And the super rich. In times of crisis, they, naming a few Branson, Bezos etc look to the state for hand-outs.
Yet, they live in tax exile countries, they pay very little tax contributing very little to the welfare of the country, and you remember stories like companies like Amazon paid less tax than a NHS nurse , and how Google pay reduced taxes etc which in the long term affects the welfare and the NHS, the infrastructure and the people of the country?
And now these vultures are out in force asking for help from the taxpayers?
How are we letting this happen? We will be the one to pay for this and the NHS will pay for this, and the nurses will pay for this and the joe blogg will pay for this...While Branson and the like will be in their private islands continuing to prosper?
What do you think? Should these people/companies who contributed the least to taxes should be given handouts from the Government?
Multi-boards, please admin
Welfare state
posted on 30/3/20
Comment Deleted by Site Moderator
posted on 30/3/20
😂
posted on 30/3/20
posted on 30/3/20
posted on 30/3/20
comment by Dave (U11711)
posted 2 hours, 43 minutes ago
comment by Sporty and Portly - LFC (U8531)
posted 6 minutes ago
Honestly, half the posters on here won't be happy with anything less than full socialism.
The lefties are always envious of the successful, they always see injustice and inquity everywhere rather than admiring hardwork, innovation, job creation, wealth generation, etc
No point arguing with them
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You are an idiot.
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posted on 30/3/20
comment by add912 (U9189)
posted 21 hours, 29 minutes ago
I find these debates very interesting.
Take Bezos for example. The amount of jobs that Amazon provide as well as the amount of competition they bring to the market and the amount of money they invest in innovation does provide additional jobs.
For example, how many more people have jobs in the Royal mail because of the additional capacity that Amazon packages bring to the network. I don't know the number but lots of new jobs and revenue has been created as a result.
These arguments are not always so straight forward.
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Well there's a huge disconnect between what Bezos "provides" and what he takes. It's worth remembering that his contribution, his idea, was just a more competitive online store. Amazon can hardly have ever been described as an innovative company, merely the one most capable of dominating the market through brand building, awful working conditions and creating as many walled gardens (kindle, prime, audible) as it can get away with.
As for the jobs created by Amazon, it's worth first looking at the number of companies Bezos has put out of business by leveraging his company's size. Do you work it out as a net jobs lost/created scenario or do you just look at the jobs made?
What about the fact that Amazon pays so little tax? That tax is crucial from an economic perspective. Amazon functions due to the grace of our roads, teachers, doctors and internet (including mobile devices) reliant on publically funded technologies.
Jeff Bezos is personally worth 119.9 billion USD. Can we honestly judge his contribution to society to be worth that much?
Lets shift to someone who can genuinely be considered to be something more than a middle man: Steve Jobs. Worth, at his death, 10.2 billion USD. The man who created, and later, saved Apple. I still remember getting a first gen iPod Nano for my thirteenth birthday and what that meant for my life and fledgling indentity. He was a genuinely capable executive, who drove Apple to heights that were scarcely imaginable at the turn of the millenium. But can his contribution really be considered to be worth 10.2 billion dollars?
The problem with this is we marry our ideas of worth to people who extract wealth from the capital they own (shares in the company) to an extent well beyond the worth of the labour they provide. Imagine, for one second, what kind of worker one would have to to be worth 10.2 billion USD over less than two decades. It's a fallacy. A fantasy.
The problem with capitalism, without advocating for another system, is that it relies on regular systemic collapses and refreshes. For capitalism to work, there needs to be an ever-expanding market. It demands this to survive. This is why colonialism happened. This is why we must kill the planet. The current economic system represents an extreme version of this, in neo-liberalism. And for people my age, it's as if we've just joined a game of monopoly everyone else has already spent two hours playing.
And what's the reason for this? Capital is leveraged to extract the value of labour, and its perogative is to extract as much of that value as possible. The reality is that world we live in is not truly divided into the rich and the poor, but into those who live off their labour and those who live off their capital. Nobody begrudges a neurosurgeon an extraordinary wage. I would not even begrudge Bezos or Jobs an extraordinary wage. But what they're doing is racking up personal fortunes that cannot be considered anything more than a personal high score and fortunes that do begin to match their actual contribution to the economy. That's our collective human potential they're hoarding. Our ability to train doctors and nurses, and our ability to build homes for those who need them. It is our freedom they are cannibalising. Productivity relentlessly rises, but wages do not due to the leverage of capital.
It is worth remembering that currency is fake, but money is not. Money is crystalised human potential. That's why printing currency leads to inflation, rather than more money. Money is a farmer growing crops for his neighbour. It is a burger flipped. It is a brick layed. Money is what we do. One could remove 119 billion dollars from Jeff Bezos and the man would still be unimaginably rich. And what is 119 billion dollars in labour? What is that in the things we do for each other?
Call that the politics of envy; I call it the politics of reality. We are capable of so much, why do we let the elites tie our hands, our ability to work for one another, without complaint?
posted on 30/3/20
Well put.
