The unacceptable face of capitalism

[SpontaneousOrder]

Utter tosh. I will always work towards making things better for everyone. But I am not going to put myself down in the process.

It's the hypocrisy he's pointing out. If you believe that people should be forced to fund other people's welfare, then you - as a relatively wealthy man - need to stump up. Drawing arbitrary lines delineating those that are ok, and those that are 'too' wealthy, is a bulltulip as supposing that everyone is their brother's keeper in the first place.

[SpontaneousOrder]

See this is what confuses me.

So you had £200 million and bought phones for you.

The you get a load for £205 million (and so are in debt by £205 million)

Then you take a dividend payment of £223 Million - where the fook has that money come from?

Presumably the dividend didn't come out of some phones4u bank account. BC bought phones4u and invested 205 million. Now they have a business valued at some daft price - an asset. So they pay themselves a fat divi without being insolvent because technically they had assets on the balance sheet to cover it.

it's like the empty houses across chicago area after 2008. The banks didn't repossess houses even though they were in default, because as long as people still lived in them the banks were accumulating owed mortgage payments which were an asset on their balance sheets - i.e. profits. As soon as they repossess those houses they become liabilities. So they don't bother and carry on paying themselves according to those phantom profits as long as the scam lasts.

[Batcher]

I take no high ground on this, although I doubt you purchase your guacamole from Lidl.

Anyway, your point of view is fine, and I sense no moral taking of the high ground from you.

There will be legal means of avoiding tax which you are quite at liberty to take. However governments need tax and NIC receipts in order to govern society (this is one of their many arguments for the use of retrospection in tax affairs) and any form of avoidance will minimise those receipts and impact society in one form or another.

Avoidance is the fault of crap tax laws. Our choice to maximise these means of avoiding tax is totally within our right, however there is little moral case for any form of legal avoidance. So why would we pretend there is?

OT I make my own guacamole /OT

When I started out contracting we didn't have any real choice as HMRC (or HMC & E as it was) more or less forced us into setting up a Ltd to make us legit.

I now have more than one income stream flowing through my Ltd and I don't think I would change to working the IT part under an umbrella unless agencies started insisting on it and it was near impossible to get work any other way.

[DodgyAgent]

Capitalism let us remember is the free activity of exchange of goods and services between human beings. It is an activity ahead of any other that ensures that human beings coexist peacefully. For people to say it doesn't work well I am afraid they are lying because it does work.

the problem is in its extreme form people are left behind and it becomes a survival of the fittest, it is a metaphor for that other activity that human beings engage in - war.

Western civilisation has moved a long way and has largely managed to exploit the activities of capitalism for the benefit of nearly everyone. there is no other system that comes anywhere near this one that enables the human race to live peacefully and develop its potential.

Let us also remember that IT contractors are the ultimate capitalists, They can sell their services anywhere they wish at whatever charges the market will pay. They are unencumbered by red tape and bureacracy and free from the dead hand of socialism. They do not have to sign long term contracts with their employers and they are free to do whatever they like with the money they earn (as long as it is within the law)

there are of course those who feel guilt and sneer at the very dynamic that serves them so well. Sneering is a lot less costly than taking a permanent job for a public sector but it makes them feel better about themselves.

[tractor]

Capitalism let us remember is the free activity of exchange of goods and services between human beings. It is an activity ahead of any other that ensures that human beings coexist peacefully. For people to say it doesn't work well I am afraid they are lying because it does work.

the problem is in its extreme form people are left behind and it becomes a survival of the fittest, it is a metaphor for that other activity that human beings engage in - war.

Western civilisation has moved a long way and has largely managed to exploit the activities of capitalism for the benefit of nearly everyone. there is no other system that comes anywhere near this one that enables the human race to live peacefully and develop its potential.

Let us also remember that IT contractors are the ultimate capitalists, They can sell their services anywhere they wish at whatever charges the market will pay. They are unencumbered by red tape and bureacracy and free from the dead hand of socialism. They do not have to sign long term contracts with their employers and they are free to do whatever they like with the money they earn (as long as it is within the law)

there are of course those who feel guilt and sneer at the very dynamic that serves them so well. Sneering is a lot less costly than taking a permanent job for a public sector but it makes them feel better about themselves.

Contractors. IT Contractors are a subset.

FTFY

[DodgyAgent]

Contractors. IT Contractors are a wealthy subset.

FTFY

[tractor]

...

I am confident there are a lot more builders wealthier than me.

Where is the spelling mistake?

[d000hg]

What does the average contractor earn? £80K perhaps?
I very much doubt this is in the top 2%

I think you have a vastly over-inflated view of what people earn then. The mean (or is it modal) average salary is somewhere around £25k IIRC. Don't know how accurate this is but it seems to refute you: Income in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[SpontaneousOrder]

the problem is in its extreme form people are left behind and it becomes a survival of the fittest

I'd contend that there is no such thing as 'extreme' capitalism. The unfortunate problems most people see as being a consequence of 'extreme' capitalism, are really the opposite - they're consequences of people not adhering to the principles of free trade and voluntary exchange. it only takes something seemingly innocuous, like drug prohibition, or minimum wage laws, to upset the balance and cause a massively disproportionate skew. Then more interferences to fix that only make it worse.

For example, anti-discrimination laws make it very difficult for your average joes to collectively discourage anti-social business practises & other behaviours.

[SpontaneousOrder]

I think you have a vastly over-inflated view of what people earn then. The mean (or is it modal) average salary is somewhere around £25k IIRC. Don't know how accurate this is but it seems to refute you: Income in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Worth noting too, that if we lower the threshold to the top 10%, for example, then a great many of that 10% started out in the bottom 10-20%.

I suspect that a surprising number of the top 2% also started in that bottom 10-20%.