The People's Pitchfork.
Shock, horror this morning amongst all the people who didn’t read the Forbes list of the 1549 wealthiest people in the world – Oxfam have used the top 85 to depress us further on #Blue Monday.
The top 85 own 1% of the world’s wealth! Nine hundred and ninety billion, eight hundred and eighty-three million, eight hundred and ninety thousand quid all to themselves, just 85 miserable sods? Noooo! We cannot have this. Pitchforkers of the world unite! They must give it back to us! We deserve it – they don’t, they are nasty filthy rich people. We can cure them of that.
Not only that, but an alleged Paedophile (we all know what that means…) will be representing Britain at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Something must be done immediately.
What to do? Well, let’s take that 1% of the world’s wealth away from the undeserving rich and share it out, and whilst we are about it, do away with the Royal family.
(Be aware, the French went down this route in 1789, it didn’t work for them!)
Now that the poorest three and a half billion of us are £228 each better off – look up and what do you see? Well, Bill Gates is broke – you took it all off him remember, so since most of the happy recipients of that £228 are living in third world countries prone to Malaria, you’d better dig deep in your pockets to fund the research otherwise you won’t live long enough to spend your share of the loot.
There’s something else you’ll notice – yes, there are still a load of filthy rich people ahead of you in that Forbes list! Off with their heads!
The only way to cure this is to take all the money in the world off everybody, and share it out equally. Yep, all £159,154,173,160,000 of it and share it out amongst the 7,289,064,815 of us.
Look at that! £21,834 quid and 65 pence each and no more rich bastards!
We’re in the money, we’re in the money….
Just one small point. We owe £104,931,894,022,537.84.
That’s, er, £14,395 each – leaving you just £7,439 apiece.
And I’m prepared to bet that you’ll find you have just repaid that £104,931,894,022,537.84 to people who only had £7,439 yesterday and thus created a whole new category of rich bastards for you to hate.
Not only that, but some of that original ‘wealth’ figure was in the form of the value of property – palaces that you just tore down and created new hovels for yourselves; factories that employed you as slave labour that now have no value ‘cos, rejoice! you are no longer slaves…
It took the French 200 years to figure out what they’d done.
Enjoy your £7,439, there won’t be another handout next year, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
- Cloudberrry
January 21, 2015 at 10:02 am -
Wonder what percentage of the wealthiest people in the UK have been accused of being paedos and what percentage of paedo accusers are short of cash*.
* Mr X passed me in an airport corridor once, so probably won’t remember what happened in the disabled toilet. I never told, as he was so famous, etc. and I didn’t think I’d be believed Need to check out the abuse stories online, buy a bag of onions and call The Express!
- JimS
January 21, 2015 at 10:17 am -
A lot of the ‘corporate’ wealth is imaginary, based on what a relatively small number of shares trade for or even what they DON’T trade for. In other words if someone wants shares in Gates Computing and no-one is selling then the market ups the price until someone else is prepared to sell. If a large proportion of Gates Computing was owned by one man and he decided to sell the lot people would wonder what was wrong about the company that he knew about and they didn’t and the price would fall through the floor. Also there wouldn’t be enough spare cash to buy him out so the best he could do would be a share swop, which isn’t ‘liquidating’ Gates Computing’s ‘value’ anyway.
The simplest method would be to print money to buy up all the debt and print more money to give to the poor to spend, which is what governments around the world do already. It’s all a big pyramid scam. Come the final reckoning, (sometime never), it will turn out that the accumulated debt is vastly bigger than all the world’s assets, which isn’t really possible without extra-planetary trading!
What we can be sure of is that Oxfam’s CEO will still be paid 100,000 times more than the poorest person in the world.
- Ian B
January 21, 2015 at 11:12 am -
Indeed. People often confuse value and valuations, such as assets. Part of the problem is that in doing so, by totting up all the valuations as if they were money, it makes it look like there is a lot more money in the world (i.e. potential liquidity) than there actually is, so they tend to think you could share it all out, which you can’t. It’s like those silly totals of the supposed value of all the property in the country you get in the Daily Mail, which say we’re supposedly sitting on ten squillion billion quid, when that much money doesn’t exist and cannot.