It's a bit like Uber (another tax dodging enterprise) saying they've created jobs.
They haven't, they've just recruited drivers from other minicab firms and created a 'taxi' company that excludes the elderley and people with disabilities like wheelchair users.
posted on 31/3/20
comment by Boris 'Inky’ Gibson (U5901)
posted 19 hours, 28 minutes ago
Well put.
It's a bit like Uber (another tax dodging enterprise) saying they've created jobs.
They haven't, they've just recruited drivers from other minicab firms and created a 'taxi' company that excludes the elderley and people with disabilities like wheelchair users.
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I'm actually disappointed that I posted it after the thread had more or less died.
And you're completely right. It is a real benefit of free market capitalism (oxymoronic as that term is) that so many innovative companies are created. This is why mixed economies, capable of benefitting from the chained beast, produce the best outcomes. The troubles come when we pretend succesfully sucking the blood from other industries and companies is creating value.
posted on 31/3/20
comment by Giröulski Alt-153 and Alt-160 forever (U14971)
posted 21 hours, 6 minutes ago
comment by add912 (U9189)
posted 21 hours, 29 minutes ago
I find these debates very interesting.
Take Bezos for example. The amount of jobs that Amazon provide as well as the amount of competition they bring to the market and the amount of money they invest in innovation does provide additional jobs.
For example, how many more people have jobs in the Royal mail because of the additional capacity that Amazon packages bring to the network. I don't know the number but lots of new jobs and revenue has been created as a result.
These arguments are not always so straight forward.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Well there's a huge disconnect between what Bezos "provides" and what he takes. It's worth remembering that his contribution, his idea, was just a more competitive online store. Amazon can hardly have ever been described as an innovative company, merely the one most capable of dominating the market through brand building, awful working conditions and creating as many walled gardens (kindle, prime, audible) as it can get away with.
As for the jobs created by Amazon, it's worth first looking at the number of companies Bezos has put out of business by leveraging his company's size. Do you work it out as a net jobs lost/created scenario or do you just look at the jobs made?
What about the fact that Amazon pays so little tax? That tax is crucial from an economic perspective. Amazon functions due to the grace of our roads, teachers, doctors and internet (including mobile devices) reliant on publically funded technologies.
Jeff Bezos is personally worth 119.9 billion USD. Can we honestly judge his contribution to society to be worth that much?
Lets shift to someone who can genuinely be considered to be something more than a middle man: Steve Jobs. Worth, at his death, 10.2 billion USD. The man who created, and later, saved Apple. I still remember getting a first gen iPod Nano for my thirteenth birthday and what that meant for my life and fledgling indentity. He was a genuinely capable executive, who drove Apple to heights that were scarcely imaginable at the turn of the millenium. But can his contribution really be considered to be worth 10.2 billion dollars?
The problem with this is we marry our ideas of worth to people who extract wealth from the capital they own (shares in the company) to an extent well beyond the worth of the labour they provide. Imagine, for one second, what kind of worker one would have to to be worth 10.2 billion USD over less than two decades. It's a fallacy. A fantasy.
The problem with capitalism, without advocating for another system, is that it relies on regular systemic collapses and refreshes. For capitalism to work, there needs to be an ever-expanding market. It demands this to survive. This is why colonialism happened. This is why we must kill the planet. The current economic system represents an extreme version of this, in neo-liberalism. And for people my age, it's as if we've just joined a game of monopoly everyone else has already spent two hours playing.
And what's the reason for this? Capital is leveraged to extract the value of labour, and its perogative is to extract as much of that value as possible. The reality is that world we live in is not truly divided into the rich and the poor, but into those who live off their labour and those who live off their capital. Nobody begrudges a neurosurgeon an extraordinary wage. I would not even begrudge Bezos or Jobs an extraordinary wage. But what they're doing is racking up personal fortunes that cannot be considered anything more than a personal high score and fortunes that do begin to match their actual contribution to the economy. That's our collective human potential they're hoarding. Our ability to train doctors and nurses, and our ability to build homes for those who need them. It is our freedom they are cannibalising. Productivity relentlessly rises, but wages do not due to the leverage of capital.
It is worth remembering that currency is fake, but money is not. Money is crystalised human potential. That's why printing currency leads to inflation, rather than more money. Money is a farmer growing crops for his neighbour. It is a burger flipped. It is a brick layed. Money is what we do. One could remove 119 billion dollars from Jeff Bezos and the man would still be unimaginably rich. And what is 119 billion dollars in labour? What is that in the things we do for each other?
Call that the politics of envy; I call it the politics of reality. We are capable of so much, why do we let the elites tie our hands, our ability to work for one another, without complaint?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
This is actually a terrific read, for someone that isn't as clued up on capitalism it definitely opens your eyes to just how shiiiit it really is.
posted on 31/3/20
Thank you for the compliment. There is so much we can change if we recognise the ownership of capital as an expression, and rent seekers as using said power. Whether that is house rent or share dividends, we need to create a society in which one's labour makes one wealthy, not one in which what one owns does.