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UK Protesters Make a Mess for Socialism – HotAir

We’ve seen lots of these stunts in the last few years, everything from people setting themselves on fire to throwing soup on famous works of art. This week a new group of protesters calling themselves Take Back Power has carried out a couple of stunts with the goal of convincing Britons to seize the wealth of billionaires.





First they dumped a load of manure in the Ritz-Carlton’s lobby.

The tweet is correct that it won’t be billionaires who are tasked with cleaning up this mess. They didn’t even manage to get a message out, just make a mess.

Their most recent stunt was to visit the Tower of London and dump food on a case containing some of the Crown Jewels.

The goal of course was to generate media attention and give the group’s spokespeople a chance to spread their message on TV. And in that sense it worked. Here we get to hear their actual plan, which is to replace the House of Lords with a Parliament of the People. This new body would have the power to tax the rich, which in this case actually means seizing their wealth.





I think our readers are familiar with this line of thought already, but the tax being pushed here isn’t a tax on income but a tax on wealth. Wealth for most billionaires is in the form of ownership of some valuable company which they created. So really what we’re talking about here is the government seizing ownership of successful companies. In order to pay the taxes this group wants to see, billionaires would have to sell their ownership of their companies and hand the money over to the government. Here’s how they describe it on their website:

Take Back Power is a nonviolent civil resistance group in the UK. We aim to put the 99% in charge through citizen’s assemblies. We are ordinary people from all walks of life who believe that in order to fix Britain, we have to tax the rich. And we don’t think the rich should get a veto. We want the people to decide how we tax the rich through a legally-binding citizen’s assembly – A House of the People. It’s time for the 99% to have 99% of a say!

But how long would this last. You can tax 10% of billionaire’s wealth every year and spend all that money on services for the poor, but even assuming those billionaires don’t flee the country that money will be all gone in a few years. Granted those might be good years for people getting free stuff they didn’t work for or earn but what happens then? 

Once all that money has been seized and there are no more billionaires in the UK what is the House of the People going to do next? They’ll turn on whoever is left with some wealth and start seizing what they own as well. Meanwhile, the economy of the UK would stop functioning. In an environment where success is met with theft, there won’t be anyone in the world willing to invest money in the UK.





How quickly this destroys the economy depends on how rapacious the expropriation of property is. In one interview this group talked about seizing 75% of all the wealth of billionaires. In one year? In five years? Who knows but in a very short time this would result in poverty for everyone. You can’t run an economy by seizing other people’s wealth forever. Sooner or later you run out of other people money.

Anyway, this kind of socialist idiocy is disturbingly popular on the left. A “one time” billionaires tax has been promoted in California recently. You know it’s an extreme idea when even Gavin Newsom considers it a bridge too far.


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