Fairness, not capitalism, is the issue | Will Hutton | guardian.co.uk

Fairness, not capitalism, is the issue | Will Hutton | guardian.co.uk

Plato first argued the case for proportionality – and it is telling that justice in so many cultures is signified by a pair of scales. Retribution should be proportional to the crime. But so should reward be proportional to our extra effort. It is a fundamental part of human beings' hard-wiring. The scales symbolically declare that justice is getting our due and proportional deserts.

Is the economic value added in making a loan, buying a share or securitising an income stream so much greater than building a jet engine, creating a life-saving drug or writing a transformative piece of new software? People work hard in many walks of life and cannot dream of earning what a banker earns. Moreover the trading in money is not so much more valuable than any other form of economic activity that it deserves such privileges. This is not God's work. It is an old-fashioned rigged market by a bunch of smart insiders who have managed to get away with it for decades because hard questions were never asked about fairness or proportionality. And to add insult to injury, when the sky fell in on what was a gigantic Ponzi scheme it was governments, backed by ordinary taxpayers, that launched a bail out to save the economy – but in the process also bankers. See Full Article| Will Hutton | guardian.co.uk