On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 12:22 AM, Patience <[email protected]>
 wrote:

> "because most people just aren't motivated when a crappy effort pays the
> same as a good effort."
>
> People are naturally selfish.  They would have been happy if they never new
> what someone else was earning
>

I have to seriously disagree with that statement.

You said it yourself:  "People are naturally selfish."  But here's the
thing...that's how we evolved and eventually climbed our way to the top of
the food chain.  Any society similar to the Soviet Union is destined to
fail, because human beings are incapable of living in a society of equals.
 What drives the human race is not the collective...it's the individual.
 The greatest achievements and discoveries of human history were pioneered
by individuals, not "the human race".  The individual is driven to succeed
and achieve excellence.  When you remove the possibility for the individual
to achieve, the individual stops striving, because striving becomes an
unnecessary expenditure of time and energy...another "red flag" we learned
to pick up on through evolution.

I've seen this happen, time and time again, in individual workplaces.  When
it becomes impossible for a worker to achieve (typically through poor
management decisions or corporate policy), the worker no longer has
incentive to expend more energy than what is necessary to simply collect
his/her paycheck.  Multiply that throughout every workplace in every city in
the country, and you now have the former Soviet Union, destined to obsolesce
itself.

A successful society embraces human nature, it doesn't seek to twist it into
something it isn't.

Sorry...everything above came across like pontificating (I have that habit),
but it's definitely merely a summation of my opinion.

Nat

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