I Didn't Get Where I am Today

[steepholm]

"We don't think people who have worked hard, saved up to buy a home, should be clobbered with a mansion tax," says George Osborne.

The trouble with this kind of statement is that it's stupid in so many ways that I feel exhausted before I begin to list them. I can say little or nothing that my sagacious friends list will not immediately see without my stir; and (with one or two exceptions) I know they'll agree anyway, so what's the point?

There's a number of possible approaches, I suppose. One can be sarcastic. How hard did you work for your trust fund, George? Clambering out of that birth canal must have been exhausting!

One can wax statistical. Wouldn't it be interesting to know just how good a predictor hard work is for wealth? A very poor one, is my guess. Not only do many rich people inherit their wealth, as Osborne did (and will do even more when he gets his baronetcy), but I would guess that background, contacts, luck and talent (which we may think of as inherited luck) are all at least as important. J. K. Rowling and Wayne Rooney are several hundred times richer than the average for their trades, but do they work several hundred times harder? If averagely intelligent people who went to Eton can become investment bankers and then cabinet ministers it's likely because they are patricians rather than plebeians, not because of their work rate.

One can go off at a tangent - musing for example about the use of "clobbered" in political discourse. When hard-working public sector workers are clobbered with years of real-terms pay cuts, that word seems curiously absent from the Chancellor's vocabulary. Conversely, what word might we use as the opposite of "clobbered", to describe (to pluck an example from the air) a cut in the top rate of income tax? I suggest "slobbered."

We can wonder about the psychology of the thing. Is Osborne deluded? Does he really believe that he and the other be-mansioned people he went to school with actually earned their wealth? Or is he just blowing hard on his horn for the faithful hounds of the Daily Express and their constituency?

Or we can go meta, and write a post like this one about the difficulties of writing such a post.

On the whole, probably best to leave it.

Comments

[sheenaghpugh]

I like your first approach best. But I prefer that of the tramp ordered off the toff's land, who asked said toff how it came to be his and, on getting the reply "My ancestors fought for it", said "Right, I'll fight you for it".

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

A good answer! (Though likely enough the toff's ancestor's actually got the tramp's ancestors to fight for it on their behalf.)

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

They really think that. See this gem from the similar discussion across the pond:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTwpBLzxe4U

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

"I've been on food stamps and welfare. Did anybody help me out? No."

Er, but...

*boggles*

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Those of us in the sanity-based community over here got a fair amount of bogglement out of this when it happened; I believe that Jon Stewart ran it and made a facial expression. (The fellow in the clip is a fairly well-known television actor in his other life, by the way.)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

It's the use of the phrase 'saved up to buy a home' that irritates me most of all in that sentence. It has the same rhetorical effect as 'worked hard' so I'm not really picking out anything you haven't already noted. But the idea of someone thriftily saving up, tucking away what little they can spare out of their pay packet every week, until they finally get to the point where they can at last afford that two-million-pound home of their dreams (having meanwhile lived in a caravan, presumably?) strikes me as even more ridiculous than the implication that people who own such homes have usually earned the money for them by working.

It seems to me that Osborne is deliberately sowing confusions which will make middle class home-owners in £200,000 homes angry at the prospect of a mansion tax, even though in fact it is people stratospherically more wealthy than they who will be liable for it, while they themselves will benefit from the better services and reduced inequality which it brings about. It's an appalling form of deceit, and I have seen people in exactly that wealth-bracket falling for it and voting Tory - against their own best interests - as a result. So depressing.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm sure you're right. And that, too, is a tactic that has been used to great effect in the States, as studies like this one show. I hate the term "false consciousness", because it always seems so patronising, but occasionally it does appear to be the mot juste.

[Edited to fix link.]

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks - I got the graph the first time (which I'd seen before), but not the article (which I hadn't).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Sorry - inveterate fiddler that I am, I then changed it again to a Youtube video linked from the article. But for the public record, here's the article again.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of that going on over here, too. In our 2000 election, Gore said the "top 3% in income" should be taxed more. Someone did a survey and found that iirc 19% of voters thought they WERE in the top 3%, and 23% expected to get there soon.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

I saw this statement when I logged on to read the news this morning and there are just no words to describe this man other than: 'overprivileged bag of horse shit'!

My grandads, both colliers who 'worked hard' (Osborne wouldn't know what it meant) and died young could never _afford_ to buy a house!

Sigh :o(

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

'overprivileged bag of horse shit'!

That would have made for a shorter and perhaps more incisive post.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I had thought that ignorant entitlement of this magnitude was only to be found in U.S. politics, and I'm sorry to find it spreading. However, it has occurred to me before now that the greatest flaw in the British system of government is its repeated tendency to generate Chancellors of the Exchequer who know nothing of economics.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I was about to add "and Health Secretaries who know nothing of medicine!", given Jeremy Hunt's views on homeopathy, etc., but actually they're not really analogous cases. If Hunt were prepared (and able) to be a good manager, committed to the efficient provision of healthcare and the setting up of systems that facilitated it, listening to evidence and acting accordingly, it wouldn't really matter that he knew nothing of medicine as such, or even that he had some eccentric private theories. But Chancellor is an intrinsically technical position, as well as a political one.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

You're right that they're not analogous, and the reason is less that the Exchequer is an intrinsically technical subject than that medicine is a science and economics is not. As long as a Health Secretary believes in the science, then he can take that for granted and get on with his proper job of managing, and will be judged on whether or not he manages it well. After all, Aneurin Bevan was not a doctor. Hunt's problem is his quirky scientific views.

But economics is not a science, whatever the Nobel committee may say, and a Chancellor needs an informed independent judgment of what the economists say. All of Winston Churchill's political instincts told him not to return to the gold standard, but his lack of economic judgment made him unable to resist the fat-headed bankers who insisted that he had to do so. After him, Philip Snowden was something of an economic troll: he knew a little, but not anywhere near as much as he thought he did, and what he knew was completely inappropriate for the circumstances. The result drove the country straight into the Great Depression and destroyed the government.

For other classic examples, see B. Disraeli and N. Lawson. They're all over the place.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I haven't been following your homeopathy issue (and please don't inform me ;-), but as placebos go, it seems harmless, and perhaps a better value in pain relief than most.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, the placebo effect is a real effect, but that's not generally how homeopathy is justified by its proponents! I won't go into the question of whether it should be funded by the NHS, but instead here's a take that made me laugh:

[sheenaghpugh]

The time placebos do harm is when people rely on them instead of getting proper help. Then they can kill.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

That could be said of any non-prescription pain killer (or other products that relieve symptoms only), especially those that give results better than placebo.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

IIRC, there was a scandal a while back when a bunch of homeopathic belladonna pills turned out to have completely inconsistent dilutions, so instead of being harmless, some were actually slightly poisonous. As I had always thought that either (a) the manufacturers were charlatans who didn't bother putting ANY active ingredient in said pills, or (b) they were True Believers who had diluted them to the point of there being nothing in them but fillers, this was quite depressing.

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

That said, I have a soft spot for homeopathy given how many people it saved from taking drugs that would have been Much Worse (e.g., the mercury-laden concoctions prevalent in the 19th century).

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Or real currently marketed herbs such as Horny Goat Weed. (Which may be quite harmless or even effective, but its name cries out for such mention. ;-)

Or recently marketed pharmaceutical drugs such as Vioxx.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

You forgot education secretaries who know damn all about education!