United We Fall: Are We Going To Force A Change?

“You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”

That’s a quote attributed to the Irish playwright and political activist George Bernard Shaw.

Back in the introduction I said how various psychological mechanisms offer us shortcuts in deciding how we will behave in different circumstances. Patriotism is effectively another mental shortcut that allows us to quickly and effortlessly assess which side we should stand with.

Our leaders can trigger our patriotism and count on us to stand up in front of them and go and get ourselves killed, maimed or mentally wrecked on their behalf simply because our leaders have pointed out how that group of foreigners is our mortal enemy. They’re our enemy because they aren’t the same nationality as us and so are inferior to us.

Once triggered, we’ll carry out the commands of our leaders even when they present a much greater threat to our well-being and safety than the enemy they’ve presented for us. Adolf Hitler was clearly a monster, but as the leader of Germany, many people would have told themselves that the enemies he identified for them were much worse.

Today we’re seeing it twisted even further to divide us. It goes beyond dividing us from those who should be our allies in other nations and is being applied to divide us from our real allies in our own societies. We’re the patriotic ones trying to save our country and they’re the unpatriotic ones who want to destroy our country.

This applies beyond patriotism and nationalism though. Pick any kind of social grouping and people can be made to turn on others because of their differences. We’re seeing across many countries that politics is becoming more and more partisan, with politicians dividing the people to better serve their own purposes. They’re not just calling out opponents as having differing views, but declaring them to be enemies and unpatriotic.

Form us into packs and group polarisation¹ will ensure we drive ourselves to more extreme points of view while constantly looking outwards for threats, oblivious to the danger at our backs that we’re just amplifying. We’re the foot soldiers who always lose whatever the result. Only those behind us who drive us forward have any chance of winning.

Knowing the true level of Russian casualties in Ukraine is impossible, but the lowest estimates are over 100,000 dead and up to half a million killed and wounded. How’s Putin looking for all that? Well, he’s still the President of Russia and still has his huge personal wealth that’s variously reported to be measured in 10s of billions of dollars or even 100s of billions of dollars.

On 19 June 2024, 37,397 Palestinians were reported killed during the war in Gaza with another 85,523 injured.² Meanwhile, Ismail Haniyeh, the man widely considered to be the political leader of Hamas, the organisation that slaughtered 1,143 Israelis to trigger the war, lives in comfort in Qatar. So, at least he’s not suffering too much then.

And while the billionaire Donald Trump has been charged with various crimes, none of those relate to him whipping up a crowd of supporters to storm the Capitol buildings. One member of that crowd was shot dead and 1,358 of them were charged with crimes, with more than 500 convicted and serving prison time. Again, the leader driving the action lost nothing compared to the people on the ground. Almost a year after the riot, the billionaire had paid exactly zero dollars³ to help any of those charged to defend themselves, while Trump has had much of his own legal costs covered by donations and the Republican party.

Divided We Stand

Our world and our societies stand as divided as ever, perhaps more so.

And that despite the fact that people are people, all of us having the same basic needs and the same desires and fears.

Billions of people across the world are nothing more than an asset, someone else’s belonging that can do what they like with. Don’t you want to be a unique human being making your own choices?

Billions of people have to live their lives being careful not to say the wrong thing in public to the wrong person. Don’t you want the freedom to say what you want, about what you want and when you want?

Billions of people live in a country where those at the top of society can force them to fight and even die for their ambitions. Don’t you want to be free to protest against your leaders fighting unjust wars, but also free to choose to make the ultimate sacrifice to protect your beliefs?

Billions of people live in a country where they have no say in who should lead them. Don’t you want the freedom to pick your leaders and to vote for someone else at the next election if they don’t do what they promised?

Billions of people live in a country where the wealthy are free to commit crimes with no punishment, while the people can be imprisoned or killed just because the leaders don’t like them. Don’t you want to live in a society where the laws are the same for everyone and everyone can be punished for breaking them?

Billions of people live in a country where those at the top of society are taking more than they need and leaving those at the bottom with less than they need. Don’t you want to live in a society where everyone has at least all that they need?

Billions of people live in a country where people are valued by what they possess rather than what they provide. Don’t you want to live in a society where everyone is valued equally and seen as essential to the success of society?

If you answered no to any of those questions, umm, well, congratulations on getting this far, but I’m sorry, I’ve been wasting your time. This book really is all about all of us deserving fairer societies.

And we only have any hope of creating fairer societies by the majority of us working together. Our societies have formed to keep the people divided so that those at the top can take almost all of the wealth from the majority of the people who live with almost no wealth.

However, regardless of how we answer those questions, it’s crazy difficult to be truly honest and objective with ourselves. We’ve looked at a few psychological mechanisms that bend our ability to think clearly. Yet knowing about them doesn’t mean we won’t be controlled by them. It’s not just those with racist or sexist or homophobic biases who lack the intellectual capacity to think objectively. We’re all at it. Unless we actively try to force ourselves, we’ll let our biases and mental shortcuts take control.

Living creatures are frugal, so we’re drawn to making lazy decisions, rather than accurate ones, regardless of the long-term cost to us.

I want you to be smart, to be better than most, but the reality is that the odds are against it. You may simply be unable to take control of your own thoughts in the way you need. It’s this common weakness that you and I and everybody share that lets a few in society take such total control and horde almost all the wealth for themselves.

It would be easy, perhaps even natural to feel angry at our peers who allow themselves to be so easily manipulated, but is that really fair when they’re just behaving as nature intended?

In the UK, Labour have just won the general election after 14 years of Conservative government that seems to have moved the country backwards. There will be many celebrating the beginning of a new era.

I have no idea why?

The last Labour government served for some 13 years and didn’t do anything to curb the growing power of the wealthy in the country at the expense of the majority of the people. They thoroughly embraced the concept of Public Finance Initiatives (PFI)⁴, which is basically a way to pay more than necessary for something over the long term, because it makes it look like the government is spending less right now.

While I’m not expecting them to return to using PFIs, why should anyone in the UK expect anything to change?

And the US is closing in on a Presidential election as I write this. What an uninspiring mess that is.

I’ve already made it clear I see this as two old men putting their egos ahead of the country, so this is one of those very cases of picking the least worst. How do you pick this one?

