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UK Petition for Secular Schools
The world is full of people who have no realistic prospect of ever becoming rich who prop up a system which allows a tiny minority to be fabulously wealthy.
Why is it in the interests of the bottom 99% to allow the top 1% to be so problematically rich? Do you honestly believe that it is only the prospect of obscene and unspendable wealth which motivates people to do great things? Do you have any evidence to back up that idea?
In the old Soviet Union a lot of people pretended to work and got drunk when they got home. Now the sky is the limit. They can earn fabulous wealth. Are Russians doing more or less fabulous things these days? The incidence of alcoholism is so high that the life expectancy has dropped substantially. Is Russia greater than she used to be? Does she do greater things? No. The ability to work harder and do better for yourself is a wonderful thing, it makes the world go round, but only up to a point. Diminishing returns sets in. If you have a car, a holiday home, better food and good quality clothes how much is extra wealth going to be a major spur for you? Admit it, it isn't. Once you have reached the point at which you can live well, travel and have no fear of being poor money ceases to be a major incentive to extra activity. At that point recognition matters more. What counts is being seen to be a big player, getting personal satisfaction from success, the actual money just gets in the way and makes life difficult for you, for the ultra rich money presents virtually a waste disposal challenge. If the only way to be recognised is to earn more money that is what you will do. But that only happens in societies that haven't got the courage to let the market be the servant of the people rather than its tyrannical master.
The rich don't really want to be rich, to have so much money that they don't know what to do with it and spending becomes a problem. The rich want to be rich and successful. They don't do it so they can actually spend money. Of course they might say different but that is because they have been so locked into the system that to say they didn't want more and more money would be seen as some kind of heresy and treason against their class.
What enables people to be ridiculously wealthy is almost always down to multiplying some modest earning capacity by the size of a country or the world. People don't tend to get fabulously wealthy by having a small number of people give them a large amount of money. Most fabulously wealthy people have come up with a way of exploiting the population size. It is the fact that there is a lot of people that makes their business lucrative. Take J.K. Rowling as an example, my family has contributed quite a bit to making J.K. Rowling rich, about the same amount as we have contributed to the take away kebab shop down the road. J.K. Rowling is rich because she can get thousands of other people to sell books, DVDs and cinema tickets to my family and hundreds of millions of other families. She is not tens of thousands of times better at her job than the man who makes kebabs and she doesn't work tens of thousands of times harder: she doesn't deserve tens of thousands of times more. The point is that it isn't the talent of J.K. Rowling, or Microsoft, or McDonald's or Disney that makes phenomenal incomes it is the population size that does it. McDonald's isn't rich by making a few people buy all their food from its restaurants, it is rich because it has taken a reasonably successful formula and multiplied it by a phenomenally large number: the size of America and then the world.
If we shrank the world to the size of the Isle of Man there would be no millionaires. The honest rich acknowledge this. The Isle of Man is full of millionaires. Why? I doubt they go there for the bracing Irish Sea air. It is the low taxation and the lack of officious regulation that draws them in. The Isle of Man is a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea relatively convenient for trading with the lands that you can spy from its highest point: England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. |
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The Isle of Man exports poor people, imports rich people and has a virtually zero chance of being invaded by foreign powers: Britain would never let an unsinkable aircraft carrier and harbour complex just off the coast be taken by a hostile power. I think all tax havens should be invaded and seized by their bigger neighbours to take back what is rightfully theirs: the fruits of their own market. The Isle of Man survives by taxing people who simply wouldn't be or do business there if they taxed the same as the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. The Isle of Man is no Celtic tiger, it's the world's dampest offshore tax haven. Rich people go to the Isle of Man to stop the nation which generated their income being able to tax it.
France should seize Monaco. A combined army of the European Union should isolate Switzerland, making it a no-fly zone, anything bigger than a clock cuckoo to be shot shot from the sky until they surrender and join the European Union or commit mass suicide, either way is cool by me.
There's a difference between being a proud independent nation and being a tax haven whose primary source of income is hiding money earned in busier, more genuinely prosperous nations from the taxation regime of those countries. Legal gambling, significantly lower or no income tax, low corporation taxes, lax accountancy rules, decidedly corruption-friendly bank account secrecy laws and lax rules on shipping (flags of convenience) are dishonest and exploitative forms of income for small states. It is not honest to act as a tax shelter, taking a cut from money that is rightly nothing to do with your little island, principality or tribe.
If you want to be independent open a gift shop, encourage tourism, have a few races and sell postage stamps. Taking in your neighbours' washing is a fair way to raise money, laundering corruptly earned money and hiding it away from the police is not. Neither is hiding legitimately earned money away from the tax regime in the country where the economic activity actually took place.