The City of London Is Hiding the World’s Stolen Money
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Anyone reading the headline statements in the document can see the implied meaning. For instance, the Chancellor of the Exchequer:
"I want to ensure that the government - working with our world-class regulators - takes an agile and dynamic approach, one which enables those in the financial services sector to evolve and thrive as they embrace the new opportunities of the future."
[0] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
[1] The 'City of London' in this context should be understood as the rough equivalent of 'Wall St' in US terms
Every corrupt Russian official will buy realestate in the west, London if he's rich, some smaller EU country if he is a 'pleb'
After all, sometimes it's New York.
I think the nod and wink is to enable the perpertrators from outside the UK to 'invest' here, and let us have a cut, rather than enable UK citizens to engage in these activities.
Who's "us"?
The people doing the nodding and winking!
Who is doing the nodding and winking?
They are!
Who are they?
THEM!
The UK (along with its crown dependencies) are large scale centres of shell companies and other mechanisms used by people to obscure their wealth. The UK has promised to reform this but appears to be dragging its heels...
Also they're much smaller countries I can't see luxembourg being able to opt out of the EU to protect financial arrangements...
UK noped out
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/50168357
> But the rules are, in fact, all already part of UK law. A small number of them will not come into effect until 1 January [2020], but that would have happened anyway whether or not the UK was a member of the EU.
HSBC is neither, and is the second-biggest bank in Europe. Just to name an example. (I guess by "European" you mean "EU-based")
With Brexit, the UK has now no say in what those rules are beyond some saber-rattling.
I mean, the UK can certainly just offer a very loose regulatory environment, but that's useless on it's own if other jurisdictions refuse to cooperate. The extreme measure would be to put the UK on the uncooperative tax regimes list, which would mean that nobody in other countries would touch business established here.
The City was hit hard by Brexit, a stupid decision the U.K. bumbled into.
Nobody benefited in the long run. That our societies can walk off a cliff with nobody in charge is scary, so we try to attribute the decision to hidden forces. But sometimes, as in this case, there simply isn’t anyone at the wheel.
No, I don't think so ... rather, it is things like this that allowed Brexit to be plausible.
Which is to say, if you hunted around for backup plans, "global financial hub" was always first on the list.
It appears that it may be backfiring, however, as financial services and banks, etc., are decamping to Frankfurt ...
The City was and remains overwhelmingly anti-Brexit [1]. The plan didn't backfire because there was no such plan.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/2980dbd4-ecf6-11e8-8180-9cf212677...
Do you think all those east-midlands counties voted on behalf of London Finance?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-06/brexit-po...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-25/brexit-bi...
So some insiders were able to profit off the outcome of the referendum in shady circumstances.
They represent the party of the self-conscious Bourgeoisie, of industrial capital striving to make available its social power as a political power as well, and to eradicate the last arrogant remnants of feudal society. This party is led on by the most active and most energetic portion of the English Bourgeoisie — the manufacturers.
What they demand is the complete and undisguised ascendancy of the Bourgeoisie, the open, official subjection of society at large under the laws of modern, Bourgeois production, and under the rule of those men who are the directors of that production. By Free Trade they mean the unfettered movement of capital, freed from all political, national and religious shackles. The soil is to be a marketable commodity’ and the exploitation of the soil is to be carried on according to the common commercial laws. There are to be manufacturers of food as well as manufacturers of twist and cottons, but no longer any lords of the land. There are, in short, not to be tolerated any political or social restrictions, regulations or monopolies, unless they proceed from “the eternal laws of political economy,”
MARX, Karl
Free Trade and The Chartists
Written: on August 2, 1852;
First published: in the New-York Daily Tribune, August 25 1852.
The article seems more like a lobbying piece, how many more times can the author write “shady”
edit: Nicholas Shaxson (@nickshaxson) is a staff writer for the Tax Justice Network and a co-founder of the Balanced Economy Project, an antimonopoly organization. He is the author of “Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World” and “The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer.”
This is an article geared for people to agree with it because it matches what they want to read
The system is build to fail. Part of the reason we get along so famously here in Scandinavia, and why we share the burden of the less fortunate is because of how we build our cities and systems of society so that everyone met everyone. In an average school class in the 90’ies you’d find children from the top and the bottom of society, and that helps generate and build compassion, understanding and empathy in ways that I think are very underrated in today’s Danish society where we all send our children to private institutions and schools if we can afford it, and aren’t ideologically inclined not to do so.
