1 acre (209' x 209') of land to cultivate so that the produce could be brought to the annual farmer's market and traded for other goods.

While some farmers brought as little as a 100 lbs of wheat, oats, rice, corn, and barley to the market, other farmers brought over a half-ton (over 1000 lbs) of these cereal grains--over 10 times as much!

The town statistician decided to look into the differences in output between people performing the same task (farming), and everyone's output was arranged in ascending order so that she could look at the entire population in percentiles (each with 10 farmers) in order to analyze.

She found out that, overall, the average output for each 1% of the population (each group of 10 individual farmers) was 200 lbs of cereal grains, but that the average output for the top group--the top 1% of farmers (the top 10 farmers) was 2000 lbs of cereal grains!

The top 10 farmers were producing output that was 10 times higher than the population average!

She analyzed differences in the processes utilized by the farmers and it turned out that these top farmers were employing a fruitful combination of sustained attention to innovation along with an uninterrupted determination for productive output.

For instance, the high-output farmers were more likely to examine new fertilizers and experiment with new farm tools, and they also did not take long vacations like others did.

Some people had an envy of the top farmers, because they were earning 10 times the average annual income--but the statistics proved that they were contributing 10 times the average amount of goods and services to society, so that it was fair that their reward was so high.

The top 1% of farmers were making 10% of all income.

One day, a sly politician came to Equalitopia and said that it was unfair, and that draconian laws and regulations and redistributive taxes would be needed in order to rectify the unfair disparity of incomes. The people fell for his ruse, and this politician rose to the highest office in the land.

After a while, the statistician decided to double-check to see if income inequality had come down from the harsh laws and the redistributive taxes and, to her surprise, the top 1% of farmers were now making 22% of all income (more than twice what they made under free market capitalism)!

The people became disgusted with the arguments of the politician--who had been preaching that farmers should hate their neighbors, by claiming that those neighbors were already "haters" themselves (so that they "deserved" to be hated in return).

The people discovered that this was in order to keep the country divided so that it could be harshly ruled, and they threw the politician out of office and developed a constitution for all future administrations of government to follow.

The constitution disallowed welfare-state wealth redistribution, because--besides violating the individual property rights of the citizens--the results are always contrary to purpose.

The End

Attribution for top image:

Ralf Roletschek [CC BY-SA 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)]

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:04-09-12-Schaupfl%C3%BCgen-Fahrenwalde-RalfR-IMG_1232.jpg