Joe Biden seems a nice enough old fella, with the emphasis on the old. I can picture him walking through the park of some folksy small American town with his German Shepherd, Mr Snuggles, by his side, a dead squirrel and two dead rats in his mouth the only reason Mr Snuggles isn’t snapping at the kids in the play park today. And every day when they pass us by, we always find ourselves wondering which one is giving off that faint odour of stale urine.

Trump’s more superstar with his TV persona. He’s got some kind of je ne sais quoi about him. How do I describe it?

Regal?

No, that’s not the word. But when I look at him, his whole demeanour, the way he carries himself, he does make me think of an imperial figure.

Specifically Emperor Pupienus, the ruler of the Roman Empire for just 99 days in 238 (very much the Liz Truss, or perhaps more accurately the iceberg lettuce, of Roman times).

I guess it should be no surprise he lasted such a short time. Just imagine the embarrassment of the average Roman citizen. I mean, who would want to be ruled over by a poopy-anus (yes, it is pronounced “poopy-anus”)? No-one wants a poopy-anus above them.⁵

It’s a dreadful choice on offer for the American people in 2024.

Would you trust either man with the remote control for your garage doors while you try to park the car late at night in torrential rain? No, of course you wouldn’t.

I know Biden was the one who looked lost in the first debate, but remember Trump is the one who has previously said that George Washington’s Continental Army “took over airports” during the Revolutionary War that ended 120 years before the first aircraft flight, declared magnets don’t work in water and suggested scientists should look into injecting people with disinfectant to save them from Covid 19. He never established what would save them from being injected with disinfectant. If I had a five-year-old child say any one of those ridiculous things, I’d have had them on Cragslist free to collector that same day.

Of course, there is an alternative. The youth candidate. Normally I’d be saying that’s the one then, but it doesn’t look so attractive when the youth option is 70 years old and riding into town backwards on a donkey wearing a 10-gallon tinfoil hat.

What on earth is on the minds of the Democratic party thinking it’s a good idea to push someone who is clearly suffering the usual side effects of ageing as the best option for the most powerful job in the world? It seems that the hope is that he’ll have more good days than bad days during the campaign. Doesn’t feel like a great plan, yet there was barely any consideration made as to whether the party should consider alternative choices.

Don’t you think it shows contempt for the American people by trying to persuade them that they should vote for a man who is unfit to be President 100% of the time?

It would be easy to believe the situation with Trump is different as he did face real competition for the candidacy and was selected by the people. However, that completely overlooks the conspiracy of much of the Republican party in the groundless claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Why did so many support the claim of a stolen election without any proof and if they had proof, why did they let the election result stand? If they’d acted with honesty and integrity and made it clear Trump was simply a loser in 2020, maybe he wouldn’t have won the candidacy.

Don’t you think it shows contempt for the American people by trying to persuade them that they should vote for a man who is unfit to be President, 100% of the time?

Democratic political systems rely on all sides being trustworthy and acting in the best interests of the people, even when that doesn’t work out for them. When either side breaks away from that, it risks damaging democracy for everyone. That’s what we’re seeing from the Republican party and we’ve also seen it from Democrats at state levels. How dare Democrats in Colorado, Maine, Illinois and elsewhere seek to remove Trump from their ballots for acts of insurrection when he’s never even been charged, let alone convicted of such a crime. That’s the action of autocrats, not democrats.

The US government had four years to prove Trump had committed insurrection, but they chose to do nothing. What he did that day was a lot pathetic, but would a jury really find him guilty of insurrection for stoking up a crowd?

Politics is a serious business, yet both sides in the US seem to be treating it like it’s just a game they’re entitled to play for their own gain and amusement. They’re all just wallowing in the muddy swamp with their wealthy masters, doing all they can to keep them happy.

And the entitlement of the political class isn’t unique to America. Remember how the British MP Nadine Dorries ranted about how her and her colleagues’ livelihoods were being threatened by the actions and policies of the UK Prime Minister?

It’s not a livelihood, it’s a calling, a privilege for a few.

Politicians are meant to be serving the people, not themselves and their wealthy masters.

The reality is that the only purpose politicians really seem to serve is to keep the people divided. As long as the people are focused on their differences and their divisions, the wealthiest in society will be left free to continue grabbing even more of the wealth for themselves as the rest of the people become poorer and angrier at each other and even more easily divided.

The people at the top of our societies encourage division between us because they know that as long as we’re focused on attacking each other, we’ll leave them alone. Leave them to cream off as much wealth as possible while many at the bottom of society struggle to afford even the basics we all need to live just a simple existence.

Far too many of us embrace this spirit of hate and nastiness that they push on us. Aren’t you tired of living in a world where everyone seems to think we should all say whatever we want⁶, and the nastier the better? If we continue to stand divided, one day all of those at the bottom of society’s pyramid will fall together and hand everything to just the few at the top of society.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

As long as we live in a democracy, we have the power to change things. And that is key as across Europe and in the US we can see movement to more extreme political positions. It’s understandable when decades of more conciliatory and centrist governments have left the weakest and poorest in our societies worse off than their parents and grandparents.

But history tells us more extreme governments don’t make for more equal societies, quite the opposite in fact. They’re the stepping stone that so often takes our societies away from democracy towards autocracy and once that step is taken, the stepping stone is removed. Once we lose our democratic rights, we’re no longer people, we’re just assets owned by the leaders.

72% of the world’s population already live in a country without full democratic rights. Remember the trend is moving towards less democratic countries, with 1.6 billion people losing freedoms this century alone. You don’t want to join that group, do you?

It is much easier to lose democracy than it is to win it. We don’t have to do anything to lose democracy. Literally, all we have to do is nothing.

On the other hand though, anyone who has fought for democracy will tell you the cost is massive and we have to pay the price whether the fight is successful or a failure.

In 1989, 1,000s of Chinese people occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing during protests seeking democratic change in the country. The violent response of the Chinese government led to the deaths of 218 civilians according to their official figures. Other unofficial death tolls range from the low hundreds up to more than 3,000 civilians killed.⁷

In Iran during the last third of 2022, many Iranians protested for greater freedoms following the killing of Mahsa Amini by state officials. The number of deaths among the protestors is unclear, but more than 400 people have been documented as killed for protesting during those few months, with the figure possibly much higher.⁸

Much of Myanmar’s recent history has been under the control of autocratic military regimes. Following the military retaking total control of the government in 2021, protests turned into a civil war that is still raging as the people attempt to overthrow the military government. To date, it’s believed that more than 50,000 people have lost their lives in the violence.⁹

The 3.5% rule is a concept developed by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J Stephan based on research of non-violent protests from 1900 through to the early noughties.¹⁰

Put simply, they found that protests against regimes that mobilised 3.5% of the population at the peak of protest were almost always successful in achieving regime change.

