Eyre Lines

A recent Evonomics post (worth a read generally) contains one statement which pulled me up short. It was this:-

” What sucker wants to earn $10 million/year at a 52.5% tax rate when you can get away with hundreds of millions in one take at just 15%? Nobody, that’s who. “

Well, that puts me in the category of “nobody” as well as that of “sucker”! For a start, I don’t like the concept of getting “money for nothing” (though at one point in my life “the chicks for free” might have been attractive…) I like to think that I’ve done something useful or created something useful or beautiful, and am getting paid a sensible amount for that. Anything over and above that would make me feel somewhat dishonest.

Add to that the fact that, in the premise that I could work a year at something and get 47.5 million dollars for it, I might be tempted, though I’d probably only bother to work at it for a month or two (netting, perhaps, around $4 million per month), because I really don’t need that much money, and for me, need and want are pretty close to being the same thing. I only say “tempted”, because although a month or two at those rates would increase my available capital by a phenomenal percentage, I actually don’t NEED any more than I already have. Would a few millions be nice? Yes, I suppose so – but I’d give most of it away. If it most definitely fulfilled my criteria of doing something useful or making something beautiful, I’d be more likely to do it in the first place and to stick with it longer.

But, you might say, what about the amount of good you could do with hundreds of millions? Well, that is a consideration. If I had, say, four million, I’d maybe hang on to a million against a rainy day, ensure that my children were financially solid (but not absolutely rolling in it – see later), that a few impoverished friends were also financially solid. OK, I might need to do another month to make sure that was the case, as it would definitely involve paying off the student loans of all my friends’ children. Student loans are a blot on our society – having young people start life with major debt is condemning them to a period of effective debt-peonage.

Then? Buy a load of houses locally and give them to a local housing charity which at the moment houses only the elderly poor, but could readily deal with the younger poor. I might consider allowing the local council (who are the housing authority) to manage them instead, but they have huge financial pressures on them and the temptation to reallocate the funds would be extreme. Homelessness is equally a blot on our society.

Fund our local food bank with sufficient to keep them catering for all local candidates rather than having to triage. No-one should be having to beg at food banks in order to survive in a society I want to live in.

Beyond that, I’ll be stretching. Yes, there are a load of issues which deserve funding which they haven’t got at the moment (including all of student debt, homelessness and hunger more generally than just in my town), but I am almost certainly not the person who should, unaided, be deciding where the money goes. If I had the hundreds of millions, for instance, I’d want to put a lot of it into research to combat climate change – renewable energy, carbon-fixing, better batteries. But I don’t have the detailled knowledge of the science to determine exactly where it should go.

The thing is, I also don’t want to be the person who decides where the money goes for entirely personal reasons. I have noticed that having oodles of cash tends to go with people being complete a***holes; there are very very few really rich people I have known who were not at least somewhat tainted by this. I have also noticed that when I have had ample finances, I have tended to be less responsive to the needs of those who need help and started being concerned with keeping what I have (and increasing it) more than is remotely healthy for me.

Wealth is, after all, power – and it is power even if you don’t spend it. Consider the shopping scenes from the film “Pretty Woman”. Just the knowledge that Julia Roberts’ character can spend an obscene amount of money is sufficient to have all the shop assistants bowing and scraping, before any money has actually been spent. In our current climate in the West, it is by and large the only kind of power which matters…

I also have some experience of having perceived power in that for a year I was mayor of my town. Now, in the UK system, outside some large cities who have mayors who have actual power (such as the mayor of London), a mayor is just the chairman of the council. I was mayor in a council in which I was actually the only member of my political party. The thing was, I was perceived to have far more power than the ability to control the way a meeting proceeded and to exercise the occasional casting vote would justify – and I found that very limited power somewhat intoxicating, sufficiently so that I actually contemplated an offer by one of the other political parties to make me mayor again, destroying the convention which had put me there in the first place (that you got to be mayor in rotation based solely on length of service) when the next person in rotation was arguably unfit to hold the position…

Power, it has been said, corrupts. I am quite confident that that is correct, having felt the corruptive lure. I don’t want the kind of power which having oodles of money would produce, because I don’t want to be corrupted.