I would like there to be some kind of high earnings cap, quite honestly
– British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who apparently wants the rich to get poorer more than he wants the poor to get richer.
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27 comments to Samizdata moonbat of the day |
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It must be number one in the huge list of socialist fallacies that making rich people poorer automatically makes poor people richer.
I must say that I do find the honesty refreshing.
What is the end of all this? Worker countrol, of course.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGqkyHd1cZk
“Quite honestly”. Why the “quite”, Mr Corbyn?
A commenter on the Daily Mail describes Corbyn perfectly: “He’s got his finger on the pulse of Michael Foot’s vision of Britain.” 😆
I knew I wasn’t misremembering the 1980s – he were a twat back then and time hasn’t been kind to him.
Don’t criticise Corbyn. Seems that he’s at least useful as probably one of the best mass voter-conversion weapons the Tories have got, and he comes with the added slapstick entertainment value one provides by repeatedly shooting oneself in the foot whilst looking puzzled by it all.
Like Clinton was for Trump. She seemingly couldn’t fail. Every time she opened her mouth – it was every time a coconut. Priceless – and she apparently still thinks those darn Ruskies did it.
Talk about having a central locus of control.
Corbyn also seems to try hard and attempts to project himself as a kinda nice, honest person – like his mate Castro was.
Cap the income of anyone who considers themselves a socialist at a subsistence level. Leave the rest of us alone.
In many ways, this is a return to the idea of the 1970s, when Labour was in power for a while, during which ghastly decade income taxes on high earners were in the stratosphere. It played to the same idea that people should not earn, or receive, more than a certain amount, because they don’t “need” it and that the wealth of one comes at the expense of another.
Of course, in a world where some forms of pay are influenced by political fiat, and distorted by central bank money-printing, or the results of political payouts, not all of the high earnings people receive are morally just. But that isn’t, I suspect, what bothers a fanatic such as Corbyn. Even if pay he deems “excessive” comes via a totally free market, he is against it. His hatred of success and high earnings is grounded in the puritanism, and dog-in-the-manger mentality that is at the rancid core of much Leftist thinking.
This book, Envy, by Helmut Schoeck, pays a lot of study.
Corbyn may be extreme, but a large number of “moderate” people who get upset about “fatcat” pay and the rest, and who may even dislike him, aren’t all that much different in their assumptions about how the world should be.
Earnings cap on anyone working in the public sector (inc the BBC). Excellent idea.
one of the best mass voter-conversion weapons the Tories have got
Unfortunately, the tories (labour lite really) are lead by the ghastly Theresa “the state is a force for good” May and her government of showers so the opportunities corbyn afford are ignored.
Indeed, you could argue that corbyn is going so far leftward that what one would call the centre lurches ever further left as well, which the ghastly woman seems only too happy to occupy.
Double edged sword that corbyn.
How much would tax revenue fall if all incomes (including from assets) we capped at say £1m? By means of a 100% tax on income above that level? PAYE incomes would become a maximum of the cap, as there’d be no point paying people more for employer or employee. People with assets would keep income within companies and not withdraw dividends and attempt to get the money out of the country somehow. Surely there would be a huge hit to tax revenues (both income tax and NI) and GDP?
Yes, and cap the income of smartass commenters on Samizdata too.
Oh, wait…
This will, however, make the poor poorer as well, and probably faster than it makes the rich poorer.
President Clinton and the Dems did this back in the 1990s.
The managers of Corporations (American companies are the most taxes and the most regulated in the Western world – but Hollywood still pumps out endless films and TV shows about how “big business” controls the government) were told they could not be paid more than a million Dollars a year.
So they got stock instead – and an incentive to push up the value of stock artificially. Causing lots of rather nasty effects.
Limit cash pay and people will be paid in some other way.
Unless one controls every aspect of life.
Which, of course, is the intention of Mr Corbyn.
Let’s pick our words with care, something Corbyn did not do, probably deliberately.
Is he longing for a cap on wages, or salaries, ie, direct employment income? If so, help him to do that, and quickly – the resulting loss in income tax revenues will end his administration in days. He says ‘earnings’, and that would be a generally-accepted meaning of that term. The vast majority of income taxes are paid by a very small cohort of high wage-and-salary earners – encourage him to cap their earnings, tax revenues will fall off a cliff. He’ll immediately run out of other people’s money to waste.
