C_J
i think that’s untrue and disingenuous.
That’s pretty harsh.
It’s a fairly uncontroversial point. If a person amasses wealth by winning the lottery, did they earn the money in the sense that you are referring to? If a person generates wealth through criminal enterprise, is that earnt? If I bought a house in the 70s that is now worth 10x the amount paid because I benefited from a soaring housing market and I just happen to live somewhere that is now considered very desirable area, was that earnt in the truest sense of the word?
Opportunity or not, many people go through their lives and work exceptionally hard. Sometimes, through no fault of their own they are not rewarded in the measure that they deserve. The assumption that they ’were given a rod but couldn’t be bothered to use it to fish for themselves’ is where it becomes problematic.
Benefits are far from generous and are not dished out in plentiful supply. Many years ago I worked in the civil service giving advice on benefits and even worked for a Job Centre. I later worked with people who are on benefits and saw the reality of the situation from both sides. There are people who milk the system but there are also those who genuinely need it and have no other choice. I forget the actual figure but something like a third of people on Universal Credit are in employment but have to claim UC to top up their earnings because they are in a form of in-work poverty. Point noted that you are not disputing some people need and are deserving of help, but it is incredibly difficult to assess on any reliable or accurate basis whether they are indeed indolent or making genuine productive effort to transform their lives.
Agreed that an investment in education and lower taxes for low earners would be part of the solution. That’s not where we are though and the all too frequent sentiment is that people are given too many handouts, which erodes the argument for the things you suggest.
The real flaw in the ideology is how to stop all the wealth & power becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Yes, exactly. What I was alluding to in my post is that when we adopt the idea that “I deserve everything I have because I worked so hard for it and others haven’t”, it is much easier to look the other way at the type of wealth inequality that you recognise. It also makes it easier to succumb to, and justify, the type of corruption, fraud and cronyism that seems to happen reliably among the Tories.
[(
