According to the Guardian yesterday:
A failure by Rachel Reeves to back a “windfall of wealth taxes” in her budget risks fuelling the rise of the populist right, a former Labour cabinet minister has warned.
Liam Byrne, a senior figure in the New Labour government and chair of the Commons business and trade committee, said that the rise of Reform UK at the last election meant the chancellor and Keir Starmer must urgently consider raising funds to deal with inequality.
I think he's been reading my Taxing Wealth Report 2024, which has some more to add.
My point is that the momentum for change is growing. Byre is not the ally I expected, but who cares? It's the change that matters, and this reform is long overdue.
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Ex-financial trader Gary Stevenson is quite good at explaining the problems of wealth inequality.
e.g. “Understand the Economy Part 2: What Is Wealth Inequality?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TflnQb9E6lw
(and more on his YouTube channel).
I am getting to the end of Tim Snyder’s ‘On Freedom’ (2024).
I think it’s his most personal book yet – a historian gone rogue (but delightfully so) – it reads as a stream of self consciousness initially, a reflection on the horrors (intellectual and physical) his previous books have revealed, narrowing down to some crystal clear conclusions as below.
p.235:
‘Americans on the left make a different mistake: they fail to acknowledge freedom as the value of values, preferring equality. Recognition of our equal dignity is, to be sure, necessary for any discussion of freedom. But equality is a beginning rather than an end. There is no tragic choice between freedom or equality. They work together’
‘Although the Left often concedes the language of freedom to the Right, people on the Left do propose policies that would further freedom. They usually fail to make their case in those terms.’
‘What seems to be a permanent clash between Left and Right reveals an unspoken (and as yet unspeakable) American consensus: freedom is indeed the value of values as some on the right claim; yet to live free, we need structures that many on the Left support’.
p.236:
‘To regard freedom as central is liberal.
The conviction that freedom is about virtues is conservative.
The belief that structures gird values is socialist.
These three approaches to politics are perfectly justified and complementary . They do not succeed in isolation. If they work at all, they work together.’
So we have an echo of what tony was saying in yesterdays’ blog about ‘Do we care?’ and Mouffe’s suggestion that Left and Right have actually merged over the worst things that could be done – bowing to capital – and not the best things, the things they naturally have in common but have been dis-aggregated by external corruption.
Snyder also seems to support John Gray’s assertion and attempt to rescue it, that Liberalism can only save itself and define its version of freedom ethically by putting it to work clearly and unambiguously in the service of others, and not one’s self.
To bring this about, Snyder says that the end of the ‘secret’ relationship between oligarchs and politicians must come to an end. And after a justification of free health care, education and anti-trust laws, he quotes of all people von Hayek (p. 224):
‘There is no incompatibility between the states providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom’.
And yet look at where we are today?
What we have is a perversion of politics as politics.
A false hegemony that has at its source one fundamental flaw.
The way in which we have allowed politics to be funded.
That can be the only conclusion.
Thanks
Freedom as a central value seems to me to be essentially, and strongly, biased towards men. Freedom for men is bad for women, children, the old, the disabled, because it denies responsibility and duty. Such old-fashioned terms, I agree, but a world of free men (as long as they are healthy and not too old) is very bad for the rest of us. See Trump and Musk.
Richard’s piece started with the value of caring. The idea of freedom as “value of values” is directly opposed to caring by the powerful.
I think most here would hope freedom is a universal objective
Freedom is not just about the absence of something contends Snyder (a man).
It’s about things that needs to be present too – like structures, the law, institutions, democracy, transparency that should broadly uphold freedom for all.
Snyder says that you cannot have freedom by rolling back the state. It is the state’s creation of political order that must prevail and it reorientation from markets back to people.
I am sorry Linda but I do not think that freedom now is a male dominated issue that is the problem. This is not about gender not in the first order of things anyway.
The freedom we are being sold is that envisaged by men AND WOMEN Linda who are part of corporations who have won the right to be seen as a person in the law. The freedom we are sold is created by giant and powerful companies pretending to be people, funding who they like in politics and steering politics towards narrowly defined corporate goals.
For the corporation, also think of political parties – are you as a woman proud of people like Thatcher? Liz Truss? Think Reeve’s sex is more important than the way she conducts her Chancellorship?
Women and children suffer everyday in this world. But so do men. We are all victims of blindness.
We cannot sort out gender inequalities until we have dealt with the money problem: – the fact that it is so badly allocated in our society and that the men AND women who allocate it Linda are both very flawed human beings indeed, sharing their flaws – very adequately exposed by a man and the men and women who contribute to his blog.
The bad allocation of money exacerbates sexism, racism and any other ‘ism’ you might want to chuck in.
Freedom costs money. That’s why we are denied money by men and women in their joint attempt to deny us freedom, and why freedom only ends up benefiting the rich and the corporations – freedom is exclusivity these days, yet is sold by a small cabal of men AND women to other men and women like you and me as on objective – even though majority of us will never achieve it and end up blaming each other for it.
That is not just a male or female problem. It is a human problem; a species problem Linda.
I find Amartya Sen’s views on freedom pretty compelling.
Basically he defined poverty, not just as material deprivation, but as a lack of agency, with that lack of personal autonomy then restricting an individual’s action and ability to help themselves.. Lacking the freedom of action to be able to help oneself is his definition of true poverty.
He mentions a man who died during his childhood in Bengal, not from starvation in those famine years, but by being stabbed in the back, as a victim of a religious dispute.
He is sure that this man would not have died if he had the means to escape his circumstances, in a situation of religious violence, so his lack of personal agency was the ultimate cause of his death.
He then expands in defining freedom as being both able to have agency, but also being able to develop one’s capabilities, so having capacity for personal actions in self development.
Furthermore, as regards unemployment, he sees the damage done to a person is not only through their inability to make a reasonable living, but also from the loss of agency, and social exclusion as well as potentially, to a person’s sense of self worth.
Then we have the notions of “Freedom FROM”, and “Freedom TO” that Berlin applied….
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/oct/05/labour-mp-torsten-bell-defends-chancellor-refusal-to-bring-in-wealth-tax
Bell: end “dreaming of your wealth tax because you are just going to waste years.”
He is right. As I argue in the Taxing Wealth Report, wealth taxes will nit raise much money. Taxing the income and gains from wealth can raise more than we need to redistribute and control inflation from the investment we require.
Although I am generally supportive of the intentions of the report, I do think there needs to be some distinction made between people who have been able to accumulate a lot of wealth already and those who have not. For example, my retired in laws with a net worth of around £1m would largely fly under the radar with these proposals whilst my taxes would rise despite having very little wealth because my salary did not increase significantly until I was in my early 40s.
I think the pension tax relief should not be restricted only to the basic rate for example. I think it ought to apply in full to all money saved under a £100k threshold and not at all above this (e.g. someone on £101k who saves £2k in a pension should save 40% tax on the first £1k and nothing on the second).
People on £50-100k whilst well above average are not earning enough in today’s economy to ever be considered rich when compared to someone average in the South of the country who was able to buy their first house in the early 1980s.
I think we also need to be cautious to remember that salaries have been flat lining for a long time. Barely anyone starting out today will get rich by working. Whether on £10k or £100k we should all be in solidarity with one another to tax the real extreme wealth gained largely by a class of people who own the assets and take rents from them whilst failing to pay a fair share to the people who work for them.