Writing in the Wall Street Journal, former Labour MP Kitty Ussher projects her own ideas onto the British public:

Of course nobody wants Britain to be a place where greed is celebrated, where rich people are deemed superior, where taxation is regressive and stupid financiers are let off the hook. That would be absurd.

The above claim reveals more about Kitty than it does the British. I thought we were generally rather proud of our Brindleys, Brunels and Berners-Lees, but Kitty of course assumes that wealth and self interest are automatically bad.

Celebrating greed

I doubt very many think of it this way, but greed has it’s good points. Gordon Gecko’s accidentally excellent defence focused on it’s productivity as a tool of choosing, and had a somewhat Randian encouragement of shareholders to act in their own interest. Rand herself wrote, in the Fountainhead, about how altruism – greed’s adversary – causes us either to sacrifice ourselves, sacrifice others, or seek to control and direct others. If we imagine a Britain 100 years from now where evryone is much happier and Libertarian and Objectivist policital ideas are considered normal, we might look back and see that learning to be greedy and to look after oneself without sacrificing or hectoring others was the greatest moral innovation of our time. That is something that I, for one, would very much like to see.

Admiring the rich

Likewise a political system that tackles the right kind of unearned income might allow us to admire the rich as our most valued section the population.

Kitty of course has a problem with the kind of wealth she considers “unearned” namely the property investments we make as we settle down, or the wealth of our ancestors who decide to reward our virtues with the results of their own, by passing on accumulated wealth after their deaths. She calls this “unearned wealth that just lands in the laps of the lucky” and wants it to be “tackled” presumably by confiscating it and spending it on her own pet projects. It is not unearned, virtue – rationality, self-esteem and productivity – earned it in both cases.

The kind of “unearned” wealth that I abhor is that granted to anyone with a need. Need is a passkey to the wealth of others that is dangerously simple to come by. If I spend all my money on drugs and booze, I have a need of food. If I fail to choose a sensible investment I have a need of money. If I drive my freinds and family away I have a need of somebody new to rely upon, generally beaurocrats and the strangers they fleece on my behalf. Then there are the short sighted “Big Businessmen” who instead of earning new wealth in exchange for new goods seek to protect ancient cash cows by setting up barriers for competitors. Tackling this latter category, by preventing Big Government from assisting them, would truly allow us to look at the rich as people whom, in general, are productive, admirable members of society and value to all of us.

The malevalent universe

Kitty, who’s name is an insult to adorable cats everywhere, continues:

[No one] should feel sorry for some kind of caricature of a poor rich person cruelly subjected to a 50% marginal rate of tax on every extra pound they earn over £150,000. These people can still buy themselves out of most practical problems chucked at them by life.

Life is a process of self-perpetuating action, and cannot “chuck problems” at that which it seeks to preserve. Kitty reveals that she holds with an assumption known as the “malevalent universe”. She “believes that men are trapped in a [universe] where disasters are the constant and primary concern of their lives”, as Rand put it. In other words, for Kitty it is as if prosperity were something that is prevented by the continous intervention of unseen forces and not something to be identified and produced from a neutral, indifferent reality which is there for the taking. It is this assumption that justifies the leftist desire to feed the hungry by stealing fish from the people who know how to make fishing rods.

The truly bizarre part is how she somehow manages to suggest that the 50p tax rate should be abolished. If you can work out how she got there, let me know.