The “almost” is important. It’s not a hard and fast rule, as evidenced by Brunei in 1962 and Bahrain in 2011 and a few years following, but it serves as a strong indicator of the strength of people when they come together aiming for a shared goal.

It’s important to note that the research was focused upon maximalist protests, basically all or nothing movements aimed at bringing down autocratic regimes. And also that in a world where social media makes quickly mobilising people easier, the 3.5% threshold may no longer hold firm as many of those mobilised may not be as passionately invested in the cause. Still, it’s hard to imagine that the threshold for effecting change isn’t still just a relatively small fraction of the population and a long way away from requiring a majority to stand up and take action.

The Millennials generation in the UK makes up about 21.5% of the population, based on 2021 figures.¹¹ Granted, some of the oldest members of that group are knocking on a bit and may not be up for a bit of social revolution on a Saturday afternoon. Not to worry though, Zoomers form about 21% of the population and should be feeling plenty angry to have stuff to protest about.

In the USA, the Millennial and Generation Z generations make up 21.67% and 20.88% of the population respectively.¹²

You’ve clearly got the numbers on your side. I’m sure that’s hugely reassuring that you can afford a bit of inaction today because if the sheep really do hit the fan, peaceful protest will undo the damage. Possibly. Perhaps.

Still, while that may be the case, do you really want to be one of the names on a Wikipedia page that shares your age and where and how you were killed as you protested for democratic rights for you and your family, friends and neighbours?

Wouldn’t it be better not to get into that situation in the first place?

So, who should Americans choose out of geriatric egoist B and geriatric egoist T?

ƪ(◑︹◐)ʃ

But, that said, they shouldn’t overlook the potential long-term implications of making a poor choice.

Do you agree that it comes down to picking the option that today seems to present the least threat to the freedom of the next generation of Americans?

The Republican party have largely spent the last four years recklessly denying the last election result knowing that there’s no proof for their claims. If they’re rewarded for years of undermining the trust of Americans in the electoral system, is it just going to turn into a race to the bottom with the Democrats?

Both parties are as susceptible as each other. As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche warned, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”

And as easy as it is to pin the blame for the current state of US politics solely on Trump and the Republican Party, the move to partisanism goes back further than that. It’s easy to trace it back at least to Clinton’s presidency in the 1990s, though US historians might go further back still, when most Democratic Representatives and all Senators put the party before the people. Trump just accelerated a drift that had long been in motion.

Should politicians from both sides take ever bolder steps away from democracy, their race for power will actually be a race to the inevitable intervention of the US military, as they, despite their own internal ideological divisions, step in to save the Republic. Ultimately, I trust in the military’s discipline to win out and keep the US from full on civil war despite the country having a population so well equipped for such a situation. And then the only question will be is that intervention to allow a reset to save democracy or will they decide democracy is too dangerous for this new, modern world?

They say power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which doesn’t sound too encouraging. And for whatever claims supporters of such an intervention may make, the Roman emperor Cincinnatus is the exception that proves the rule that there’s no such thing as a benevolent dictator. They only look benevolent for as long as they’re doing what you want them to.

And sadly, where America leads, the world, well the English-speaking part at least, tends to follow.

Is that all a bit melodramatic? Perhaps. Hopefully. Clearly, I don’t have a crystal ball and I’m sure many would claim such suggestions are plain ridiculous. I can’t really argue against that and I hope history conspires to prove them right and make me look like an overexcited dickhead, in this context anyway.

In the same way some will claim that many of the things I’ve told you are naive and even simply wrong. Again, I’m not going to waste my breath arguing against such claims. I know I’m fallible and will make mistakes.

Errare humanum est

Or in plain English, it’s human to cock stuff up. We do it all the time, except I know I haven’t done it all the time in this book. It doesn’t matter what this expert on this subject or that great authority on that subject say, the simple truth remains that we live in societies that are becoming savagely unequal.

There can simply be no justification for the poorest 50% of any population to possess just 2.5% of the wealth and for many to struggle to pay for basic human essentials when the wealthiest have more than they could spend in multiple lifetimes.

Listen to those who criticise me if you wish, but know they seek to divide us to hurt us both.

And keep in mind that when they tell you that this is wrong or that is wrong, well they would say that, wouldn’t they. They don’t want you thinking differently to how they need you to think.

Anyway, assuming that you and I and the American people can become and stay united in order to ensure we maintain our free and democratic societies, then we can take the opportunity to make our societies less unequal.

Time To Reduce Inequality

No-one needs a Rolls Royce when a Ford will get them from A to B. It’s just about status and appearing better than others. It’s a bit pathetic, but it’s human nature and we just have to accept that’s how we’re wired. I’ve never even sat in a Roller, let alone owned one, but as a young man I did drive a few fancier motors and while they afforded rather less status, I still enjoyed the status they did offer.

In the earlier part of my career I left one company for one of their clients, jumping from a fairly lowly position to a rather more senior position. I recall paying a visit to the old company. Prior to that occasion, the security guard manning the office had always been quite high and mighty with me. On this occasion though, he positively sprinted out of his office and nearly saluted as he insisted on opening up the executive parking to find me a spot. The difference in attitude seemingly only because I was driving a brand new Mercedes. I rather enjoyed that moment and while I like to believe I’m beyond that now, I wonder…

Mind you, you have to pick the right brand of motor to get that kind of respect. I recall another occasion with a friend who’d just fulfilled his dream of buying a Ferrari Testarossa, like the one Crockett drove in Miami Vice, only in red. As we waited to pull out of a junction, the driver of a passing car slowed down, wound down his window and, while giving a one-fingered salute, shouted “oi, banker” or something similar.

“How does he know you?” I asked my friend, just as another car slowed down and the driver shouted “arsehat”. “Gosh, you seem to know everyone,” I said as a third car slowed and the silver-haired lady in the passenger seat shouted “tosser.”

