A “special kind of hypocrisy” on tax and wealth

A chap called John Russo, whose comments I follow on LinkedIn, takes aim at the recent pattern of well-off people joining “Patriotic Millionaire” calls for folk like them to be taxed a lot more. An obvious retort is that all they need to do is set up a direct debit with the relevant revenue body, and job done. Oddly, I rarely see such “Patriotic” rich folk saying “yes, of course, I will get that done immediately”. And I suspect a reason is that they want to sound good, and also like the idea of people being coerced. The coerced transfer in the name of “fairness” is the point. Voluntarily giving some of your money to the State is a bit, well, too voluntary.

Anyway, some paragraphs from Mr Russo:

I realised there’s a special kind of hypocrisy in preaching equality from the elevated comfort of elite media, elite networks, and elite platforms.

The idea of a wealth tax has been around for decades, but suddenly it’s being sold as the grand answer to Britain’s economic and social problems.

That’s the pitch. Simple. Catchy. Morally flattering. And, if you don’t look too closely, it’s vaguely heroic.

But the truth is less glamorous. A wealth tax isn’t a bold reform. It’s often a slogan in search of a serious policy, and a performance of fairness that doesn’t come close to fixing the machinery underneath.

Yes, Britain has inequality. Yes, too many people feel shut out while a narrow group sits on significant assets. But that does not make every proposal for taxing wealth a useful one. Britain isn’t America. We don’t have California-scale concentrations of extreme wealth, and we don’t have an economic structure that can pretend a wealth tax is some great fiscal breakthrough.

The sums being talked about sound large until you place them next to the scale of the state. Then they look less like transformation and more like loose change with a manifesto attached.

The hypocrisy is that some of the loudest advocates of wealth taxes talk as though they are speaking for the squeezed and the overlooked. In reality, they are often highly visible, highly connected, and very comfortable participants in the same media and political ecosystem they claim to be challenging. They denounce concentrated power while depending on the attention economy, elite networks and moral theatre to amplify their own status. It’s a neat trick. Condemn privilege from within a system that rewards you for sounding rebellious.