The transfer of wealth upwards is out of control and driven by technology - Andy Brown

Few people object to those who achieve success in business gaining rewards for their hard work and creativity. But there are limits. Elon Musk’s huge wealth varies but the latest estimates I could find put it at $436 billion. That is such a mind bogglingly huge sum of money that it is only possible to visualise it when all the zeros are added. He is sitting on a fortune of $436,000,000,000.

There are, of course, people who have used great wealth wisely and generously. Andrew Carnegie, for example, gave away millions at the start of the twentieth century to create public libraries in stunningly beautiful buildings in the heart of some poor but hardworking communities such as Keighley. Bill Gates and his wife created a foundation which has helped saved millions of children from horrible diseases via vaccine programmes and public health awareness training.

Others use that wealth in less pleasant ways. Elon Musk chose holocaust memorial week to give the Nazi salute and to travel all the way to Germany to tell the very far right AFD party that it had his financial support. He informed them that Germany had too much focus on past guilt.

If industrially slaughtering six million people including Jewish people, Roma people, people living with a disability and gay people isn’t grounds for guilt then what is? No reasonable person could become aware of a planned and deliberate massacre on this scale and then give the Nazi salute.

What is driving the new extremes of wealth concentration is a combination of technology and the ease of tax avoidance. There was a time when improvements to technology tended to wipe out routine manual jobs and create new professional and managerial jobs that spread wealth around. This created a large, prosperous and secure middle class across much of the West. That isn’t what the latest technology does.

Artificial intelligence can give you a first class legal opinion in seconds better than a lawyer. It can study stock markets and identify opportunities and threats quicker than any stock broker. It can review the state of a company’s finances much quicker than any auditor.

When jobs go the money saved ends up in the hands of the people who own the business or the software licences. Computers don’t take home pay cheques but nor do former professionals who lose their job. Technology is wiping out access to a comfortable lifestyle for many of the next generation of professionals every bit as surely as mechanical looms destroyed hand weaving.

The obvious way to control the transfer of wealth upwards that is underway because of technological changes is taxation. That becomes impossible to do in a world where money can easily be hidden in obscure offshore accounts and in bitcoin currencies that just happen to be ideally suited to money laundering of criminal wealth and shielding money from the attention of the inland revenue.

The ease with which money can be moved abroad makes it incredibly difficult to tax the truly astonishing mountains of wealth possessed by an increasingly aggressive and determined minority of oligarchs. In the absence of their contribution ordinary working people end up trying to cover the cost and governments are finding it virtually impossible to decently fund the most basic services at the same time as moderately well off tax payers are justifiably struggling with the burden.

In the 1950s under the Conservative government led by Winston Churchill the top rate of income tax in the UK was over 90 per cent. Few people were able to avoid paying up if they earned hefty incomes. Now it is 40 per cent. Few of the very wealthy pay anything like that if they have clever enough accountants. Many ordinary working people do.

Stopping the trickle up effect isn’t easy in a global economy without effective international management. There is, however, one thing an individual country can do. It can tax the mansions of the very wealthy regardless of what nationality they claim to be or where they record as their main residence.

At the moment council tax is capped so that those who live in enormous properties pay the same amount as those who live in a large detached house in the suburbs. That is nonsense. It is time to start putting much higher tax rates on larger homes.

John Maynard Keynes once wrote that there are only two certain things in life. Death and taxes. Unless we switch to taxing the visible assets of the very wealthy the rest of us are likely to end up paying a much bigger share.

Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.