“Don’t worry, that one’s for me,” and shouting now,” I’ll pick you up tomorrow at nine for your appointment granny.”

“Dickhead,” shouted the driver of another passing car. “Pretty sure that one’s for you, though.”

Quite an illuminating drive that turned out to be. A lot of people really do not like Ferrari drivers.

Anyway, we have to accept that if we really want less inequality, we have to do as much as possible to use human nature to our advantage and not try and force behaviours that are unnatural.

People don’t need a Rolls Royce, but most of us love the idea of owning one.

We’ve established that communism doesn’t work because everyone wants more status than those around them. No-one wants a Lada, we all want a Rolls Royce. If we want less inequality, we need to accept and even embrace it. Embrace the desire for status and accept a degree of inequality. A large degree of inequality, in fact.

So obviously not everyone can have a Roller, but do you think everyone should have a Ford? Last year, the YouGov site published the results of a survey of British people asking about what things they thought different sections of society should be able to afford. I personally found some of the opinions quite eye-opening.¹³

Pretty much a quarter felt it was reasonable if people who weren’t working and receiving benefits couldn’t afford to pay for electricity, gas and water. Fudge me, that’s a bit extreme, isn’t it? Though, perhaps more remarkably, 2% thought it reasonable if only the wealthiest members of society could afford to pay for those things. My gut says that Molly Valance woman identifies with that group.

Some of the other findings surprised me too, such as more than a quarter believing it’s okay if the out of work can’t afford a healthy diet or non-designer clothes, which I guess means any kind of clothes. Do they expect people to wander around naked? And almost half were happy if they couldn’t afford to pay for an internet connection at home (which surely must be an essential service nowadays, especially if you’re looking for a job) or even rent a home.

Maybe I’m just a soft touch, though I guess the fella with a pot of coins who stands outside the supermarket and doesn’t have a card reader wouldn’t agree, but I do feel all members of society should have access to the essential basics, though we may need to debate as to what those basics are.

Which leads us to a possible explanation for results in that survey that seem surprising to me. Without seeing the questions, it’s clear from the results there was some vagueness in play. My view of who the wealthiest Britons are and yours could be very different. The survey doesn’t tell us how the wealthiest group is defined. Is it the wealthiest 49% or just the top 1%? Clearly different interpretations make for very different results.

Also, this looks like the kind of survey where it would be very easy to push the results in different directions by framing the questions in different ways.

Looking at the results created though, doesn’t it make the respondents appear a bit nasty? If so, it may be a testament to what a good job the wealthy do of victim shaming and blaming the poorest and most vulnerable in society. In effect, it’s their own fault that they’re poor and so they don’t deserve any help. If they weren’t so lazy, they could help themselves.

By pushing the belief that the fault for being poor lies with the poor, rather than society, it conditions us to accept policies that result in increasing inequalities. We’re trained to see these people as lazy and deliberately avoiding work, where in reality very few people really don’t want to work. Life is hugely unfulfilling with no sense of purpose and even the unsexiest of jobs offer that. They also generally bring human contact into people’s lives, which even someone as unsocial as me can appreciate is generally a positive.

The people in the poorest segment of society are not to blame for being there, the way society operates is the cause.

But whether we accept the claim or not, the argument can be simplified to “people don’t deserve to receive income for no work.” Does that sound like a fair simplification?

Yes, it does, doesn’t it?

So by that measure anyone using their existing wealth to generate more wealth through passive actions, such as interest on savings and share dividends is receiving income for doing no work. We established a scant few paragraphs ago that the wealthy are particularly strong advocates against income for no work. Undoubtedly they will also be the biggest supporters of a 100% tax rate on earnings the wealthy receive without working for it.

You’re not going to feel bad about that, are you? Remember earlier we considered the two types of wealth that exist in our societies. The wealth generating more wealth from no work is the non-productive wealth that offers no benefit to the rest of society. In fact, it harms society by shuttering off vast amounts of money that the wealthy don’t need and don’t use. In effect, its only practical purpose is keeping score in the contest of who’s the most successful.

That comes from the horse’s mouth, well the mouth of very multi-billionaire Bill Gates anyway, who said “Think of business as a good game. Lots of competition and a minimum of rules. You keep score with money.” And if that sounds familiar, it’s a rejig of a quote from the American oil tycoon H.L. Hunt that featured earlier, so obviously this isn’t an uncommon view among the wealthy.

So if that money is just benefiting one person and hurting everyone else, doesn’t a natural sense of justice almost give us fair cause to tax it heavily?

In 1944, the top rate of tax in the US was at 94%.¹⁴ Obviously, that was a result of a second world war in the space of a few decades, but it shows that tax rates can be pushed to very high levels when there’s a good reason.

Isn’t giving even the poorest members of society a guarantee that they will have a home and be able to feed themselves healthily every day, etc, etc a good reason?

And the tax rates probably wouldn’t need to reach that kind of level, even for non-productive wealth. Wars, well the blockbuster ones anyway, are mind-bendingly expensive. Making our societies a little less unfair and little less unequal will be expensive, but on a very different level.

As an added carrot, applying taxes at different rates for income from productive and non-productive wealth offers the wealthy the opportunity to move to a lower tax rate by simply being more of a team player in terms of society.

Right now, society gives a lot more to the wealthy, relatively, than it gives to the poorest. As they’re getting more, they need to pay more. That’s only fair.

If the wealthy are already feeling a bit queasy with this obscene talk of taxing them, perhaps now is the time to consider wealth taxes and get all the nausea inducing ideas out of the way in one go. Most taxes we pay either get us when we earn income or when we spend it.

The former is going to have no effect on wealth that has already been accumulated and the wealthy spend a pretty penny for experts to help them pay as little of the latter too.

Wealth tax is intended to address the first of these two issues and recently a report was published looking into one way that could possibly play out.¹⁵

The world has an astonishing number of billionaires right now, yet like most of the very wealthy, they don’t seem to pay taxes at anything like the levels, relatively speaking, that the poorest in society do. A study commissioned by the Brazilian government has described how countries working together could levy a wealth tax on billionaires that would net up to $250 billion a year.¹⁶

That sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?