- Ian B
- Fat Steve
January 21, 2015 at 10:40 am -
Not only is your prose is vastly better than mine but by golly (if such is a politically acceptable expletive) so is your maths …..can’t say I would fancy my chances against you in a game of poker Anna
- Ed P
January 21, 2015 at 10:51 am -
Aah, the politics of envy – as used by Labour for decades to stir up hatred and (hopefully for them) gain a few paltry votes. It would be funnier if the sheeple didn’t fall for it, as they will again in May.
- windsock
January 21, 2015 at 2:58 pm -
The politics of envy works both ways. All those who are envious of the “feckless”, laying around watching Jeremy Kyle on a whole £70 a week while they have to work for their share options and BMWs boo hoo. Or so the Tories would have it.
- windsock
- The Blocked Dwarf
January 21, 2015 at 11:39 am -
“Lord who made the lion and the lamb,
You decreed I should be what I am.
But would it spoil some vast eternal plan?
If I were a wealthy man?”Je suis Topol.
- JuliaM
January 21, 2015 at 4:25 pm -
/applause
- JuliaM
- English Pensioner
January 21, 2015 at 12:03 pm -
I never believe statistics unless they are presented by a impartial properly qualified statistician.
The current definition of poverty in the UK is based on those who have an income below a certain percentage of the median income of the UK population. During the recession we had less people in poverty, because the median income dropped; we now have more because it is rising but I would question whether anyone is actually any poorer than they were a couple of years ago.
However, if we took as our yardstick the median income within the EU, by magic we would have a lot more people who were no longer in poverty in this country although their circumstances wouldn’t have changed one iota. If we took the median world income as our reference, I doubt if anyone would be in poverty in this country, indeed I suspect that everyone here would be in the wealthiest 50% in the world.- The Blocked Dwarf
January 21, 2015 at 2:05 pm -
“a impartial properly qualified statistician.”
…along with his friends- The Easter Bunny, Father Xmas ,The Tooth Fairy and that most mythical of all creatures -the Honest Public Health ‘Expert’?
- the moon is a balloon
January 21, 2015 at 2:25 pm -
I can recommend a statistician. And one who just cares about presenting the data. He is not perfect by any means but is probably the most honest of his kind I have come across. And he says that in terms of what counts, the world is getting increasingly equal. Whowuddathunk? How he snuck this message onto the BBC is a mystery.
- English Pensioner
January 22, 2015 at 12:05 am -
When I was working, on occasions I had to use a statistician to analyse data. He had no real knowledge of the subject being analysed, his job was to look at the data, identify any patterns or trends in order that we might make changes to our systems. Such people do exist, to him the data was merely figures which as a mathematician he examined.
- the moon is a balloon
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Mark in Mayenne
January 21, 2015 at 12:16 pm -
Nice
- Andrew Duffin
January 21, 2015 at 12:22 pm -
“It took the French 200 years to figure out what they’d done.”
Actually I’m not sure they have figured it out yet.
- Micky
January 21, 2015 at 2:27 pm -
On the basis of daily encounters with French locals [and officials, as for that matter] I’m sure they haven’t.
- Tedioustantrums
January 21, 2015 at 4:49 pm -
Hmmmmm….. I’m all for onwards and upwards, it’s just it come to a halt has it not? How about we demand that more of the money we earn stays in our pockets? How long will it be before the price of a litre of petrol drops no longer because the part that was the actual petrol is so low that we’re left paying just the duty?
How about the cunning plan to have us give money to charity and the givernment will put in the same amount? But they don’t they any money, they just have access to ours that they stole. So really we are paying twice. I could drone on.
It’s hard to justify royalty nowadays. Buying ski lodges and getting a helicopter from your a Granny is fine if you get it in a hobby shop or the lodge is yours for a week. Race to the bottom “Call me Dave” said that. When has he ever said anything that made sense or was useful?
