The downside with residing in a wealthy man’s international stage | The super-rich
The concept that the departure of the super-rich is an issue ignores a historic truth (Apparent exodus of super-rich suggests UK is no longer billionaires’ playground, 7 October). Capitalism works higher with out them. The most profitable international locations at present are states the place redistributive taxation has empowered the working plenty and offered a greater and extra secure marketplace for trade folks.
How do at present’s complaining uber-rich clarify the postwar a long time, when the highest fee of earnings tax was generally 80% or 90%, and but the interval is named a golden age of capitalism? Then Margaret Thatcher lowered the highest fee to 60% and the nation tilted into a large recession. The wealthy get to a degree the place they merely change into wealth extractors, utilizing their cash to purchase property and elevating the price of them for the remainder of us – housing being a very good instance at present.
A very good story from 1969 comes from a music author who was embedded within the Rolling Stones’ tour of America. Earwigging the band speaking about turning into tax exiles, if not on primary road, then possibly in France, he hears Charlie Watts (a non-songwriter, so much less prosperous) say that he reasonably likes his land and his home and his horses, and he wouldn’t wish to go away. Isn’t that wealthy sufficient for many of us? It’s acceptable that John Maynard Keynes is now on stage within the West End. People may keep in mind what he mentioned in regards to the risks of wealth disparity and the bubbles of hypothesis that they carry.
David Redshaw
Saltdean, East Sussex
Your report (‘I reside in Monaco’: billionaire said to have quit UK over potential wealth tax had already left, 7 October) exposes one thing way more troubling than billionaires fleeing Britain: the extraordinary energy of the super-rich to carry a whole nation hostage to the specter of their departure.
Ordinary working folks can’t relocate their tax obligations to Monaco. They pay their taxes, fund public companies and shoulder the implications of a system more and more tilted in direction of those that want its safety least. Yet we’re anticipated to tremble on the prospect of billionaires taking their fortunes elsewhere. Why? Wealth doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is constructed on a society’s employees, transport systems, establishments and alternatives.
If the wealthiest can benefit from the fruits of that society whereas escaping their justifiable share of its obligations, the scandal isn’t that they go away. It is that successive governments have allowed them to make the foundations. A rustic that can’t afford to lose its billionaires ought to ask itself why it might probably apparently afford to impoverish everybody else.
Fernando Quintana
London