In practice though, isn’t this one of those situations where it clearly is a lot of money, but also isn’t a lot really? With a global population of eight billion people, that’s barely a little more than $31 each. Sure, $31 goes further in some countries than others, but can you imagine it really making any noticeable difference to the huge inequality in wealth?

The report intended that the billionaires would pay at least 2% of their wealth annually in tax. So if someone had exactly $1 billion, they’d pay $20 million and would still be a gnat’s chuff within being a billionaire. Except they’d actually have more than $1 billion. The first search I did for best interest rates found an account offering an APY of 5.55%. If they paid their $20 million at the start of the year, over the course of the year they’d still earn more than $54 million making them worth $1.03439 billion.

Is it me or does that report just look like a bit of smoke and mirrors on behalf of the heffalumps? It’s effect would be to slightly slow down the rate that inequality will grow, not actually stop and reverse it. They’re just taking the pigs, aren’t they?

So, what rate of tax should be applied to the wealth of billionaires? What do you think? I ask because I’m not sure myself.

How about a wealth tax rate of 0%. Yeah, no wealth tax at all. Agreed, that does sound a bit odd after everything I’ve said up to now, but give me a moment. I’m not suggesting they don’t pay tax on their wealth, just that they pay differently.

Firstly, tax productive wealth at one rate and non-productive wealth at a higher rate. And that latter rate should be as high as it needs to be to ensure everyone in society can afford the basic human essentials. Some people will be generating both types of wealth, so perhaps those successful entrepreneurs generating the greatest benefits for society could also receive credits that reduce their non-productive tax rates.

Once society has enough wealth to ensure that every member is properly looked after, then the wealthy should be free to accumulate as much wealth as they can and want, but only when that has been achieved.

Yes, I know the wealthy are already meant to pay taxes on their earnings, so it’s not groundbreaking, though income from non-productive wealth often seems to be taxed lower so we’d be changing that, though the real issue is ensuring all due taxes are paid. We’ll get to that later.

The Incredible Inheritance Tax Con Trick

Secondly, place an absolute cap on the amount of wealth that can be passed on after death. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve read or heard the claim that inheritance tax (estate tax in the US) is the most hated tax. It’s repeated across pretty well every outlet and channel, regardless of whether their bias is to the right, left or centre. That claim is complete bullsheep.

In the UK’s tax year ending in 2022, about 4% of deaths led to inheritance tax¹⁷, while in the US, less than 2% of deaths led to estate tax being paid¹⁸.

So the taxes only affect a very tiny minority, yet in the UK 56% of people support abolishing inheritance tax¹⁹ and 54% of Americans support getting rid of estate tax²⁰.

Don’t those figures look utterly remarkable to you?

Remember, every year more than 96% of deaths in the UK don’t incur inheritance tax and more than 98% of deaths in the US don’t incur estate tax. Hardly anyone is affected by these taxes, yet more than half of Britons and Americans want to scrap their respective tax. Not just reduce it a little bit, but do away with it completely because they think it’s so unfair.

Hardly anyone pays these taxes, so why on earth should they be so unpopular?

Monkey see, monkey do. We are still monkeys underneath, no matter how smart we think we are.

It’s another typical part of human nature. A lot earlier, when we were talking about truth and lies, we saw that one reason for lies growing into truths is because people repeat them without checking them. We all want others to see us as a source of knowledge, as an authority, because it gives us status.

Almost all of us have absolutely no experience of inheritance or estate tax. So if we ever get asked about it, say in a survey asking if we’d like to abolish it, we’ve got no personal point of reference to comment on it. But we don’t want to look uninformed and fortunately we do have someone else’s point of reference and so we share that.

Newspapers and privately owned news websites, TV and radio channels are invariably owned by wealthy people. Many are owned by heffalumps with immense wealth while the rest are owned by companies that pay dividends to their wealthy shareholders. These are the people who do have to pay tax when they die and they don’t like it. They can get politicians to do many things for them, but what politician is going to risk getting re-elected to cut a tax that only affects a few very wealthy people?

So the media owners use their position of privilege to educate their readers and viewers into believing that inheritance and estate taxes are obscene and unfair taxes. And my hasn’t it worked out rather well?

One of the common complaints against inheritance tax is that wealth is being taxed twice.

That’s sadly hilarious. It would be true if the people paying these taxes were the poorest members of society, but it only affects the wealthiest. We saw a long time ago that they already pay tax at much lower rates than the workers. The wealthy avoid paying their fair share of taxes in life and quite brilliantly, they’ve convinced most of us that they shouldn’t have to pay tax in death either.

Bravo! Honestly, don’t you just want to stand up and break into spontaneous applause to recognise the absolute genius of that?

I suggest that there are two possible things wrong with inheritance and estate taxes.

The less extreme view is that it’s a disgrace that the rates are so low.

The more extreme view is that it’s a disgrace the wealthy are able to pass on their wealth at all.

How Inherited Wealth Steals The Next Generations’ Futures

On the surface, that second view may look a bit extreme, but is it really? Humans started farming about 12,000 years ago opening the possibility of producing surplus amounts of food with greater repeatability than was ever possible for their hunter/forager predecessors. With the development of farming grains that could be stored for extended periods, for the first time in human history, they could quite reliably produce surplus amounts of food that could also be transported for sale, harvest after harvest.

Let’s picture a town of 1,000 people 9,000 years ago in what is now Syria. There are 100 parcels of equally fertile land producing grain for the town, with surplus produce transported and sold in the nearest city. If all things were equal, the surplus that this society produces would be evenly distributed between the 100 families that own the plots of land.

However, some of the farmers work harder or better understand how to get the maximum yields from their land every year. Some may even work harder and have better knowledge. This means the surpluses are no longer evenly distributed between the 100 families and over the course of some years, this leads to some farmers having the wealth to buy some of the other parcels of land.

So after a generation, perhaps now 90 families own the 100 parcels of land and the society’s surplus is now shared between those 90 families. Some of the other 10 families may be employed to work on the land still and some of their members will have had to find other jobs to earn income.

For simplicity, let’s say 10 families now own two parcels of land and 80 own one.

Across the course of another generation, the families with two parcels will be able to generate greater surpluses more easily than the other families, leading to even more wealth for them. Of course, it’s still possible for farmers with one parcel to work harder and more effectively to produce greater surpluses.