This has created ghettos of wealthy and poor, where we don’t really mix anymore. The result has been fairly obvious over the past two decades, and as inequality steadily increases the classes grow further and further apart. This will of course only have one conclusion unless the legal system gets a grip and starts seizing and redistributing the wealth.
Maybe people are willing to live in their cars and work warehouse jobs in America, but here in the cradle of social democracy, people are sharpening their axes.
People revolt (for real) when they are hungry.
I am skeptical that any well-fed, satiated populace will spawn any kind of violent revolution.
So, regardless of the markers of inequality or other drivers of outrage (which certainly exist) I would be loath to predict any kind of violent unrest while everyone has food to put on the table.
They appear to in Scandinavia.
Relatively well fed people started the american civil war, which is a kind of revolution.
A housing shortage doesn't qualify in that sense, and a revolution (internal war) is unlikely as a result of it because we don't have some tremendous housing shortage where a large population are not well-fed. If we did, maybe so!
Also, revolutions don't need to be violent! I argue it's better if they aren't. The "axes" can be metaphorical too.
It’s intentionally built to empower people who die, and the baton gets fumbled around once they do
Frankly it’s working peoples fault. Aristocrats financial hegemony would vanish tomorrow if workers became independent agents rather than work for them.
Only 5% of the US hunts anymore. Everyone is dependent on industrialized economic distribution.
Let the bankers in NY and London try to collect mortgages across the world when we stop paying. Let the 800,000 sworn officers in the US police 300 million+ for no pay.
The system is too small to handle the reality. It’s not designed to fail, it’s not designed to scale. We see similar planning effort in the logistics pipeline problems; no slack. Militant efficiency.
Just like with religion, it’s the belief of the masses that enable the co-opting of our agency for their profit. Our belief enables them.
Unions need to stop collecting dues from members and start charging employers subscription fees, or similar changes to social norms. But that’s all politically babysat and everyone is happy to look away from the lack of disruption in that context, while disrupting the shit out of lives dependent on business that is now extracted from the community.
My fellow Americans ended up being a bunch of Daniel Plainviews… I drink your milkshake. But the financial wealth is all a mirage, made up to serve the old ways. Good luck when the masses realize very smart people took away their American dream.
I agree with everything but this. This is exactly why the propaganda machine for ages (fairytales) have put royalty/nobles at the top. e.g. It's the knight who kills the dragon, not the townsfolk who band together. Or that magical talent is somehow always hereditary. Or that the king
No, don't blame the working peoples. The countries where the working class got rid of royalty and are consistently demonized.
But like you said, we demonize working people instead of empowering them, for a reason.
The goal isn’t perfect mind control, but to avoid thinking in alternatives and enabling the self made nonsense. Convincing everyone they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Implant reasons to ignore alternatives and hammer on them; it’s not how it works for tradition, for country… one reason after another why we can’t politically just be decent.
It works not because people are lazy but mirror neurons. Biology. The public must be the one to do different so the public sees itself do different. Knows different is doable.
Relativity has some deep network effects we don’t often think about. We can’t experience otherwise doing the same all day.
You think it's propaganda that professional soldiers have a better shot at killing a mythical creature than a peasant militia?
> I agree with everything but this.
I'd like to examine the principle from another angle, with the following question.
Regarding US voters who reelect pols that legislate in response to major campaign donations: How much responsibility do those voters have for legislative corruption?
Not sure how exactly that is an "only", sounds pretty high to me. Does US really need more than 5% hunters? I'd be more concerned about the percentage of thinkers.
You can romanticize the prehistoric times and the middle ages all you want, but the reality is that the "working class" had it much worse back in the times when 50% were hunters.
There are 25 million deer in US, there are 300 million people.
I sympathise with your tirade, but all systems of power work this way. If tomorrow morning all people of Russia would forget who Putin is, he would become nobody.
What changed in Denmark between the 90s and now?
Why do people, even in Denmark, send their kid to private schools if they can afford it?
Tax rates have always been very high in Denmark, you're advocating for them to be even higher?
> ... but here in the cradle of social democracy, people are sharpening their axes.
Blood to make sure to make more of what didn't work?
I'm not saying they're wrong, I don't know. But that's the perspective from Malmo which is the closest major city to Denmark in Sweden... in fact Malmo is sometimes referred to a suburb of Copenhagen. (this is also controversial)
> Why do people, even in Denmark, send their kid to
> private schools if they can afford it?
I'm not speaking on behalf of the OP here, but my interpretation is that what changed _was_ people sending their kids to private schools instead of intermingling as they did before. I believe you are asking about the "why", why did they start sending them to private schools or why did they stop sending them to public or community schools.
