Do you believe that rich people should exist?

[Bumpitybumper]

Having read lots of threads on here, I am starting to wonder about the proportion of people that believe that rich people shouldn't exist at all and that policies should be enacted to ensure a more or less even distribution of wealth.

So out of interest and just to satisfy my curiosity please vote:
YABU - there shouldn't be rich people in this country and that wealth should be distributed evenly to the extent that people aren't significantly richer than others.
YANBU - rich people are a necessary (and potentially even desirable) part of society

If you don’t have rich people economies collapse. Communism doesn’t work.
i think the issue we all want addressed is that no one should live in absolute poverty and children should not be hungry in this day and age.

If the rich gain advantage because of their wealth, who do you think is losing out? It’s not ‘politics of envy’ to think people shouldn’t be able to buy life advantages.

Billionaires should not exist - that level of wealth can only be accumulated by exploitation of someone else’s labour. And no one needs billions.

If you are not happy in a free western ( but not perfect) nation I was very happy in a free western but imperfect nation 50 years ago. The gap between average CEO and average worker was about 25 times. Now it's well over 100 times.

Poor people aren't poor because of the wealth of rich people. That's not entirely true. The other problem with extreme wealth is that it buys you the ear of the governing party, and the means to influence who will form the governing party, and hence the means to ensure that more of the wealth of the nation flows upwards rather than downwards.

This is a false dichotomy. The objection is to the ever-increasing disparity in wealth, which is not a given, even under capitalism.

I can't help but agree with you!
Extremes of wealth, concentrations of wealth and power are very damaging to society. These are very difficult problems to solve.

I don't think everything is a zero sum game.

If enough people want to pay for their healthcare then private hospitals will be built which add additional facilities that wouldn't otherwise exist. Doctors and medical staff will be incentivised to work more than they otherwise would have done because the money is so good.

In these kinds of scenarios who loses out? Additional capacity has been created because they have devoted more resources to it but the existing capacity hasn't decreased

Because I think think they are basic human rights and needs to create a just and fair society. Nice bags and holidays are not.

I think there has to be wealthy people for a country to thrive.

There are many tasks like picking fruit and working on a production line in a factory where the amount of value a human's effort for one hour barely manages to create £10 of value for the business. There is an infinite supply of people to do the job so there's no incentive for the business to raise salaries and raise the prices of their final products because it is more appropriate to pay minimum wage and not care if an employee leaves as they can be replaced.

There are other jobs where each hour of effort creates many hundreds or even thousands of pounds of value for the business. The skills and experience needed are in limited supply so there's a constant pressure for those salaries to rise and any business refusing to keep pace will lose employees and have unfillable vacancies and stop making a profit.

To make a more equal society you would need to legislate a maximum wage level as well as minimum wage and a maximum profit level for companies where 100% of money over those limits is redistributed, with companies still obliged to balance supply and demand with pricing to maximise revenue but with HMRC being the beneficiary of that maximisation.

I don't think it would work.

People who can’t afford to pay. Because no private hospital trains its own staff. The country pays for that training, and if we are paying for it I want all the extra hours available to those who need them most, not those who can pay most.

I don't think people on 65k should be lumped in with the global super rich. They are completely different categories.

Believing that billionaires shouldn't exist isn't "the politics of envy". There's only a finite amount of wealth, and it's common sense that if it's hoarded by a handful of people then millions of others will go without.

65k isn't rich. (If I worked full time my role would be 21k).

But there are no available hours. That's the point. The NHS can't and won't pay enough to encourage the doctors to work additional hours and sacrifice their family time. Doctors are human too and will only start wanting to work significant overtime if it is strongly incentivised.

Many doctors come from abroad and haven't been trained in a UK hospital in the way you imply.

Communism doesn’t work. People have to be able to buy a better life for their family in order to be motivated. And for most people the motivation of a nicer area to live in, better school, quicker/better healthcare is far greater than bags or cars.

I do think ideally some caps should be placed on the very top end of wealth (say pay of £250k+ or assets of over £10m). Above this level I think there is limited further motivation and it’s just excess. However, unless the whole world agrees to such a cap at once, it won’t work as these people will just move - many people with such wealth already don’t live in their home country as they have followed the most favourable job prospects and tax regimes.

What a daft question.

So you think people should be allowed to be rich as long as they spend their money on things you deem to be not associated with basic human rights. No healthy and expensive food or drink that poor people can't afford. The fact that this doesn't allow the poor to eat or drink any better clearly is irrelevant for you.

It's an interesting question, because I wonder what the result would be?
Warren Buffet, for example, is one of the richest people in the world, worth over $100 billion. He's made that money through investing and has pledged to give away 90% of his fortune to philanthropic causes.

If he wasn't allowed to make that money, how would that work? Would it be taken away from him once he'd made over a certain amount, for example? What about Amazon, a company that Jeff Bezos started in a rented garage? Do you take a business away from the founder if it gets too successful?

I genuinely don't know how it would work.

There will always be poor people because people make bad choices.

Think drug addicts, gamblers, shopaholics etc. Think of the benefit claimant who won the lottery and blew the lot in about 6 years then was back on benefits.

Some people are just hopeless with money and will always be broke. Others have a huge work ethic and a talent for making money. You can't fix that. It will always be true.

You can help things along by ensuring sick people get treated quickly so they are physically able to work. By providing training opportunities for those who weren't academic at school. By offering low-cost childcare. Wealth taxes can pay for those things, but some will always be richer than others.

I don’t earn this ….but I don’t think it’s in the ‘rich’ category……it doesn’t worry me what others earn…,,’rich’ people pay bigger taxes which we all benefit from🤷‍♀️

What does everyone think of as "wealthy/rich" then?

I think it’s a silly question. Communism doesn’t work and that’s what you’re proposing.

im currently earning c£150k about half of which goes to the government in tax. Fine happy with that. I’ll probably retire in about 5 years. But if you were to implement your plan I’d retire now. And that would be the end of my tax.

Taxing the very rich effectively would be sensible but I am not sure what the tax take would be like.

I have absolutely no issue with any other person being rich beyond my wildest dreams. I'd love to be in that position myself but I'm not going to be bitter that I'm not and they are. I don't care whether that comes from business decisions or family wealth as long as it isn't illegal.

I'd like to be a wealthy country with more equality. So I would expect to see some fairly big individual variations in wealth but not enourmous variations. So not top 10 people have the same as the bottom 50 per cent type of thing.

So I'd rather be more Japan, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands than UK, USA, Portugal

I dont want to be all equally poor.

I dont think this is achieved by stopping rich people existing but through very good public services and through removing structural inequality. This looks at how decisions are made, who by and the impact - so you might redesign university funding or admissions or how judges are chosen.

I think people are very modest in their understanding of wealth, looking at paye only . There are billionaires in the uk with 20 odd billion in wealth. Noone in the world seems to quite know how to tax billionaires though. Their wealth and share of global wealth just seems to keep going up.

But we live in a low tax country where these are provided at quite a basic level and that isn’t about to change anytime soon. Why if someone desires better healthcare and education should they not pay for it? These are my no spending priorities. If I were not allowed to spend on them, I’d make less effort / not generate as much wealth. Is that a better outcome?

Clever!