After a second generation, we now have 10 families that own four parcels of land each, five families that own 2 parcels and 50 that own one. The families that had a head start were able to capitalise on that and double their wealth. It was still possible for other families to grow their wealth, but the power of the wealthy families made that harder, so only five new families were able to grow their wealth during that generation.

Within two generations, this society has seen the surplus go from being owned equally by all members to 50% of the surplus being owned by just 15 families. Those who own and sell the surplus are the ones who can grow their own wealth.

While simplistic, if we continue for another generation, it’s easy to see how 10 families could own 80 parcels of land and five families own the other 20 parcels. In just three generations, 15 families captured all of the surplus wealth from their society, leaving 85 other families with no share of the surplus.

During the first and second generations, it was possible for hard work and expertise to capture a share of the surplus, but by the third generation, the only thing that affected capturing wealth was whether a family already owned a greater share of the society’s surplus.

If we carried on for future generations, we’d see the number of families sharing the surplus would shrink as more effective farmers and tradespeople in some families were able to buy land from competing families, but eventually, with the land and surplus held by just a few wealthy families, pretty well any sheep-dip stupid offspring inheriting the wealth would still be able to enjoy the benefits of it and retain it to pass it onto their children.

As children, we’re told that if we work hard we can achieve anything, but that simply isn’t true. Some of the hardest-working people in our societies are at the bottom in terms of wealth. They have no choice but to work hard to feed and care for their families. Similarly, the most bone-idle people in society can invariably be found at the top of the pyramid where the hard work of ancestors has put them in a position to live a privileged life they couldn’t have achieved for themselves.

Does that feel fair to you?

It weakens society too as it handicaps each new generation of entrepreneurs who aren’t born with the privilege of wealth.

This is the argument against allowing wealth to be passed on to future generations. It would prevent wealth from being concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller number of people as time goes on and make it easier for the greatest of every generation to help grow their society based on their merits, rather than access to those benefits being based on the merits of their ancestors.

Of course, every parent wants to give their children as much security as possible, but how much wealth should people be able to pass on? Remember we saw earlier that the average American earns $1.7 million over their lifetime and the average Briton earns £566,000. So anyone inheriting that amount would immediately be better off than average as they’ve received a lifetime’s average earnings without having to work for it.

Does that seem like a fair amount, not enough or still too unequal when compared to those who won’t inherit anything? I personally don’t have a problem with it being higher, despite it being unfair in relation to others of their generation, as long as the system really works. No gifting of wealth by the living without at least a significant level of tax being applied. That indicates the problem of any tax system, formulating something that should work and then making it work.

But if it could be made to work, then resetting the distribution of most wealth with each generation would give everyone the best chance of achieving their full potential which would also lead to more prosperous societies.

To add some more context, the wealthiest 10% of Americans own $95 trillion.²¹ If the wealth they left after their death was taxed at just 66%, it would wipe out the entire US debt²² in a single generation and leave more than enough for everyone in the US to have a 10-year federal income tax holiday²³ and the inheritors of the top 10% would still own more than seven times as much wealth as the poorest 50% of Americans. Win win win, surely.

Fairer taxation in the drive for less unequal societies will be a bitter pill for the wealthy to swallow, but I’m sure that if enough smart people think about it for long enough, they’ll come up with both carrots and sticks that could encourage participation.

Bill Gates and H.L. Hunt have already told us that once you acquire so much wealth, the purpose of money is little more than to keep score. People can only spend so much every year and even if they’re running a private jet, once their big expenses like houses and cars are out of the way, they’re probably not spending as much money as we might imagine. In effect, wealth is being used to show status, both in the ranking in rich lists, but also to purchase silly money items that do exactly the same job as items that cost a fraction of the price.

Status comes in other forms too. Just think of the Met Gala every year when bizarrely the opportunity to dress like a dick (literally in some cases) offers the attendees huge status. The opportunity to knock about with famous faces is irresistible to many it seems.

The UK has its honours system which recognises the positive acts of people at all levels of society. It gives the recipients a title that they can use with their name and it’s just another way of giving people status. We recalled Nadine Dorries above and her complaint about MPs losing their livelihood, but apparently the main driver behind her mega-strop was not receiving a peerage. Titles and honours are clearly attractive to famous and wealthy people and they always get the best ones. The top of the tree would be a knighthood, like the one awarded to the Egyptian businessman Mohamed Mansour, who donated £5 million to the Conservative party.²⁴

The Conservative Party have been very clear that there’s no connection between the donation and the award. I personally don’t believe that for one second. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that there was any tacit agreement where Mansour was told a donation of £5 million would be rewarded with a knighthood. However, the power of reciprocity is clearly known. If someone gave you £5 million, wouldn’t you want to demonstrate very clearly just how grateful you were? I know I would. It’s different though when a political party accepts a huge amount of money and less than a year later reciprocates by giving an award in the capacity of the British government that very few receive.

It smells off, but I bring it up not because of that, but because it does illustrate that titles and public honours are attractive to many people and do have very real value.

Why should only rockstars like U2, Coldplay and The Foo Fighters be treated like rockstars? Being treated like a star is the ultimate dream for so many people, so why not recognise the people who contribute the most to society as stars? Politicians may try and set the best conditions for a strong economy, but it’s the entrepreneurs at all levels who actually generate the money that our societies rely on. Don’t underestimate the power of status. If a big tax bill means they get treated like a big deal, paying tax will look like a sound investment to many people.

Do you remember we did the sums comparing the wealth generated by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and Donald Trump? Bezos’ success made Trump look like a bum selling tissues at traffic lights – he’d have been more successful financially if he’d had the smarts to put his money in a savings account.

Bezos, though, I mean, seriously, what a guy! As long as he and others like him are using their wealth to support the societies that support them, why can’t we do more to recognise their value?

And it is in his interest to support society. After all, society is protecting his immense wealth from anyone else just taking it. In that regard, he’s getting much more benefit from society’s rule of law protecting all the wealth he’s accumulated than you and I get. Paying a realistic amount for that protection isn’t unreasonable, is it?

I appreciate he keeps himself fit and could definitely whip me in a fight, but if I had my neighbour, Conchita “The Beater” de Marichalar García, with me, his arse would be grass and I’d be the cow chewing the cud. Well, okay Conchita would be on cud-chewing duty, she’s actually got a bit of a creepy thing going on for Bezos (I fear for Lauren Sánchez if she ever visits Spain), but you get the idea. I mean, seriously, she may be 79, but just look at her…no, careful, don’t look her in the eye. What are you doing? I said DON’T look her in the eye.

