Greed and Glamour.

One of Britain’s leading comedians, Jimmy Carr, has just got himself into a spot of bother. He’s been publicly criticised by David Cameron for investing his wealth into a tax avoidance scheme, which Cameron says is unethical. It’s a pity it had to be Cameron who said it, since I’m not his greatest fan, but for once I agree with him. The point is, however, that Carr isn’t the only person doing it (and he’s now engaged in a public show of contrition anyway, and says he’s stopped doing it.) This is just another example of how the free market mentality rewards the rich and penalises the poor.

The majority of people in Britain are in formal employment and don’t get a choice as to how they pay their income tax. It’s stopped at source by the employer under the Pay As You Earn system. Such ‘ordinary’ people might vary in relative prosperity, but they never get ‘rich’ unless they win the lottery or something. The rich people are mostly the entrepreneurs and celebrities who are self-employed and operating in fields capable of bestowing a level of wealth beyond the wildest dreams of most of us. Those who make the grade in such fields – and, in the process, get hideously overpaid for their efforts and end up with more money than they can ever hope to spend – get targeted by the tax avoidance operators. Since such operations are not actually illegal, the rich folks get to pay proportionately less in tax than the poorer people and garner even more money than they can ever hope to spend.

We’re living in difficult economic times. Public services are being cut, pension provisions are being eroded, and many of the cuts are being borne by the poorest members of society. Cameron says we’re all in it together, but we’re obviously not. The dictum ‘greed is good’ became acceptable under Thatcher, but can it still be tolerated now?

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And still on the subject of celebrity, this woman expresses herself better than I do, so I’ll just point you to a small article to reiterate a point I’ve tried to make on the blog several times. It’s a quick read.