One of the ironies of far left politics is just how much money you have to have in your life in order to be there in the first place.
Marxism, as the 750,000 people who died in Stalin’s purges would cheerfully admit, only really works if you’re not poor when it first comes knocking at your door.
But the thought came up uncomfortably in my mind when I was driving along listening to a news piece about Tamara Ecclestone being the victim of a £50 million jewelry robbery. Although I feel a certain solidarity with her having myself recently been relieved of a day pack and all its contents in Buenos Aires by some light-fingered Argentine, I began also to feel a surge of discomfort that someone should actually have £50 million of jewelry in the first place, no matter where it had come from or where it had gone.
The same goes for Lloyd Blankfein’s $22.3 million annual paycheck from his grateful employers at Goldman Sachs, Jeff Fairbairn’s £47.1 million ‘right-to-buy’ annual income from Persimmon, and Pep Guardiola’s £20 million hand-out at Manchester City. Once you get into the realm of telephone numbers, you begin to get a very basic feeling that this is all a bit of a zero sum game, and someone elsewhere is suffering just a little bit more than they were as a result.
‘O, reason not the need!’ I seem to remember King Lear saying during my A Levels when his daughters were cutting down his possessions and he had a point. I’m all for wealth, all for reward and and all for high incomes, but I just happen to believe that there comes a point when the level of income leaves the realms of the fiscal, and starts to be covered by obscenity laws instead. To my possible shame, I really do believe that there is a moral plimsoll line marked ‘ENOUGH’ and that above it no one should go. It’s not so much based in good economics (which it clearly isn’t) or sound behavioural science (again, probably not), as it is in living in a pleasant and sustainable society.
My friends on the robust right would say: ‘stuff and nonsense; you just don’t understand the market.’, and, even though I do, a few years ago I might have meekly come alongside the argument and agreed that you either support free enterprise or you don’t, and you can’t have it both ways. They might also add, with some justification, that I am probably just jealous, and that I would be all for it if my it was my own trouser pockets being hosed in crispy brown ones. Again, good point.
Two years of researching books that are vaguely on the subject of sustainability has taught me, amongst other things, that we are only ‘time poor’ these days because we are on a treadmill deluding ourselves that we can go on growing for ever. I could show you a million examples- animal, vegetable, mineral- of people and things that have suffered to keep that little lie going, and I no longer believe one tiny bit of it.
So, when I take over from Boris in 2024, anyone can earn what they like, but above £2.5 million, 75% of it is payable as an ‘irony tax’ and goes straight into alleviating homelessness.
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