Should City Workers Voluntarily Return their Bonuses to the State?

Thank you, SuiGeneris, for acknowledging that what I am trying to get at is worth discussing. Thank you also for discussing it with me. And I also agree with you that I set entirely the wrong tone with this thread at the beginning in the mistaken belief that it would be a quick way to provoke a discussion.

Hopefully there can be some constructive discussion on this thread, now. If not, then I guess it is better to go away, as suggested, and maybe someone could start another thread another time under a less provocative title? I daren't start one myself, as I appear to have attracted the label of a City basher! Which is not what I intended to be or am.

ps sorry pagwatch. I was being lazy and making sweeping generalisations when talking about "the City," as you rightly pointed out. It's not that I don't understand that there are many different types of people in the City with different roles to play, many of which are not directly profit generating.

No, I don't. But that is what appears to be happening.

In the current economic situation, we have, effectively, to put more value on the jobs that make money, because we need as many people making money as possible at the moment. The problem is, this makes the people whose jobs are not about making money feel undervalued and underpaid.

What can we do about peoples' feelings? That's all I'm trying to say. We shouldn't refuse to acknowledge their feelings, because that just makes them angry. The status quo may be quite logical, but it just doesn't feel fair to many people and they need to understand why unfair is fair.

Or, try thinking of it another way. The free market says that the wealthiest bankers make the most money for their bosses, so deserve to earn the most. Fair enough.

The free market also says that hospital cleaners are ten-a-penny, because their job does not require great skill and therefore they get paid very little. But if a group of hospital cleaners do their jobs very badly, they could effectively be responsible for the deaths of many people. In other words, the free market hasn't done a good job of assessing the true worth of the job in question - by paying so little, it has attracted people with no motivation to do the best job they can and with no understanding of why their job is so important. They assess their value by the amount they are paid, because that is what the market does.

So, sometimes the free market is wrong. Can you really blame people for feeling a little bit angry when, from their perspective, some very wealthy bankers in the past have been paid colossal bonuses for illusory profits? And that when these profits turned out to be illusory, they refused to give the money back and refused to be sacked??? If a social worker made mistake after mistake over a long period of time and her mistakes resulted in lots of children suffering at the hands of their parents, what would you think? Should you be constructive, accept that she did not mean to make those mistakes and try to help her learn from them for the future, or should you get very cross with her, tell her she is useless and then sack her?

I personally think that both with bankers and social workers, we should try to be a bit more understanding. It's not as if the bankers realised their profits were illusory (I hope!). I'm just questioning, though, whether some of us have double standards in the way we treat each other.

Maybe it was simply the fact I put this under politics? It's just that I wasn't sure where else to start it. There isn't a section on self enlightenment.

So, does anyone feel like they understand me, yet, or do you still feel like I'm a misguided idiot who thinks bonuses should be returned to HMRC? It would be nice to know (I think...). Is it acceptable to want to use other people to understand yourself?

So, I've looked through this thread again and I see that I repeated ad nauseam that I did not necessarily actually believe that bankers should give their bonuses back, I just started the thread like that to provoke discussion. Yet people keep dragging it back to the lowest common denominator, as though they don't believe that I don't believe it.

I think pagwatch is right that, despite how much fun it could be, I can't get people to read things carefully enough on here to understand, and people are all too happy to jump to conclusions in order to reinforce their own opinions rather than question them.

Maybe, MadameCastafiore, I should be laughing at your husband for thinking that all mumsnet is is a forum for a bunch of women to give their opinions, rather than a forum for self-discovery. Perhaps he should try out the latter himself!!!!!

And yes, I know that is a bit offensive, but then so is laughing at something you don't understand. He was offended by my apparent lack of understanding and I am offended by his. Perhaps you could ask him to read this?

Which has trapped me back in the political argument I thought I was avoiding! So I've used this thread to think about two different ideas.

And another way I try to square the circle is to believe that the City is necessary, but that the principles behind the City do not sit well in the running of the NHS or other state organisations, where other principles also have to apply, not just money-making ones. In other words, I think the philosophy of the City has spread its tentacles too far.

ps my dh and I have radically differing political views. I still live in hypocrisy with him and love him!

Or you could say, I agree that most of the wealth has been generated by the City in this country for a very long time. I just don't like that fact and think that maybe there could be an alternative. It's not as if all wealthy countries have that dynamic.

So, yes, I feel I actually have a good grip on the economy and how money is spent. I just disagree on the current balance in the economy and who has the most power in the argument. I don't like people being so sure of their opinions, because I am not so sure of mine and an absolute certainty in the validity of your position strikes me as being a little bit self-deluded.

I want to question my views and where they come from. Some people are happy not to.

I now know what my problem is - I worked in the City when I didn't believe in what I was working towards, so felt like a hypocrite. In other words, I disliked myself for doing it. There is no problem working in the City if you believe what you are doing. In other words, my opinions were too socialist for that environment. I therefore feel angry at myself for doing it just because that was where I could get the best salary. So, in effect, I dislike people like myself.

MadameCasafiore - I don't have an argument, I'm just admitting to having a whole set of value judgments that I had intended to leave out of this conversation. And at no point have I ever blamed people - I started out the thread to make people think about why they were blaming people, so that we could come to a better understanding of why we are doing that, and I have achieved that. You are still arguing about something that doesn't interest me! That doesn't mean it is wrong for you to argue about it, as it quite validly questions my position and where I am coming from and has helped me understand what I was trying to understand when I started this thread.

Which probably does spread to wider society, but I guess I'm making a value judgment about the worth of people who move money around without creating anything physical, which is again a judgment that shouldn't have been included in this argument. In other words, I even hijacked my own original idea when I started arguing about the details with people.