With Conchita by my side, I could take the wealth of any billionaire I wanted. Conchita and I don’t do that, however, because the laws of our democratic Western societies say taking someone else’s property is a crime. The fear of being caught and locked up in a cell with Conchita is enough to guarantee I stick to the straight and narrow.

If you ever drive past a private gated community, a residential area where only the residents are allowed access, you can be sure to see a sign warning about security. The wealthy understand the concept of paying for security to protect their property. We just need to clarify how society also protects their property and that doesn’t come free either.

But in addition, we’ll be also giving them status through the recognition of their contributions.

I know that may sound like a bit of a flight of fancy, but human nature is a funny thing and gaining the legal right to be addressed with some fancy title that marks them out as someone special will be astonishingly appealing to many.

In addition, people smarter than me need to clearly explain the moral argument for reducing inequality within societies. People are people and while we’re mostly programmed to want as much as possible for ourselves, we’re also mostly programmed to understand right and wrong. We need to ensure a strong and persistent reminder of why the wealthy need to pay more than they want to ensure the stability of society. People always seem to rally to donate to good causes when a crisis emerges. We need to evoke the same desire to help to prevent the crises arising in the first place.

Of course, all of this won’t be fool-proof, but carrots, the metaphorical ones anyway, generally come with sticks too.

Freedom Is Just Chaos, With Better Lighting

That heading is a quote from the American writer Alan Dean Foster who, judging by his Wikipedia page, has kept himself busy.

Anyway, I interpret that to mean that when we’re free it may appear as if all is under control, but the reality is anything can happen. It’s understandable that some people don’t like uncertainty and would feel happier living a more regular and ordered life. Mrs Forclift would tell you I’m one of those people, though I’m not sure that I agree.

I’m absolutely certain that the vast majority of the more than a million Uyghurs reported to be in detention in China would prefer chaos.²⁵ They’re not detained in prisons for committing crimes, they’re detained simply because they’re Uyghurs. The Chinese government wants to force them to lose their Uyghur identities so that they are more like the rest of China’s homogenised population.

Oh, the joys of life in a country where you have no democratic rights and the leaders can literally do whatever they want to you.

Anyway, the point I want you to consider is that chaos isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, the late Indian billionaire Rakesh Jhunjhunwala reportedly said that “Growth comes from chaos, not order,” so, good news, there’s nothing for the heffalumps to worry about.

Throughout, I’ve repeated the fact that in the US, the poorest 50% of the people possess just 2.5% of all the wealth. While Europeans are doing a little better with the poorest 40% owning 3% of the wealth and the poorest half of Britons owning almost 6% of the wealth, they’re still not stats to celebrate, are they?

We can change our societies in any way that we want, but only as long as they remain free and democratic. As long as it’s in that state, we can nominate and vote for representatives who will stop those at the top hoovering up more and unnecessary wealth until those at every other level of society have the essentials of human life first.

For centuries the political parties of the UK and the USA and basically every other democratic country have put the interests of the wealthy first and above the interests of the general population.

That’s never going to change. If you’re a diehard supporter of the British Conservative, Labour or Liberal Democrat parties or you’re solidly behind the American Republican or Democratic parties, you’re voting to keep things the same. You’re voting to make the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer.

They don’t care about the general population, they only care about themselves. They care only about protecting the wealthy, either because they are wealthy or in the hope that the wealthy will return the favour. They’ve always been that way and they always will.

Every time we cast a vote for one of those of those parties we’re just figuratively punching ourselves in the face. And don’t misunderstand me and think I’m advocating for newer more extreme parties pushing to the fringes of the political spectrum. They may claim to be the agents of change, but the change they want isn’t to reduce inequality. They just want to get their own snouts into the feeding trough and wallow around in the swamp with the heffalumps.

I briefly mentioned the new British MP Nigel Farage earlier, the leader of the Reform Party. You remember, the funny-looking fella from Men in Black who faps over Vladimir Putin because he rules over Russia with an iron fist having destroyed true democracy in the country. He’s been clear that he admires Putin because of how he took control of Russia and also seems to believe we in the West should look away and let Putin take away the independence and democratic freedoms of the 44 million Ukrainian citizens.

What kind of changes do you think he’d like to make to the political system in the UK if he had the chance? He seems to make a lot of noise about Muslims stealing the country and the evils of immigration, but I don’t recall him making any kind of suggestion that he wants to reduce inequality.

The only thing that ever reverses inequality is chaos. For large parts of the last century, the US and most European countries saw wealth inequality reduce. That was the result of the chaos born out of two world wars little more than 20 years apart that collectively led to more than 100 million deaths.

Another parent of chaos, the Black Death, potentially killed as many as 50% of Europe’s population in the 14th century leading to another drop in social inequality.

Massive chaos leads to less inequality in those societies that are affected.

I’m not suggesting we should aspire to any of those things. Mass war and plague reduce inequality because they reduce the size of the workforce and push wages up. Do you fancy sacrificing yourself for a bit less inequality for those who survive?

Don’t worry, me neither.

So why raise these different causes of chaos?

Because if you really want change, you need to turn away from the existing political parties and also new fringe parties and create your own movement with your own representatives. Representatives who will put the general population first. Even with political systems that don’t respect the popular vote, the poorest in society have the power to take control.

Just 50% of the people plus one in every constituency throws the existing order out and removes the protection that allows the wealthy to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

It’s that simple.

What happens after would be rather more complex, though.

It would be chaotic.

I’m imagining the newly elected representatives would all be independent and hadn’t formed a single party ahead of the election. For all the problems with political parties, they do bring order. Arguably too much order, but a little bit of order is necessary in government.

Without formal parties at the outset, the election of leaders may not be a smooth process. In the UK the leader of the party that won the most seats is invited to be the Prime Minister, but with no parties, that’s going to be difficult. Meanwhile, the US will have an independent President who has to work with a Congress and Senate filled with independents who need to vote for their leaders. The Republicans have spent the past 12 months showing us just how difficult that is even when you have a party with a majority.

