In the Guardian obviously:
I don’t know whether the left has been sleeping, but there has been a dominant narrative that has remained quite unchallenged in the media. This narrative suggests that there is no connection between the super-rich and abject poverty, that you can keep getting richer and richer, and this has nothing to do with people getting poorer. And it wasn’t always like that, people in the past have known that maximising at the top means you are depriving somebody else further down.Now Karl Marx got a lot of things right but the lump of labour idea wasn't one of them. The painful truth for these numpties is that the "super-rich", by creating new wealth ake everyone better off - Facebook and Google and Amazon may seem trivial things but they have provided enormous additional value to the lives of people across the world. And something like 2-3% of that additional value goes to the people who created those firms. The thing is that 2-3% of trillions of dollars is an awful lot of money.
For a non-stupid commentary on the "abolish billionaires" rubbish read this...
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3 comments:
But historically, people invented everything world-changing, from the alphabet to the jet engine, without becoming globe-dominating multi-billionaires.
Inventive people still would, even if they paid their taxes, just like concert musicians do.
As all logical folk know, you don't ever make poor people richer by making rich people poorer.
But jealousy is a powerful emotion and if you can use it to your own personal (and usually hypocritical) advantage, then some will.
It is not possible, within reason, to make a rich person poorer by taxation, since they are not poor to start. It's only possible to make them less rich.
And just how rich do they need to be? You can only eat three meals a day and sleep in one bed at a time, for goodness' sake.
Greece is what happens, when you don't bother to collect taxes.
Jealousy is what those who wasted their time at school display, towards those who did not, and who got the interesting jobs with the proper pensions on the other hand.
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