I don’t have to explain Andrew Sayer’s title, above, in any detail here. The ultra-rich lie, cheat, steal, and get laws written to protect their interest at any and all costs. They prate Friedmanite neo-Liberalism, Starve the Beast, and Trickle Down (on the pee-ons, natch) non-stop while they set up one financial catastrophe after another, as we have seen (This Time is Different; A Nation of Deadbeats, The Big Short). They demanded that the financial typhoons (H/T Tommy Smothers) get bailed out with vast gifts opaquely labelled “Quantitative Easing” while underwater mortgage holders got left high and dry, to mix my metaphors.
This book appeared in 2015, after Bushonomics and the Neo-Con Forever War profiteering, but before Trumponomics. None of the advances of Bidenomics was predictable at the time, but many of the book’s suggestions appear in much of the discussion of Green New Deals, Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax, and so on. I look forward to the new Congress in 2025, when we hope and expect (but without any of that Gottverdammt complacency we keep getting bugged about) that we can comprehensively take care of the filibuster, voting rights, Supreme Court reform, and a few hundred other good ideas.
The main reason why inequality has increased over the last generation in so many countries is that the incomes of those already rich have increased so much faster than everyone else’s.
That statement is necessarily true by definition. We need to do better than that.
How can it be claimed that we can’t afford the rich? Here’s a short answer.
Their wealth is mostly dependent ultimately on the production of goods and services by others and siphoned off through dividends, capital gains, interest and rent, and much of it is hidden in tax havens. They are able to control much of economic life and the media and dominate politics, so their special interests and view of the world come to restrict what democracies can do. Their consumption is excessive and wasteful and diverts resources away from the more needy and deserving. Their carbon footprints are grotesquely inflated and many have an interest in continued fossil fuel production, threatening the planet.
Yes, that’s more like it.
Pink Floyd - Money (2023 Remaster)
Cabaret | "Money" Musical Number | Warner Bros. Entertainment
So, then, what can we do about it?
Real development means creating circumstances that allow everyone simultaneously to be able to have and do the things necessary for a good life:
- having enough food, shelter and health services
- having security and freedom from threat and violence, including sexual violence
- being able to develop their capacities through education and access to a range of activities
- being able to participate in political decisions that affect them and
- having free speech and conscience
- being able to care for others and be cared for
- being able to have respect and interact with others without coercion, exploitation, stigma or neglect
and so on.
I’m referring here to ‘the capabilities approach’, pioneered by Amartya Sen, the Indian economist and philosopher, and Martha Nussbaum, the American philosopher.
Well-being requires not only the elimination of avoidable suffering, but enabling people to be active and make the most of their potential so that they can flourish.
Abba - Money, Money, Money (Official Music Video)
Indeed, all good, but how?
- Care work must be valued in itself, rather than as an inconvenient interruption to employment. Child benefit and benefits for carers should be as normal as wages.
- A land-value tax. “Milton Friedman, a key figure in the rise of neoliberalism, described it as ‘the least bad tax’.”
- Lending for consumption and purchase of assets should be secondary and much more tightly regulated than now, so that it doesn’t fuel asset bubbles.
- There are many different models for cooperatives, but they tend to work best in networks including mutual banks and other complementary organisations in which know-how can be shared and new products and services developed. “We don’t always have to choose between capitalist firms and the central state.”
- Sometimes we do need local or central-state control, albeit with worker and user representation. For both efficiency and social justice reasons, some, like railways, education and health, are best if provided by publicly accountable state monopolies.
- Many formerly state-owned businesses that have been privatised, particularly in energy and water supply, will need to be renationalised or changed to mutual associations, to ensure that energy sources become sustainable and not primarily a source of rent.
- The money supply, which the banks have steadily privatised through digital credit money to provide a source of interest over the last 40 years, should be brought back under public control.
- A crackdown on corporate tax avoidance and tax havens.
- More jobs for tax inspectors.
- There should be no secrecy for companies.
- A transactions tax, as proposed by Nobel laureate James Tobin, set at a tiny percentage of financial transactions, could both raise considerable sums and benefit economies by reducing incentives for speculation, and hence volatility, and allow governments more control over their economies. As Tobin said, it was intended to ‘throw some sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient international money markets’.
- Taxing unearned income based on ownership of assets, which means taxing the extraordinary wealth and income of the rich. Most important is a progressive wealth tax, so that the higher reaches of the 1% pay tax on their wealth, with the rate increasing, the richer they are. As Thomas Piketty proposes, this should be global (he calls it a ‘global capital tax’).
- Capital gains from the rise in value of existing assets should be heavily taxed.
- Whether local or national, taxes on property should be strongly progressive, so that those with the biggest properties paid the most.
- Inheritance taxes on bequests over a certain amount.
- Carbon taxes and other green taxes are essential.
- Require information on everyone’s income, net worth and taxes paid, and make that information available to the public.
- A higher minimum wage, equal to the living wage.
- At a global level, in low-wage countries a pay increase of just a dollar an hour would boost living standards, increase demand for goods in those countries and yet make only a small difference to the overall cost of export goods.
- Pensions should be state run and funded through taxes.
- Benefits for the unemployed and for those with disabilities or ill-health should be enough to allow them to live with dignity and security.
- Universal basic income to replace most specialised benefits, providing both security and a simplified welfare system.
- Being able to repair stuff.
- Remove the political as well as the economic dominance of the rich, and rebuild democracy.
- Media empires must be broken up, and the internet ‘digital commons’ defended from attempts by corporations to control its form and content and harvest our personal data to sell off
The plutocracy of the early 20th century was pushed back by democratic political pressure,28 and our 21st-century plutocracy can be made to retreat too, only it needs to be done more decisively and permanently this time round.
We have our work cut out for us, don’t we. But we, the public, don’t have to do all of that ourselves. As I said before, we mostly need to win the November elections comprehensively, and let those we put in charge get the rest started. Then we can take on the new lies and confustications that our sworn enemies cook up in this new political, social, and economic environment. And remember,
Whatever they find to scream about loudest, do more of.
Money (That's What I Want) (Remastered 2009)