In time, representatives will form up into groupings and possibly parties, which is arguably a great reason to not vote for any of them at the next election. So an ongoing cycle of chaos to look forward to every four or five years.

That could be a very good reason for implementing a system of government where representatives are selected completely randomly to serve for a period of time in the same way juries are selected.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves though. That’s only an issue if society can get through all of the chaos and that’s going to be made harder by many people doing everything they can to ensure it fails.

In the UK, it’s common to hear supporters of Brexit moaning about how the European Union deliberately makes many aspects of the new relationship between the two sides more difficult than it needs to be.

No sheep, Sherlock, what on earth did they expect?

Well, based on what they told the British people, they expected the EU to continue trading with the UK on the same basis as before. Basically, the UK would continue to enjoy all the benefits of being in the EU, but would not be in the EU and so would suffer none of the downsides of membership. As I believe authorities on the world of sponge and gateau say, they believed they’d be able to have their cake and eat it.

It takes a special type of jackass to be that stupid. Of course, the EU makes things difficult. They want other members to see that leaving comes with plenty of negatives to offset the positives that leavers always focus on.

And so, in a similar way, there would be plenty of people doing all they could to stir up the chaos and make it feel like an after party with Keith Moon.²⁶

The media would have an absolute field day. They love a doom-laden headline at the best of times, but this would be all their Christmases arriving at once. The owners of privately own media channels and publications are the wealthy people who would stand to lose the most from cutting the levels of inequality. They wouldn’t take it lying down and would use their power to convince the people that their lives will only get worse. Their wealth means they can afford to go on day after day, winding up the pressure in the hope if becomes unbearable and the majority break ranks.

Additionally, they’d be supported by the politicians who’d lost the privilege of serving the people, or as most of them seem to believe, lost their career and livelihood.

And we know that most of us really don’t like change, so we can probably expect much of the civil service that is meant to support the people’s representatives in governing are likely to undermine change in the hope of a return to the old normality.

Of course, most of the pressure would come from the wealthy who, like the media owners, would do all they could to convince the people that taking some of their wealth to support a fairer society for everyone would just end up hurting the poor and making them even worse off.

I read an article from The Telegraph newspaper this morning in which a British man whose business turns over £50 million per year was moaning about how he expected the new Labour government would make tax changes that would cost him millions of pounds. This prospect was described as “eye-wateringly ridiculous” and “unbelievably depressing.”²⁷

Talk about an obnoxiously self-obsessed world view. Having to pay millions in tax isn’t depressing, it means you’re absolutely minted. You and I would throw a party if we were in that position.

What’s depressing is working hard and still having to turn to the charity of food banks in order to feed your children. What’s depressing is working hard and still having the constant worry of when the next bill is going to drop through the letter box and wondering how to pay it. What’s depressing is spending years raising children, fearing that their future is going to be even more bleak and soul-destroying.

That article also took advantage to roll out the old favourite about how higher taxes will lead to wealthy non-doms leaving and taking their wealth with them. We’ve been through this already, haven’t we. They’re not going to take their wealth with them because they never brought their wealth with them in the first place. Their wealth was always elsewhere. It costs money to exchange currency, they only ever brought as much as they needed. You recall from our tear down of trickle down economics that very wealthy people offer very little benefit to society beyond creating jobs and paying taxes. Non-doms generally offer neither of those benefits to the societies they live in. Lots of people of with a little wealth offer far greater benefits.

We should note though that the article also highlights that it’s not just non-doms threatening to leave. Some British citizens are also likely to head for the hills. Like that businessman above who’s so depressed at being filthy rich.

For people with that mindset, they will see any changes to the system that favours them as open warfare. And it will be pre-emptive too. Any indication that change could be coming will result in them giving a clear demonstration of their strength and the folly of trying to take anything from them, even reasonable and proportionate amounts designed to benefit society as a whole.

It’s regularly reported that increasing certain taxes, always ones that benefit the wealthy, will actually lead to lower tax revenue and make societies worse off.

Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. We can be sure that the wealthy will do all they can to make sure it appear to be true and to damage the economy of any society that has the neck to to try and reduce inequality. If they can’t have the wealth, they won’t want anyone else to have it. Recall the businessman who was close to being a billionaire and could literally buy anything from his wildest dreams who, along with his family loved living in London. Yet he chose to move them all to another country rather than pay more tax that he could easily afford.

That’s just not logical, but seems typical for many wealthy people. What’s the point of having huge wealth if you let it control your life rather than enjoying the immense freedom it should offer. Such people are prepared to lose vast amounts to ensure they win (?) and their wealth puts them in a strong position to sustain losses and ride a sinking economy that they sabotage.

Inequality only reduces with chaos. You need to be ready to embrace chaos.

I’m sure some people could be made to see that it’s not a punitive act intended to hurt them but an act intended to strengthen society as a whole.

For those less open to reassessing their position within society, a democratically elected government has the power and freedom to pass whatever laws they consider necessary.

Why not introduce an emigration tax that needs to be paid by those moving to another country? And that can apply not just to wealth being moved out of the country at the time, but wealth already held overseas. Ensure that tax evasion is a crime and that suddenly makes any country with an extradition treaty an unattractive destination to anyone planning to avoid the tax.

That said, it’s also important to identify those who are important to society. We’ve considered productive and non-productive wealth before. The former benefits society and it’s important to recognise the owners of that wealth are important to society as a whole. More generous terms for them compared to those with non-productive wealth should be the order of the day. That doesn’t mean giving them a free pass though. Returning to the depressed multi-millionaire again, his complaint was an increase in capital gains tax would cost him millions. Capital gains is just another name for income. Why shouldn’t he be taxed on income at rates comparable to income tax rates paid by the rest of society?

The truth is, I really don’t believe we’ll ever see such chaos.

I think evolution is too strong and we saw at the beginning that we evolved to make our societies work in such a way that those at the top can take more than they will ever need, even when those at the bottom don’t have enough for just today.

You recall I’ve spoken about loss aversion a few times, how we feel loss more strongly than we feel gain. Even when life is a struggle to get by day to day, when faced with many voices insisting change will make things worse, the fear of moving from a bad situation to a worse one will be more intense than the dream of a life where there is no longer a struggle.

Such a change would require the majority of the people to have balls of brass.

We don’t and that’s why I’m sure fate has already decided that united we fall.