The Undeserving Rich

There was a film on last night, I forget what it was called, but it had a gambler in it. I wasn't really watching it. Too busy sleeping.

As I say, there was a gambler. That got me thinking. A gambler is a good example of the old idea of the undeserving poor. It is an old fashioned idea now, mostly Victorian. The deserving poor should be someone who works every hour God sends to support his family and still needs the odd handout. The undeserving poor is a dissolute and drink-sodden wastrel who'll waste any money he gets and is too idle to get any himself. Of course, neither one exists in this perfect form. Neither one exists at all, it's just a construct of the rich to justify their wealth. I believe it was Marx who said the rich will always invent belief systems that justify them holding onto their wealth. Might've been Orwell. Or Orwell quoting Marx, mayhap.

This, as I say, is an obsolete idea. Back in the pre-Thatcherite social democratic era there were no undeserving poor, simply those badly served by the system. I like that. Now it's the Thatcherite model, entrepreneurialism and so on. Wealth is virtue. Right makes might. So forth. The poor are now meant to be undeserving by definition as anyone worth their keep should be able to make it. But it's none of it true. It's a pity. It's a nice Darwinist view of the world, the normal right-wing pattern of seeing the world as they want it to be rather than as it actually is. The truth is that the tax system dictates how many poor and rich there will be and how poor and rich they will be. The economic system. Of course, if I was an entreprenuer I could shove myself to the top of the pile by being the biggest bastard in the big pile of bastards, but I'd rather not. The system simply dictates that you've got to be a bastard to get on, it doesn't pick a name out of a hat to decide who's rich, anyone can be rich. Opportunity and all that. But not everyone can be rich. The reason there are poor people isn't because they lack the entreprenuer gene, although perhaps they do, it's that the structure of society requires some people to be poor and they're the ones best suited to the role.

If they ceased to be poor someone else would have ot take their place.

Could be immigrants, there's been an effort to replace our freedom loving stock with slavish foreigners. Good for the economy, they say. Low wages. Not good for the economy from my point of view. Our ecnomy is based on services and the export of financial services, I don't think a few low-wage labourers is going to help. A few Poles aren't going to enable us the compete on wages with the Chinese and I don't see the bankers in a race to the bottom. They don't want to pay too much for their gardeners and cleaners, I suppose.

I notice Sweden doesn't have extremes of poverty. Has high taxes too. Shocking. Surely they should be bankrupt, forcing those oh-so-valuable entreprenuerial spirits out of their country. The man who invented TetraPak, a glorified cardboard box, is a Swede. He left the country because of the government's outrageous demands that he pay his taxes, as if he was a normal person rather than a Nietzchean superman. Silly Swedes. Look what they've lost! The pleasure of getting to lick the boots of a very rich man. And this is an "inventor", one of the deserving rich if there is such a thing, who made the money himself. Well, collected it in licencing fees, anyway. But all the Swedes have lost is his tax money and he didn't want to pay that anyway.

If only our government would take the hint. We don't need to worship the rich, they're no good for us. I say: "pay your taxes or get out of my country". Cunts. I blame Cromwell. Ireton, too. He argued that the rich had a permanent stake in the Kingdom as its owners and therefore should run it, not give it over to a democracy. It's wrong, even if it wasn't sucha bad argument. The rich can take themselves off whenever they want, the poor are stuck. Especially before the invention of bikes to get on. The rich should pay their taxes, more than proportionately as Adam Smith said, because they get more in return (even if we don't count all the tax moneys they steal in overpriced contracts as so forth). The tax-funded government is the only thing standing between them and a forcible redistribution, you'd think they'd be more grateful.

Society is like Total Football. There are positions to be occupied, all that changes is the individuals occupying them. Robert Maxwell and Arthur Scargill. Maxwell is supposed to be more vituous, a wealth creator rather than a parasite. He pissed off roofs and laughed at the people below.

Other matters

Things indicative of a lack of civilisation: minding the cold, good sense of smell, talking too much.

Dole incidents: agency, ascot hat (I've told that story).

There was a terror alert recently, turned out to be a hoax, up at Kelham Hall.

I went to a school called Lovers' Lane. I remember now that there was always a belief that there were tunnels under the playing field. I believed it. There was a wooden board in the ground, like a railyway sleeper, which we believed to be the roof. There was also a few stairs leading down into the ground, buried, made of bricks, in some trees. There was a hole too. Supposedly an ant hole but with no ants or anything else, which went as far as the arm could reach. An air hole for the tunnels was the common opinion. In hindsight this all stink of SRA, as do several other things.

Panorama, the BBC flagship documentary has really gone downhill since it was taken over by women. Now it's only half an hour long, picks rubbish subjects and covers them badly. And it's got that Vine on it to make it as much like Tonight wi' Sir Trev as possible. Makes me sick.