Ed Comes Out

It can’t be a coincidence.

On the very day that British parliamentarians pass a landmark law ending the bar on those with mental illnesses serving as MPs, opposition leader Ed Miliband comes out of the closet to reveal his thinking on wealth creation.

Ed kicks off with a ringing endorsement of the free enterprise system:

“I believe capitalism is the least worst system we’ve got.”

Then asked the tough question whether it is “good to be rich” he reassures the interviewer that:

“Yes, if you make it the hard way. It’s not for me to pass moral judgment.”

So if Ed will forgive me for taking his ideas to their logical conclusion, he does pass moral judgment if you didn’t earn your wealth. I expect then that, with a thought to their mortal souls, Ed won’t be passing on his wealth to his own children.

Unlike Ed, I would like to pass moral judgment on those entrepreneurs who work hard and make a killing. On behalf of your grateful fellow citizens:

“Thanks very much guys for striving when we couldn’t be bothered; for having useful ideas that are beyond us; for employing us; and for carrying the burden of bureaucracy without going postal.”

Also, on behalf of us tax payers:

“Thanks to the top 1% of income earners for paying 27.7% of all income tax. The £44 billion you chipped in to the kitty was very useful to the rest of us.”

But, of course, “Those rich bastards can afford it, can’t they?” I hear you say.

And you may be aware that according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) the top 20% of earners are, in fact, paid about 16 times as much as the bottom 20%. That could seem a bit unfair even to those not so red in socialist tooth and claw.

Until, that is, you consider that after tax deductions and benefit handouts are taken into account they earn just 4 times as much.

 Ah, but what about those nasty rich with unearned income? Some people worry that wealth is becoming more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

In fact, that concentration hasn’t changed very much over the last 100 years for a simple reason.

There is an age old mechanism which tends to eliminate disparities of wealth over time. Let’s call it the “Idiot Son System” (ISS). Because of the miracle of genetics, your children are not you. Their attributes will tend toward the average. So if you happen to be super smart and industrious it is unlikely that they will be. This means they will tend to dissipate Daddy’s hard earned fortune to the benefit of the rest of us.

If you still want to prevent rich people from handing on their fortune to their own children you are not only morally wrong in stealing it, you would also be removing the most important incentive to wealth creation. Check out the history of every communist experiment to find out the likely results of this.

No. The rich are more than paying their share. It the spending that's too high, and any politician proposing more stimulus is talking Balls or raving.

The Labour leader is far too nice to pull a fast one on us, so alas Ed Miliband is a loon, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

I’m OK with that. Just so long as a majority of the voters in our ancient kingdom are not of the same mind.

That really would be a case of the lunatics taking over the asylum.