Or is he longing for a cap on incomes, from all sources, not just wage or salary incomes? If so, just what exactly is he proposing? That investment income for a individual be subject to a cap? If so, how does that work – if a rich individual earns more non-wage and non-salary income that the cap, what happens to the rest of it? You don’t have to take investment income as income – or will it be imputed, from what you could have taken as income if you’d wanted to, except you didn’t, but reinvested it?
I suspect that this is what he really means, with the typical woolly imprecision of the Left – he dislikes people who make a lot of money from investments, from bonuses, from inherited wealth or property, and in other ways that he finds ‘unfair’, and so his solution is to ‘cap their incomes’. The extent of his thinking is ‘they should have less, because Fairness.’ He has no idea how this will work, and no concept of the possible consequences that such actions might have – his analysis begins and ends with ‘take away their money’.
Upon what basis in law or morality does he get to decide how much any person may earn, or by what means? He will, of course, immediately begin to blather on about how laws are passed by a democratic process, and so if he can get Parliament to pass a law which caps individual income, he has his basis in law and morality to do so. But his ability to get a law passed does not eliminate the natural rights of the individual, no matter how much he may think it does.
In a sense, his is the purest demonstration of what socialism is, which is robbery with violence which is somehow thought to be excused because it is ‘authorized’ by a democratic process. In this manner, a person who is mugged in the street is not actually ‘mugged’ if a majority of thieves got together first and voted to authorize the mugging.
As another has noted, this is the same thinking which guided the Labour governments of the UK in the 1960s and 1970s, with 98% aggregated tax rates, all generally known under the rubric of ‘soak the rich’. You’ll have observed the economic and social miracles that followed.
llater,
llamas
“Earnings cap on anyone working in the public sector (inc the BBC). Excellent idea.”
Seconded.
A strict cap to all salaries in the public sector. That would include everything financed (even partially) with Government money. BBC – of course, but also NHS, local councils, universities, the London tube, quangos, bailed out banks, everything.
That is something well within Government authority, that would in no way infringe on human rights.
While we’re at it cap all salaries or wages of public employees, not only the top layer. For example: a public bus driver or electrician shouldn’t get more than the average wages in the private sector, for the same job.
The interesting thing is that something in that spirit was done not far away, in France, not 3 years ago (tax year 14 and 15).
75% tax rate for income over 1m euros introduced by that hater of the rich, f hollande, a socialist.
A big song and dance was done about it when it was introduced. Not so much when it was quietly dropped 2 years later.
I mean, there is an actual, recent, example from across the channel that shows it doesn’t work (that is, if you are a moron who didn’t figure it out on his own and you still need to be shown the obvious).
More than ever, a good socialist is of the dead variety.
The cap needs to be tied to the inflation rate plus COLA. That way it will be unnoticeable and the lefties will get to feel good for having done something.
Brendan O’Neill highlights what a twerp Corbyn is here.
I wonder if he really wants to cap the amount of wealth – the currency – that a person can gather in a year, or if instead he’s trying to cap the amount of power a person can attain in that same time?
To Corbyn and his ilk, I imagine that political and/or social power seems to be a function of the number of dollars in one’s pocket. His hatred of the idea of capitalism is likely derived, not from the unfairness that one person can only buy a loaf of bread with his daily earnings while another can buy a Rolls, but from the unfairness that political power can be bought by that same person to accompany their Rolls.
They’re just different forms of currency, really, but the Corbyns never understand that. They think that if they can control the pounds and francs and dollars – if they can wrest control of those away from the hated owners – then the power will always follow.
But the people who are smart enough and driven enough to have made the huge incomes before his cap will always be smart enough, cap or not, to continue amassing the power.
That’s why his kind have never puzzled out why they always ultimately fail. They try to control the wrong currency.
I wonder why an earnings cap is always higher than the earnings of the person demanding the cap?
llamas:
SQOTD !
I think you just described civil asset forfeiture.
Which our (very likely) new AG strongly supports.
(“He’s not Hillary. He’s not Hillary. He’s not . . .”)
*bleep* !!!!
Socialism is ubiquitious. Pure Anarchy is what Somalia seems to be going through, and pure Communism is what North Korea is. All other societies are variants of socialism, so they are all ‘third ways’. Even the Commonwealth of Australia has a bias to all wealth being in common, an English term like socialism.
National socialism, and International socialism (Communism) are thus variants of a Common theme, just the degree of control being different.
Alisa and others, sorry, but you’ve been fooled! When a politician says ‘quite honestly’, don’t you normally distrust whatever he/she/it says? I think Corbyn must be a closet Tory, supporting less taxes on the rich, but his party won’t let him say such things. Either that, or he really is an honest politician……