That could be a multi-faceted answer, and it could be very difficult to pin down even what the dominant factors are. I would also like to know about Denmark.
I will add that this same problem exists in some form in my own home town, so I don't know if it's something unique to Denmark. My guess is that it's probably something to do with competition in generation from many more people consuming increasing amounts of a diminishing supply of resources.
Is it a feature of American politics to bring up communism in every discussion?
It's always some comedic parody too, like 'race mixing is communism' or 'climate change is a communist plot'. Basically a boogeyman of American politics
The former is within the latter.
The government is an extension of her majesty, and since the Queen can't even enter without prior permission.... though I believe there's some form of power exerted on the City by parliament.
They are governed by the "City of London Corporation" which is much different from the "Mayor of London".
They have their own police force, power stations, elections. Etc;
Unless you have information I don't have.
Specifically, the City of London Corporation is headed by the Lord Mayor of the City of London, who is a completely different person than the Mayor of London who heads the Greater London Authority, which is the government of what most people think of as the city named London, which is a completely different thing than the City of London.
I mean, Manchester has its own police force, Merseyside has its own police, and so forth. Each borough in the England has its own elections. What's peculiar about the City is that the electorate of the City's elections includes businesses as well as residents. But it's not some kind of extraterritorial oddity as some conspiracy theorists think.
There's a commons MP for the City of London _and_ Westminster (jointly) but that arrangement is... peculiar and not like other regions of the UK at all. She doesn't officially represent the CoL from their perspective.
There _is_ a member of the House of Lords who is directly posted by CoL and his job is to prevent the erosion of rights that City of Londoners enjoy.
[0] https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-us/about-the-city-of-l...
This was because the Congress had been beseiged by disgruntled citizens when it met in Philadelphia, and the state of Pennsylvania had refused to intervene.
I'm getting this from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C.#History
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corpor...
I think the country is much better off with the City than without it and to some extent we must be accommodating of it, not bending it to our will.
Disclaimer: written from my desk within the City.
Everything else, apart from its value as real estate, is just a historical curiosity...it doesn't matter
Great example of synecdoche (rhymes with Schenectady)
However, it would mean that part of the local investment might flow back into local business/industry, making the country also slightly better off and with less inequality there might also be less corruption. Your average politician would spend less time being a mercenary for the city and more time dealing with actual problems.
Possibly, but here the perception of tax avoidance and perception of corruption matters, as well as the ability of people on City salaries to outbid everyone else on housing.
Ultimately the City is still subject to UK law and UK voters, and the more depressed towns pile up the more likely something drastic and probably counterproductive is going to be "done about" the City.
If everyone paid their 'fair share' down London way it wouldnt change a thing.
As the saying goes, we live in a society.
Because financialisation has caused stock market and GDP to become detached from the real productive economy.
Because maybe they think the finance industry should be investing in real infrastructure or something productive.
Is this true ? Genuinely curious since you work in The City.
I was under the impression that New York was 1, London was kind-of-sort-of 2 and Frankfurt was either 2 or 3 ...
Comments ?
Best "tax evasion as a service" since City of London uses laws as obscure as if they came from some fantasy book.
* trusts excluded from information exchange processes, effectively unknown beneficial owner
* No reporting of capital reserves to nobody, so laws like Basel II literally dont exist, as long as the pseudo bank is on some island (yet all operations are in City)
* "If I believe it looks like a bank, then it is a bank"
1. A predicted consequence of Brexit was that the UK would become more of a tax haven once freed from the shackles of EU banking and financial regulation. This would be (and is) sold under the banner of jingoism and because of jobs as some business moves to the EU;
2. The US demands financial transaction information as the price for access to the US banking system. The flipside of this is that the US doesn't share that information with anyone else so ironically (or perhaps by design) the US has its own role in hiding assets. Note that South Dakota featured prominently in the Pandora Papers; and
3. We need to tax real estate more when the beneficial owner isn't known or isn't a tax resident of wherever the real estate is located. Treating real estate purely as an asset class is having real consequences for the ability of people to live. New York City, London and other cities are where people work and live and shouldn't simply be a place for oligarchs to secretly park money.
Yes, we have property taxes in NYC as one example but they're not high enough. For example, a $100m apartment only pays about 10-15x the taxes on a $1m apartment and that $1m apartment pays 2-3x the taxes on a $1m single-family home.
