Kathryn of Omaha TV and her panel of Mother Earth’s Weekly Squirms is on-screen and millions of viewers have tuned in. Take-a-listen.

Kathryn: “Glad you are still with us, Mars Man, to tackle another fad that is overflowing today’s media, namely “inequality”. A French economist, Thomas Piketty, has written a tome of 800 pages about the increase in inequality between the haves and the have-nots on Mother Earth over the last one hundred years. The book “Capital in the 21st Century” has brought forward a tsunami of criticism and acclaim.  Does Mars have a similar problem?”

Mars Man: “Definitely not. Inequality is human-made. The great Mars Magnifier gives every Mars Man what we need. It’s supra-natural, gender-neutral and omnipresent, and was created by the Big Bang of Mars. Every Mars Man taps from it from birth and lives happily ever after. We don’t need to work, don’t have to pay taxes, and have a sea of time enjoying ourselves. We never get bored because we are too busy having fun.”

Kathryn: “But that’s wonderful. Why don’t we have such a machine on Earth?”

Mars Man: “As I told you at your last Round Table, at Big Bang Time, Mother Earth disqualified itself because Eve handed Adam the testosterone apple, and everything has been going downhill for you since then.”

Kathryn: “But how do you define Mother Earth’s  inequality syndrome?”

Mars Man:”Your inequality is a natural phenomenon. I don’t understand why someone has to write an 800 page tome about it, much less where you would find the time to read it, only to advance a French argument favoring higher taxes on people who work harder than those who don’t and want to keep their hard-earned money grow over time.”

Kathryn: “What’s wrong with that French argument?”

Mars Man: “First of all, it’s French. The French popular advice is if you want to get rich, marry a wealthy person who’s plain-faced and can’t find a partner, and then have a mistress or lover on the side to keep your sanity, while using the money of the plain spouse to live well. So, the French say, taxing that bad person to poverty makes sense.  But destroying money is unproductive because then it stops working, and as you know taxed money goes down the drain and that’s a waste. That’s why so many wealthy people are leaving France today and want to come to Mars.”

Kathryn: “And what’s the second point?”

Mars Man: “I was getting to that. Inequality is good. You say on Mother Earth that someone else’s grass is always greener. Humans want to keep up with the Joneses. It’s an incentive to do better, have upward mobility, make new things. On Mars, we do that for fun. On Mother Earth, you do it for money. But if you tax the hard-earned money away, you kill the incentive to work more and go back to the stone age.”

Kathryn: “People here are arguing that the rich must be taxed more to spread the wealth.”

Mars Man: “Why do some people get rich and others don’t? A film star, a smart person? Why not tax someone only because he or she was born beautiful, to give it away to the ugly? Tax George Clooney ninety-nine percent of his salary? And why not tax someone because he got more brains than someone else?”

Kathryn: “Don’t give the tax people here any ideas, they might just do it. Let me get our panelists in. Bob Foolsman, how do you look at it?”

Bob: “All men are born equal and have the right to the enjoyment of life and liberty. That’s what Jefferson and his followers said.

A system that is based on rewarding talent, hard work and achievement creates inequality and hurts the person who has no talent and lacks the incentive or has no brains. But that person still has a right to the enjoyment of life, thus needs a home, a TV and a long chair to look at it.”

Fred Garfinkel: ‘But that’s utopia. Why not give him or her a swimming pool, too? Mitt Romney turned companies around so that they and their workers contributed to the Treasury instead of drawing unemployment checks. That’s an art. Art is worth money and he earned it and paid taxes on it. And yet,  he gets slurred for not paying taxes by a politician who gave him the middle finger and only receives a salary from the taxpayer and doesn’t produce anything good.”

Mars Man: “To us Martians, that is Topsy-turvy. You know the story in your Bible: those two servants who invested the money of the absent landlord got rewarded for it on his return, and the one who didn’t and put it under his mattress, got punished instead. That was the right decision, but on Mother Earth you want to do the opposite.”

Charles Hammerschmidt: “And where to does it all lead? Look around. Stagnation. Nobody in his right mind wants to work to only pay more taxes. We are all born unequal. Inequality is a fact of life. Bob is just jealous because he wasn’t born a George Clooney.”

Fred: “I’m jealous of those NFL football players, or the Yankees, Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, all worth multiple millions of dollars.  I am simply not as good at it, however much I try. There you have it: inequality. But nobody talks about them, it’s always the CEOs and families that built wealth with their hands and minds that get clobbered.”

Mars Man: “Your politicians have a knack for getting on the bandwagon when they believe a significant portion of the populace likes to vent their frustration that they’re not equal to those who are successful.

If they do and vote for more taxes, the inequality will even grow larger: less investment by the wealthy means less jobs for the unequals and even lesser chance to get even, while the wealthy have other means of capitalization to keep their money growing.”

Kathryn: “Well said, that’s the end of the show. Wish you a good journey back to Mars City, Mars Man.Viewers, thanks for joining us.”