- Don Cox
January 21, 2015 at 7:13 pm -
One justification of royalty is that they are cheaper tha Presidents.
- The Blocked Dwarf
January 21, 2015 at 8:00 pm -
*insert a Blocked Dwarf obscure 80s lyric quote*
“It’s a small world and it smells funny
I’d buy another if it wasn’t for the money
Take back what I paid
For another motherf**ker in a motorcade”- A.von Eldritch
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Don Cox
- Paul Widdecombe
January 21, 2015 at 5:28 pm -
Reminds me of a post I read a while back on the legendary IowaHawk blog:
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/feed-your-family-on-10-billion-a-day.html
Oxfam have lost all credibility since policy director Ben Phillips turned what used to be an effective organisation battling the causes of true grinding poverty, into a platform for green-eyed handwringing Marxist agitprop
- Binao
January 21, 2015 at 6:01 pm -
It’s hard to disagree.
I’m reminded of the story of a royal who cancelled the building of his new yacht to show restraint while the poor suffered in the depression.
Thereby destroying even more jobs.
I find it difficult to imagine a situation where a modern society without the rich would be much better.
The alternatives haven’t been very successful. - Engineer
January 21, 2015 at 7:29 pm -
I wonder what proportion of the ‘wealth’ held by the richest 85 people is in current value of businesses employing lots and lots of people? I wonder what proportion of said ‘wealth’ is the current value of farmland growing food for lots and lots of people? (OK – so the rich farmers get subsidies, sometimes. True, but so do the little farmers, too. Maybe it’s the whole subsidy idea that’s cock-eyed, not who gets them.)
A radio interviewee not long ago rather sneeringly said that charities are no longer run by the minor sons and daughters of the aristocracy. Some of us rather wish they still were. At least the said minor sons and daughters only asked for their legimate expenses to be covered by the charity, and didn’t expect a six-figure salary as well. The direction of some ‘charities’ in recent years does not appear particularly charitable – Oxfam is one such.
- Robert Edwards
January 21, 2015 at 9:58 pm -
I calculate (albeit with rather less than the surgical precision clearly used by Oxfam – whose business it is to say these things) that once the Great Redistribution has been accomplished (and natch, by which time Oxfam are all out of a job) that a very similar order of things would be established within about a week. Lawyers, guns and money…
- Ed P
January 21, 2015 at 11:20 pm -
Whilst it’s quite fascinating to watch the death spiral of Western civilisation, getting off the mad train is not so easy. Gold or real estate, there’s the question. Self-sufficiency’s top of my list.
- Lupulco
January 21, 2016 at 6:19 pm -
If you really think about it, there is no such thing as total self-sufficiency. Every one needs a little help now and again.
We look down on street cleaners and refuse disposal operatives, but without them and their like the streets would be full of rubbish and our gardens turned in to rubbish dumps.
The head might rule the body, but without the bodies legs and arms, the head could not move.
- Lupulco
- Paul Widdecombe
January 22, 2015 at 11:15 am -
There is one question that should be persistently asked whenever the SJWs thrust inequality statistics forward, which is:
“What should the ratio be then?”
The implicit assumption always seems to be that the ideal tends towards 100% equality. Most thinking persons understand this not to be the case, however. So the assumption should not be allowed to remain implicit – they should be forced to defend an alternative, which would be easily defeated by the next question:
“What level of inequality do you suppose is required to manufacture the iPhone that you are using to broadcast such fine sentiments…?”
No amount of weaselling should be accepted. If people want to argue the present ratio is wrong, that is fine – but they should tell us what the ideal ratio should be.
- Peter Raite
January 23, 2015 at 1:45 pm -
100% equality is an impossibility, but I think a lot of people are a bit narked at businesses making huge profits, paying as little tax as possible, giving huge bonuses to those at the top, yet paying those at the bottom so little that their income has to be topped up by the state.
- Peter Raite
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