Interestingly, US citizens and residents have to declare foreign assets every year (twice; once to the IRS and the exact same information also to the Treasury on a separate form) but... foreign real estate is an excluded asset. You don't even have to report it. Why? It's a nonsensical exclusion for the wealthy;
4. We need to do something about using debt to avoid taxes. This is another zero-interest problem. Why repatriate or realize gains and pay 35% when you can borrow at <1% basically forever. Worst case you end up realizing gains to pay those loans back. For individuals, you get out of that by dying (ie your beneficiaries inherit things on a stepped up basis). For companies, borrowing money should count as repatriating foreign profits and be taxed accordingly;
5. We need to tax more things at source; and
6. We need to do more about using IP shenanigans to shift profits overseas. Additionally, countries need to start apportioning profits based on revenue. If Apple earns 25% of their revenue in the US then the US should tax 25% of their profits.
People being unwilling to pay for the world that allows their wealth to exist is not a new problem but like all such efforts before them, the ultimate form of wealth redistribution is war and revolution. And nobody wants that.
Veto power doesn't mean you can simply veto anything you don't like. Well, you can but then everybody else does the same thing and the net result is nothing. So in reality, you just give up something you want for something you want more. You compromise.
But now the UK isn't shackled by having to make concessions to 25+ other countries that can veto their agenda.
Simply re-instate capital controls and the uber-wealthy would find the costs of offshoring their wealth would be greater than the costs of paying their fair share of taxes domestically, as would corpororations.
Of course, corrupt governments controlled by the uber-wealthy (Saudi Arabia, United States, Britain, Australia, etc.) would never willingly go along with this approach, as it would represent a great loss of power and control by the billionaire class.
There are zero cases, contemporaneously or historically, of permanent capital controls not having billionaire-sized holes for the rich and powerful. Instead, they typically create a wealth transfer from the lower and middle classes to a bureaucratic layer of bullshit jobs which benefit the elite.
This would force manufacturing back to the country of ownership, which would be good for domestic manufacturing and middle class prosperity, and very bad for the current global tax evasion and money laundering system.
We don't need to use hypotheticals: China is heavily capital controlled on the outbound side of the equation. On the other side of the coin, the U.S. corporate tax regime, until recently, penalised bringing capital home. That acted as a limited inbound capital control. So when considering a U.S. company investing in China, one would have symmetric capital controls.
The result? Not less offshoring. Just more money sitting uselessly in various accounts being tended to by teams of lawyers and accountants.
> Commitment No 9: Non-tariff measures
> "China shall eliminate and cease to enforce trade and foreign exchange balancing requirements, local content and export or performance requirements made effective through laws, regulations or other measures."
Thus, there's been no 'test case' to date of the results of forcing manufacturers to pay real costs for outsourcing domestic USA manufacturing to sweatshop low-rate labor zones overseas.
This is probably the most pushed aspect (and least reported on by the media) of all the 'foreign trade deals' the US government has pushed from the 1980s onwards - relaxation of capital controls by the target country. Notably, countries that agreed to wholesale removal of all restrictions typically get gutted by pump and dump schemes, currency manipulation, and so on (see Asian crisis 1997 etc., which China avoided) run out of Wall Street and London financial centers.
Incidentally, from an economic perspective, Ricardo's Theory of Competitive Advantage (sheeps wool from Britain, grapes from France being the traditional example) which shows how two trade partners can mutually benefit. The concept only applies if profits from trade stay in the countries of origin; Britain setting up a slave plantation in France in 1750, for example, and exporting profits and wine to Britain would not be what Ricardo had in mind.
One, it's an open secret that China rusn roughshod over its WTO accession commitments. (Including the language you cite. For example, with respect to local content and local partnership requirements.) Two, that language doesn't deal with capital controls, but with currency manipulation and tariffs. (Both of which, again, China does.) In reality, anyone who has done business in China knows that converting yuan from local sales to dollars is a tedious process [1].
Capital controls have little to do with what makes offshoring enticing: the labor cost and regulatory gradient. Ford making a car in Mexico to sell to Mexicans isn't an offshoring problem. It's Ford making cars in Mexico to sell to Americans. Tariffs are the direct solution to the latter. Capital movement is irrelevant.
[1] https://www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca/china-chine/control-cont...
The US govt could slap import tariffs on those imported autos (as it does with imported Chinese solar panels) to flatten price differentials. However, the Mexican government could also apply export tariffs (even bans) in order to keep domestic auto prices down. (Notably the US banned crude oil exports from 1970-2015). Such export tariffs can be a form of capital controls imposed by a government, but aren't they typically banned in free trade deals?
