Terry Leahy, the facilitator and keynote speaker for our upcoming mini-conference on Permaculture in Society and Development on April 30th has more to share!

He comments on the article: How to Hit the Rich Where it Really Hurts

Terry writes: “This article proposes a particular kind of tax on the rich. Why is such a tax unlikely to be implemented? One reason is the alliance between the political class and the rich. The other is that the rich will take their investments and money elsewhere if taxes increase. Even a tax on personal property (as proposed here) is not completely proof against this strategy. It is always possible for the rich to sell up and go somewhere else to live. The article notes the increasing inequality of wealth – the increasing concentration of wealth at the top. But it remains a bit of a mystery why this is happening. What an article in the Herald will never say is that a large part of the problem is globalisation. It is very hard to regulate the rich if they can always take their investment to another country. Every government in the world is trying to seduce them into investing and making their own country’s economy and employment work. A regime of tariff protection, which most rich countries had until the seventies, prevented this mobility of capital. The rich could not make money by investing overseas, producing consumer goods there and importing them back to undercut local producers. They had to locate production where the consumers were. Now, if things are not going their way, they can take their money and set up somewhere else – where taxes are not such a problem and workers are paid less.”