Catherine Dunlop

Gabriel Zucman is not as urgent, in his little book ‘We need to tax the Billionaires’ at least, as Gary Stevenson on his Channel ‘Gary’s Economics’.  They agree on their one main point, and Stevenson has done an interview with Zucman recently on his channel.

Gary Stevenson makes one point only on his channel, which is ’Tax wealth not work’ because the untaxed super-wealthy are on the way to owning most of the world’s assets and consequently making everyone else poor.

Years ago he used to give the example of Rishi Sunak with a wealth of £700 000 making so many thousands a week just through interest.  Recently he gave the example of the world’s first trillionaire.  His wealth automatically makes him $137 million a day.  $137 MILLION A DAY.

That money does not lie in a pile somewhere, it is used to buy assets and make more money.  It is clear that the super-rich will outbid everyone for the assets that exist. Stevenson compares them to a black hole that sucks everything into themselves.   They will end up buying everything and everyone else will be poor.

I understand this process when I think of the effect the ‘normal’ rich (people who have an income that might allow them to buy and sustain the upkeep of a second home) have on for example the population of picturesque coastal towns.  They buy property there, drive the price up and prevent the locals from getting a look in.

That effect is multiplied unimaginably once wealth reaches the billionaire mark.

Stevenson says if you think this does not concern you, you are like China and India in the 18^th century looking at distant Europe developing industrially and financially and thinking it did not concern them.  They were soon involved when they found that Europe forced them to trade on unequal terms and ruined them, initiating a century of humiliation for China and famines in India when fields used to grow food for locals were turned to tea and cotton cultivation for export.

In Europe and the USA today, the billionaires want to use water for their data centres (used to spy on you and take your jobs). This will deprive you and your kids of water or, to put it another way, access to water will go to the powerful, that is, the richest. 

Stevenson fears that the strategy of the super-wealthy, when deprivation starts to bite, will be to set the poor against each other along race lines, a path Elon Musk has started encouraging people to take.

We can see the difference in the politics of France and Britain, when the French House of Commons (Chambre des Députés) has already voted Zucman’s wealth tax into law, whereas an equally qualified and brilliant economist, Gary Stevenson, is reduced to making desperate appeals on a YouTube channel.  So far he only has the ear of the leader of a small disorganised party, the Greens.  He thinks, quite rightly, that the Labour Party must take this on.