Friday 1 November 2013

The rich do not take it from the poor

The next immature view I will expose is the Russell Brand style statement that the richer people become the poorer everyone else will be. This is based on the view there is only a fixed pool of resources, and by having more than most others keep it from them. Equality is divided between equality of opportunity, the foundation stone of the USA, and uniformity, the foundation of China. You can't have both either, as equality of opportunity allows everyone with the talent to make it, and in uniformity if they make it the state takes it away and gives it to everyone equally.

Again, an insidious and immature view is behind half the world taxation policy, not because it helps more people but because they believe if anyone has more than a certain amount it belongs to everyone else even though they have hopefully earned it honestly through hard work and talent, someone else gets it instead. The most basic economics spells this out in the theory of added value.

If two people earn the same amount per hour and one works twice as much in a week than the other then they earn twice as much. All they have done is covert one form of energy to another, time to cash. As people are entitled to do overtime, who is to say once they cross the weekly limit most of it should be taxed away from them? They haven't sucked in more of the pool of money for the country, they have added more, it's the nature of growth. The same goes for an artist who converts a few pound's worth of paints to a painting worth thousands of pounds. His time spent painting has added that amount to the economy, it's not your money, it's theirs.

This means each person's wealth is independent of others, and although we may all be running the race to succeed, we are all running alone and in a different direction, as our only goal is to reach the winning post, not beat anyone else. And there is a winning post for each person but the left do not believe it is possible, except when they reach it, like Russell Brand or Lord Young before him, who made millions but still tried to impose wealth removal on everyone else. How can that be right?

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