Tax the rich until they scream for mercy

The politics of envy? BRING IT ON! We should tax the rich until they do us all a favour and take their “talent” elsewhere.

Those who have an immoderate love of money are imprisoned by their immoderation. Like all addictions, it damages the addict as much as anyone else.

Monbiot gets it right: “Extreme wealth invariably leads to captivity. Its victims live in an open prison … Everywhere on earth they live behind walls and razor wire, guarded by cameras, dogs, watch towers and sensors. The walls that shut the world out also shut them in.” Extreme wealth also means that one will inevitably be surrounded by flatterers, sycophants and greedy hangers-on, making it harder to find true friends and true love.

This might all be fine if the addiction of the super-wealthy did not damage society as a whole. But extreme inequality of wealth damages not just the wealthy, but also the non-wealthy, who become poisoned by their envy of the wealthy. I’ve previously discussed how economic inequality led to the global credit crunch. High levels of economic inequality mean that in order to try and keep up with the wealthy, the nearly-wealthy need to spend more and more. And then the nearly-nearly-wealthy need to spend more in order to try and keep up with the nearly-wealthy. And so on down the scale. This leads to a cascade effect on expenditure. Over the last thirty years in the West, median incomes have not been increasing much, while the incomes of the richest ten percent have exploded, which means that the only way for the non-wealthy to try and keep up is to borrow more and more money. That’s exactly what happened. And the rest, as they say, is economic history. In the West, it tends to be the countries with the highest levels of inequality that have the highest levels of personal debt.

So it is now patently clear that very rich people destroy societies, and that is why we need to make sure that the wealthy go somewhere else and ruin someone else’s society.

But unfortunately it’s not that as easy as you might think to get rid of these avaricious bastards. As Monbiot adds: “It's a bitter blow. When the government proposed a windfall tax on bonuses and a 50p top rate of income tax, thousands of bankers and corporate executives promised to leave the country and move to Switzerland. Now we discover that the policy has failed: the number of financiers applying for a Swiss work permit fell by 7% last year. The government must try harder to rid this country of its antisocial elements … The universal public response, as Tracey Emin found when she announced that she couldn't possibly survive here on her scanty millions, is ‘Go on, then – jump’”.