Two readers have responded to recent reports of a billionaire exodus from Britain, arguing that the departure of the super-rich is not a problem and questioning the power they hold over national economies.
Capitalism works better without billionaires
David Redshaw of Saltdean, East Sussex, says the idea that the departure of the super-rich is a problem ignores a historical fact. He argues that capitalism works better without them. The most successful countries today, he writes, are states where redistributive taxation has empowered the working masses and provided a better and more stable market for business people.
Redshaw asks how today's complaining uber-rich explain the postwar decades, when the top rate of income tax was commonly 80% or 90%, and yet the period is known as a golden age of capitalism. He notes that Margaret Thatcher later lowered the top rate to 60%, and the country tilted into a massive recession. The rich, he says, get to a point where they simply become wealth extractors, using their money to buy assets and raising the cost of them for the rest of us, citing housing as a good example today.
A story from the Rolling Stones' 1969 tour
Redshaw recounts a story from 1969, when a music writer embedded in the Rolling Stones' tour of America overheard the band talking about becoming tax exiles, possibly in France. Charlie Watts, a non-songwriter and therefore less affluent, said he rather liked his land, his house, and his horses, and wouldn't want to leave. Redshaw asks if that isn't rich enough for most of us. He also notes that John Maynard Keynes is now on stage in the West End, and people might remember what he said about the dangers of wealth disparity and the bubbles of speculation they bring.
The power of the super-rich to hold a country hostage
Fernando Quintana of London responds to a report about a billionaire said to have quit the UK over a potential wealth tax, writing that it exposes something far more troubling than billionaires fleeing Britain: the extraordinary power of the super-rich to hold an entire country hostage to the threat of their departure.
Quintana points out that ordinary working people cannot relocate their tax obligations to Monaco. They pay their taxes, fund public services, and shoulder the consequences of a system increasingly tilted towards those who need its protection least. Yet we are expected to tremble at the prospect of billionaires taking their fortunes elsewhere. Wealth, he argues, does not exist in a vacuum; it is built on a society's workers, infrastructure, institutions, and opportunities.
If the wealthiest can enjoy the fruits of that society while escaping their fair share of its responsibilities, the scandal is not that they leave, but that successive governments have allowed them to make the rules. 'A country that cannot afford to lose its billionaires should ask itself why it can apparently afford to impoverish everyone else,' he writes.
