Beat the rich

Since I started writing about the urgent need to tax the super rich, I’ve encountered counter arguments that make no sense.

The most popular goes like this: “The wealthy own the companies that employ everyone else and make the economy work. If we tax them too much, they’ll leave.”

Firstly, it’s worth noticing that this is an entirely circular argument. Essentially it’s saying: “We let the wealthy get so rich that they own everything, so we can’t tax them now…because they own everything.” It only proves that it’s way beyond time to do something about it.

Secondly, most of the super-wealthy have homes all over the world. They reside wherever they feel like from one sun drenched week to the next. Remember, we’re not even talking about the middle class in industrialised nations, who are, like me, among the richest people who have ever lived on Earth. We’re talking about people sitting on tens of millions in assets. A lot of them only legally ‘live’ somewhere - or technically, are domiciled - where it suits them for tax purposes. It’s often not where they physically are most of the time. And even if it is, they’re not strolling down your high street in a top hat dishing out tenners to beggars like they’re in a musical. They’re holed up in a mansion somewhere. They live behind infrared camera-monitored security gates. They have men with moustaches only sported by ex-special forces personnel with raging alcoholism, PTSD and alimony commitments. If they work at all it’s remotely, or by summoning people to their palace-like bunkers, or bunker-like palaces. They get about by helicopters and private planes.

If you think the super rich really “live” in your country in any meaningful sense, pop out now and try and stop one in the street. And if you think they really are loyal to your national interests - then try asking them to pay their fucking taxes.

Again, the counter arguments don’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny by any honest person with an IQ higher than Tom Cruise’s balls.

“These people are valuable to our country because they’re loyal to it. But dare ask them to contribute actual fair value to our country and they’ll move to the Cayman Islands.”

Today’s ultra rich aren’t like the Bournville brothers. They’re not knocking up model housing for the workers around their chocolate factory. They’re more like Willie Wonka. They’re outsourcing production to Oompa Loompas overseas and not really caring when they kill kids, while claiming it’s the Oompa Loompas who’re hoarding all the money and killing kids. It’s like they were actually created, like Willie Wonka, by a raging bigot.

But don’t worry, there are five golden tickets out there, so keep playing that lottery and dreaming of becoming just like them.

Instead of helping to pay for social housing, the modern super rich are more likely to be privatising as much social housing as they can get their hands on and landlording the fuck out of your family. Basically, they’re behaving just like pretty much every rich family other than the Bournvilles has been doing throughout recorded history. And somehow we still contrive not to notice. They’re about as loyal to your nation as the British Royal Family was to Britain during the World Wars. (Hint, they’re a German family, whose cousins ran Germany in World War One and who practised Hitler salutes in the gardens of the palaces your grandparent’s taxes paid for…see the excellent book And What Do You Do? for details.) Their loyalties lie with power and money, not with you. The proof lies in their very existence. Because if that wasn’t the case, then they wouldn’t be as rich as they are. How is that not obvious?

They like you to wave flags and not ask too many awkward questions, like, for example, the question: “And what do you do?”

This is not the politics of envy. It’s the politics of the bleeding obvious. I don’t want to be them. I want them to stop being them, because being them is destroying the world.

As economist Gary Stevenson has pointed out, if they do the off they can hardly take the land and infrastructure they own with them. It’s physically in your country. What are they going to do, dig up Park Lane and ship it to Dubai? Probably. Yes, they can pull investment out of production, and will undoubtedly try some market led nation-crushing economic hitman shit on your country if they can. Because, did I mention, they’re not loyal to the nation, only their privileged position in it.

All the fears we express about doing this are actually all reasons to get on with it. Saying we can’t or shouldn’t is like saying the cancer I have is too big to cut out, so I’m just going to have to live with it ‘til it kills me. Is that what the people who stand in the way of sensible taxation really think about the state of our economies? If so, why are we letting them run them into the ground?

The ultra rich aren’t beneficial aliens beamed down from another dimension. The concept of the Great Chain of Being is supposed to have gone out of fashion shortly after Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, in 1859. These people sprang from your society. They’re a product of the system we all share. Our society, our system, can control them if we only we collectively choose to do so.

As of 2023, according to one report, there were approximately 426,330 Ultra High Net Worth Individuals globally, with a net worth of at least US$30 million. Assuming that’s true we outnumber by something like 19,261 to 1.

I think we can take them on.

If you’ve been with Sustainabile a while, you might wonder what this all has to sustainability. Well, unsustainability and inequality are two sides of the same coin. That coin is currently rattling around next to the bollocks of some pretty awful people. On the plus side, we can change this relatively easily. It’s been done before, just not very often.

The rich and powerful are on the bridge of the Titanic, fighting over control of the steering wheel. It’s in pretty bad shape, all but entirely disconnected from the course of the ship, which is languishing in rising waves. At least half of them say they don’t believe in icebergs. Or they think the risks from them have been highly overstated. Or they don’t understand how ice melts, or are pretending they don’t understand that so they can hang on to their cash. And the rest of us seem to be spending our dwindling hours chipping bits off the passing bergs to top up their champagne flutes.

Do we really want to leave them in charge until the saloon bar windows implode in a gouting rush of seawater?