Messages

I have played croquet...

I have barely seen any BB this year.  My reality TV viewing was invested in The Contender - which really was the Greatest (reality TV game show).

He gave a pretty self-depracating interview on Channel 4 News a couple of nights ago.

Bugger - I missed this.  I was pissed off when they were cancelled last week, and knew they were on this week, but did my We Love Telly magazine tell me they were on yesterday.  No.  It said there'd be some rubbish CSI: Miami or CSI: Normanton episode or something.  So imagine my anger when, flicking round the channels before bed I saw some fellah being lifted out of a plastic box.  And then I saw Grissom.  And I thought - Bugger.

I'm too scared to go and see it.

I wish that I could come.  Caption is the one festival that I really want to go to.  But I am in the process of an extended house move.  York to Cardiff.  I began this move two years ago.

Why thank you.

Thanks for that.  There's no problem with me copying it onto my blog for propaganda purposes is there?

Ah, but you see Lobo, at this rate (and if I add a few OU degrees into the pot and toss in my partner's degrees too) my descendants, probably wearing jumpsuits and living on a diet of vitamin pills and with names like X-65B 'Billy' Bartlett, will turn the corner many generations ahead of everybody else's descendants.

And then they'll be all on their own, but...

Which 2000AD character would Ted Heath have most identifed?

Well, I'd need three to become a lecturer, that's for sure.  They're not all undergraduate degrees - I only have one of them.

I'd argue with the rest, but I can see that we are just going to go round in circles.  I am still a supporter of high inheritance tax on the grounds the aggregation of wealth throughout generations makes society far more unequal, and this inequality cannot even be justified on the basis of differences in individual ability and effort.  If there is one place where we can begin to tackle economic inequality, this appears to me to be a morally watertight case.

It seems to me to be morally dubious to argue that I should be able to pass my wealth to my children as that wealth is the product of my efforts and abilities, given that this very justifying principle is overridden as soon as a lifetimes accretion of wealth is passed onto someone on the basis of factors other than effort or ability.

"I don't see any necessary equation of socialism with meritocracy."

No.  There isn't.  But even a meritocracy is better than an inheritocracy.  Most people who disagree with socialism do so on meritocratic grounds - i.e. "my hard work and talent should be rewarded with a materially better life than those who work either less hard of with less talent."  Now, I might argue with the assumptions that are involved in making that statement.  But if I accept it, then an inheritance tax becomes a moral imperative, so that my children do not benefit from the fact that I have all this money (and maybe I do) while much more hardworking and talented (or even JUST as hard working and talented) kids will always be economically poorer - and will, more than likely, pass this relative position in our social hierarchy to their own children.

That's not what I am saying.

Look, if we draw the analogiy with my degrees, it goes like this:

I have umpteen degrees (or whatever).  While I am alive my degrees will hopefully play a part in producing a good 'educational' environment for my children.  But when I die, they should not inherit those degrees.  If the system allowed that, they would have umpteen plus the one they get themselves, while Mr Bloggs' kids have just the one they get themselves.  How does Mr Bloggs' kids, or descendents catch up?  Only if my descendents are extraordinarily stupid, or if Mr Bloggs' line produces a genius.  But all this being equal - in other words, if my kids and Mr Bloggs kids work equally hard, Mr Bloggs kids will always be worse off, in this economy of degrees.

That is an anaology of the point I was trying to make about the importance of inherited wealth.  This doesn't say - work hard to produce a good environment for your kids, nor even that ou shouldn't be able to pass something on.  But if we want to have a society that rewards people for their opwn merits, not those of their family, then the one tax we need - more than income tax, more than any luxury taxes - is a strong, strict, inheritance tax.

By the way, I'm on my fourth degree now ;)

It is socialist drivel.

Look, all I'm saying is that, as wealth accretes over generations, we either have to take measures to redistribute that wealth if we want to call our society meritocratic (never mind egalitarian), or we must smash the myth that what a man or woman has, they deserve (for all sorts of reasons, but this is the most straightforward).

My point is that differentiation by the inter-generational accumulation of wealth doesn't just happen at the level of massive country estates, but also at the bottom end of the economic spectrum.  As we are talking about relative wealth, and therefore relative life-chances, power and the like, it is necessarily so that one persons wealth disadvantages another.

Max: if it is the meaning of life to live for our kids then, when you spread that 'philosophy', planty of people are going to have to consider their lives meaningless.  And most people who consider that their life has meaning, will have to realise that this meaning is simply secondary to some kind of brute Darwinian caculus.  Furthermore, if you choose to live for your kids, very high death tax doesn't stop you doing this.  It actually demands that you do just that - live for your kids - rather than simply acummulate wealth that you do not use (removing it from economic circulation) until the point of death where your child begins this (frankly meaningless) cycle with respect to his or her kids.  By all means, derive meaning from your life by working for the best for your children, but one that centres around how much wealth you can leave them when you die is a pretty ahuman meaning and is indisputibly antimeritocratic.

"Mr and Mrs Ordinary would be far better off renting and pissing their money up the wall than trying to make things easier for their children and grandchildren further down the line."

The point I was making with the idea that social mobility being linked more tightly to wealth than wage income, is that when, say, me and you leave our great big mansions (like the one you have just inherited from Ted Heath) to our children, we necessarily disadvantage other people's children.  In a stratified society, we can't all be at the top.  Now, so long as we CAN do this, we are all going to do this.

And I agree with you here:  "I've already told my family that if tougher Inheritance Tax laws are brought in, I'd prefer them to sell their homes and spend the fucking lot, rather than let the taxman take a chunk of it when they go..."

This would be a boost for free enterprise! Imagine all that extra moolah swilling round the economy.  Saving for your kids after you are dead?  No-one is locking money away like that.  Instead, they'd be spending the lot, making the economy more vibrant and opening up opportunities to all the former chimney sweeps and workhouse boys.