Conservatives in the fortunate position of being rich tend not to feel guilty about it. As believers in property rights, conservatives might be willing to give away their money but bridle at great chunks of it being confiscated by the state. If a conservative has inherited some money, they think it right and proper. With the central importance of the family in society, to have wealth cascading down the generations is only natural.
Above all, the conservative does not believe that getting richer through capitalist endeavour means others get poorer as there is less to go round for them. On the contrary, such enterprise and endeavour only succeed if it makes the rest of us a little bit richer too.
For a socialist who finds himself rich, it’s a bit more awkward. While it’s hard to really contend that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world – there is clearly more of it about than in previous centuries – that remains the socialist belief on an impulsive, emotional level.
It is human nature that articulating resentment of the rich will always find a sympathetic audience. Why should Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spend so much on his wedding? I bet his bride, Lauren Sanchez, is only after his money! How vulgar. And so on.
The Left are adept at intermingling the angry class war rhetoric with pious indignation. Rational argument (‘Don’t you think Amazon offers rather good value? Do you not use it yourself?’) tends not to work. But where the Lefties invariably get unstuck is in their gold-plated, ocean-going hypocrisy.
The Glastonbury Festival has just taken place. It is a capitalist success story – though a rather more exclusive one than Amazon. Tickets cost £387.50 plus a £5 booking fee. There is strict security to keep out the poor – even an internal prison for those caught breaking in, who are then detained as a punishment before being evicted or handed over to the police. If only all businessmen were so robust in defending their commercial interests.
In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn gave a speech to the affluent class warriors. He was Labour leader and it was a time of Peak Corbynism. ‘If you see that far,’ he said to the crowd, ‘look at the wall that surrounds this festival. There’s a message for President Donald Trump. You know what it says? Build bridges, not walls.’ The irony was lost on his adoring fans.
Michael Eavis – the founder of Glastonbury Festival – referred to Corbyn as the ‘hero of the hour’.
This year, the acts included punk duo Bob Vylan. The organisers apologised for his chants, which included, ‘death, death to the IDF’. There is ‘no place at Glastonbury for antisemitism, hate speech, or incitement to violence,’ said a spokesman. They ‘stood against terror’ – curious then that they should have also booked a band from Northern Ireland called Kneecap, whose apologism for terror is hardly a secret.
Eavis (now Sir Michael) is 89. Despite his professed admiration for Corbyn, his thoughts are turning, not to giving all his money to the state, but how to keep this family business going after he has gone. The founder has transferred ownership to his daughter to save her £80 million in inheritance tax.
The Times reports:
The owner of Glastonbury festival has transferred most of his financial interest in the event to his daughter and a family trust, potentially avoiding a huge inheritance tax bill. Sir Michael Eavis, 89, gave his entire shareholding in Glastonbury Festival Events Ltd, the operational company responsible for running the festival and selling tickets, to his daughter Emily, 45, in October.
Last year, pre-tax profits doubled to nearly £6 million after revenues jumped 20% to £68 million. It is estimated that it could be worth up to £400m and that the transfer of ownership could ‘save nearly £80 million in inheritance tax’.
We should not be surprised. Tony Benn, Corbyn’s mentor, transferred part-ownership of his house in Holland Park to his children before he died. This ‘deed of variation’ was to stop the taxman getting his grubby paws on the lavish inheritance.
Harriet Harman denounced Conservative plans to cut inheritance tax when she was Labour’s deputy leader. But was revealed to be one of the beneficiaries of a trust set up in her father’s will designed to reduce the amount of tax she would eventually pay on his estate.
Gary Lineker, a well-known BBC presenter and self-described Labour supporter, was sold a home in Barbados through an offshore company in the British Virgin Islands to avoid UK stamp duty.
Black Lives Matter became nicknamed ‘Black Lives Mansions’ after its founders did rather well out of all the donations.
Karl Marx relied on funds from the capitalist Friedrich Engels to pay for school fees, frock coats and assorted other luxuries he felt a man of his social status was entitled to.
How many of those who take to the airwaves to denounce the rich are on six-figure salaries? The trade union leaders, the socialist politicians, the academics, the Quangocrats, the charity chief executives… the broadcasters themselves.
They will all champion the politics of envy… while being keen to earn as much as possible and for the state to take as little as possible from them. For all the intellectual and practical arguments that free enterprise is a better system than socialism, it is the hypocrisy of the socialists that is their undoing.
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