DEMOCRACY AND ECONOMIC EQUALITY

Democracy does not seek to sanction almost a complete identical treatment to all the persons concerned. The disparity in extension of rewards of labor to person of different cadre must be in proportion to be capacity of accomplishment and rank, performed and enjoyed in the social theatre of life. Wages and remunerations vary from class to class in accordance with their customary standard of living, though the scale of remuneration, thus distributed and paid, does not, however, assess the comparative worth of talents and characters of these individuals. It, at the same time, worth taking note of, that all the workable persons, constitutes our society, are almost indispensable for its successful working. Future more, the disparity between a laborer and an officer must not be appallingly wide, as the physical needs of the two, from the point of view of ‘bare necessity’, are the same.

There are some champions of democracy, who go in for the extreme, in advocating equal distribution of national income among all the members of society. They, however, overlook the basic fact that the education and training of a specialist- say an admiral- cost much more than those of an ordinary worker. Consequently their standard of living is certainly much loftier than of a wage-earner-say, a cabin boy. Thus, the ideal of equalizing income of all the members of society is not only impossible but absurd. On remuneration, that can satisfy a raw-worker’s demands, we cannot satisfy the needs of a scholar or administrator.

Equality of income had, consequently, to be dropped until the national dividend could be raised to the professional level. Mathematically equality is incompatible with economic or political. There can never be complete identity of opportunity between a people of specialized attainments and one, having only physical capacity to serve.