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

Google ‘Soviet Union’.

Excellent idea in theory, practice didn’t work so well as many people were happy doing the bare minimum or less and many processes were very wasteful/ no accountability/ no motivation for improvement or progress. Many people wouldn’t do anything unless there’s a direct benefit to themselves - just read on here how many people would prefer not to work in demanding jobs if they didn’t have to.

Not saying capitalism is any better.

‘Rich people’ in my book aren’t those that work and make 200-300k a year.

Very rich people have an element of inherited wealth. How are you going to take away inherited wealth without practising extreme socialism? And is the government able to maintain all these assets that they nationalise/ put them to good use?

Quite. And were the 'communist' (I know Marxists would say they weren't really communist...) societies of the Soviet Union or Mao's China equal? No they most definitely were not! They had their elites and privilege was passed on. In Mao's China, it was just that one class got vicious 'revenge' on another...at a terrible cost (Cultural Revolution etc).

Human societies tend to stratify, whatever interventions are put in place. I think being dogmatic about it is disastrous - that's what led to Stalinism and the Cultural Revolution. Much better to work at ways to lift people out of poverty while still rewarding and incentivising people to create wealth.

I'm a pragmatist, though - I've see the damage strongly-held principles can do in all sorts of fields.

Well obviously, who else are we going to eat?

This is £3k a month after tax.

My childcare bill for one child is two thirds of that.

Oh yes - just wanted to add...

I would challenge you, OP, to come up with a system which both re-distributes 'wealth' (whatever you mean by that) 'fairly' (whatever you mean by that) yet keeps society 'free'. You can stop people sending their children to private schools but you can't do that within a free society. Which do you prefer?

If you stop people choosing how to educate their children, say, then...should people not be allowed to go on very expensive holidays, or drive luxury cars? Where would you draw the line? I don't think you can, in a free society. You'd have to have some kind of totalitarian state and throw democracy out.

@housethatbuiltme I don't have a problem with higher taxes either and certainly not with tightening up tax loopholes - but I do think that going back to the postwar days of 80/90/95% tax if you earn over a certain amount will stifle entrepreneurship.

I don't think it would be worth trying to create a successful business or investing in someone else's business if say £8 out of every £10 you earn is taken for tax. It would make it difficult for startups to attract investors.

That's the problem - people make some conclusions and then statements based on their assumptions, not facts.

You are wrong - Germany has insurance based healthcare, state does pay for insurance for the poorest, but those earning above some very modest (about 45k) threshold have to pay themselves and monthly payments are rather high, might be 6-700Eur. Even if you leave country for a few years with expectation to return you still have to pay. Germany also have private schools.
Finland also has private schools and parents get rebate for fees from state.

Separately, what is your view of educated parents tutoring own kids? if they aren't allowed to pay for it? how will this impact inequality?

And I think (could be wrong) that it's generally only around that level that you even become a net contributor.

I'd like to try true communism. So far that hasn't happened anywhere in the world.

2poorlygirls
Yes hard work should be rewarded but intelligence?
People are born intelligent or unintelligent, there shouldn't be reward for genetic luck.
*
But talent should surely be rewarded and intelligence is one of the most useful forms of this? How else would we encourage innovation and excellence? I want the best minds working on our most difficult problems and I think they should be paid extremely well for this.*

But that's where you get poor people and rich people.
People who are born less intelligent will be poor and people who are lucky enough to be intelligent will always be rich and wealthy because they're the people who can earn it.
Very few intelligent people are poor and very few people with learning difficulties or of low intelligence will ever pull themselves out of poverty.

I think you misunderstood my stance. I am in complete agreement with you. I just started this thread to understand how prevelant this (extreme IMO) view is on MN. It provides interesting context to other threads where it almost seems that posters hate rich people.

Great post, illustrating our mutual dependency.

I think OP’s numerical limits were unrealistic, particularly as real estate and pension pots were not excluded. I am ambiguous about the principle.

Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg and other ultra wealthy Americans (including Jeff Bezos’ ex wife whose name unfortunately escapes me at the moment) are practising philanthropy at a scale to affect social policy. I am not sure how much of this we have in the UK. Arguably it is better to have higher taxes, particularly for the ultra wealthy, and more governmental support for those who need it at home and abroad, anyway.

However we do need the dynamism that certain wealth creators bring to the country. I tend to think that a tax policy that is transparent, closes the loopholes, more graduated, and treats dividends as income would go a long way and be more fair than a wealth tax

But how exactly do you see that? What form would it take? That's the hard bit...

How are you going to take people's wealth away? What if they don't want to give it up? How far would you go to enforce your system?

The devil is in the detail. We'd all like to live in a lovely, happy, Utopian world.

Of course income tax is only around a quarter of all tax revenues. So that contribution is just over 8 per cent. I don’t think that’s an outrageous proportion.

I think you misunderstood my stance. I am in complete agreement with you. I just started this thread to understand how prevelant this (extreme IMO) view is on MN. It provides interesting context to other threads where it almost seems that posters hate rich people.

Thanks Bumpity - and a very good, exciting thread it is! I think it's useful to get people who think like that to set out their rationale AND their practical solutions, especially since societies have been struggling with this question for over 200 years.

Israel - kibbutz

USSR were very close to it - google Holodomor, Gulag etc

I think people with a 500 million or a billion dollars in assets should be taxed at a very high rate. The idea that they are using those assets to generate jobs has been shown to be false in practice. The wealth is simply being hoarded.

I believe any company that doesn’t pay their employees enough to keep them off standard benefits, not extraordinary circumstances, should be fined. A full-time working 2 parent family with 2 children should be able to afford to live off their salary, even with childcare costs. If they can’t, then the company is being subsidized by the taxpayer. The employee might get the benefit money and the blame, but really it’s the company that is getting the profit from the cheaper labor.

equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/

This was before the great Covid redistribution from poor to wealthy.

But to truly change this would be involve changing the essence of human (and animal) existence. More intelligent individuals have always been able to take advantage of this to access more resources. Their ingenuity and inventiveness can even enable the whole species to develop and progress.

Doctors and medical staff will be incentivised to work more than they otherwise would have done because the money is so good.

I think that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates most healthcare professionals. Ask a junior doctor if they could work more and I imagine you’d be pretty offended by the two word response.

I have no problem with rich/super rich people. Good luck to them if they have taken the risks to make it.

I know for a fact I wouldn't turn down a few million or billion if I could make it.

Outside capitalist influences make true communism very difficult. Trying to achieve communism with a world war raging was always going to be problematic. I think people with money can't understand that some people aren't really bothered about material wealth. Making money has never motivated me, job satisfaction and happiness has. That's not to say I want to be poor, I appreciate what I have but I'm not into buying things or having money that I'll never use in the bank .

That tax is a small slice of the proceeds of other people's hard work.

"paying tax" does not have the same meaning for rich people as it does other.

And poorer people don't work hard?

YABU to make it so black and white.

People should be allowed to be well off. People shouldn't really be allowed to be billionaires. No one needs that sort of money, no one could ever spend that sort of money. I did laugh at a tweet I saw saying once you get to be a billionaire you get a prize saying 'You've won earning money' and a dog park named after you, and then the rest of your earnings are recirculated into the economy.

It's just deranged there are people hoarding billions they can literally never do anything with personally while millions are struggling to get by, it's not even good capitalism because the only people the Market now 'solves' anything for is the super rich. A big reason population growth is slowing is that people can't afford to have kids, so good luck with continuous economic growth with fewer people to work and buy things unless you actually subsidise childcare, pay people decent salaries and so on. The system is broken.