Except it’s not a form of capital control. It’s a trade tariff. You want tariffs, which are typically what’s reduced in trade deals. Capital control or not, without tariffs the offshoring you describe would make sense. (You just wouldn’t repatriate the profits from Mexico in a world without free movement of capital.)
Also, why would Mexico implement an export tariff in this example? To decrease the domestic price of cars? More realistic: the U.S. would implement an import tariff. Capital controls on either side would, again, do nothing.
> "Another concern inherent in decentralised cryptocurrencies is that they make it easy to circumvent China’s capital controls, which restrict people from converting more than US$50,000 worth of yuan into foreign currencies each year."
> "Without restrictions on bitcoin trading, it is easy to buy large values of the digital token and quickly convert it into other currencies. Still, the fees associated with that are typically much higher than what people would pay through bank transfers."
1. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3141253/chinas-bi...
Institution of capital controls in Britain and the USA would represent an inversion of the actual political power structure (which is currently basically a top down oligarchic power structure run out of Wall Street and London, a system in which most major economic decisions are made by a 'Central Committee' of billionaire shareholders and CEOs, not by their paid-off and subservient bureaucrats and politicians).
Monero would be a much better choice for their purposes.
[0] https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-us/voting-elections
1. Have any of you brilliant financial analysts who work in different tech sector jobs and megacorps put consideration into how much of your high salaries and benefits might just be subsidized by those same corps that hire you being able to enormously reduce their tax burdens through all sorts of clever tax avoidance schemes?
The same havens and instruments that are often used by blatant tax avoiding criminal money launderers such as drug traffickers and corrupt politicians also correlate with the paths that legal entities legally use to avoid taxes.
2. In all discussions about tax havens and financial privacy instruments, the criticism is always against those who practice these things and those who facilitate them. Rarely do people who should know better seem to ask if maybe, just maybe, government already wastes far too much money on all sorts of idiocies and inefficiencies. Many of these could first be corrected for better funding of its better, more socially beneficial programs instead of reallocating funds or trying to squeeze even more tax revenue and paranoid surveillance from people of all kinds.
The obvious example in this case: The U.S governments military budget alone is in the several hundreds of billions per year (not including god knows how much black budget spending or military-related waste), but tax avoidance losses get screamed about by bureaucrats and social justice types at every turn.
How about wasteful-spending avoidance first, and a modicum of self restraint from the behemoth public agencies that bloat nearly every western governments apparatus today?
Banks, in any country, aren’t limited to domestic investments. It goes into exactly the same things as it would if in a US Bank.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/05/how-britain-ca...
IIRC it was in the book "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World" by Nicholas Shaxson that I first learned about the existance of the City of London.
I don't even get indignated anymore... The thing is, as a society, we're fine with tax evasion ad high levels. Had we not been so fine with it, something would have been done about it.
Trying to build a fair and equitable world using a tax system that relies on knowledge of everyone's finances is not only doomed to fail but also abhorrent because it denies privacy except to the rich and powerful.
The obvious place to start with an alternative is land value tax. The Georgists have the right idea.
If so, why and how?
Or do you just think that people have no right to privacy even when there’s no evidence they’ve done anything wrong?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/13/donald-trump...
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-emails-reveal-that-hunte...
AFAIK they don't contribute to the UK finances directly, but do take advantage of things like UK defence spending and are effectively protected from international regulations by being part of the UK for those purposes.
Case in point: California, where income tax rates are over 50% for some income brackets, because the state sector has taken over the political system, via control over the dominant narrative/ideology.
To give just one example, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
The one thing that the leak revealed, that should not be tolerated, is wealth hiding by public officials. Public officials should be under intense scrutiny. In fact all the financial surveillance laws which are misleadingly labeled anti-money laundering laws, should be repealed, and in their, place we should have financial surveillance laws for public officials.
Is buying a luxury house in central london and letting it rot, empty for 20 years while it's value climbs 'efficient free market'?
https://theconversation.com/londons-extraordinary-surplus-of...
You are totally missing the point, they are competing for a scarce resource and driving up it's prices only to waste it. They are creating a housing crisis.
"market system is allocating capital to those who are generally better are growing it"
So 'wealth attrachs more wealth'? That's a benefit in your mind? Not that the capital is used productively, or deployed efficiency in the real world, just that imaginary numbers are growing in a spreadsheet
"the problem is when it's public officials that are hiding their wealth"
As opposed to Jeff Bezos hiding his wealth? If Jeff has 1,000X more wealth than all of them combined, why are they 'the problem'?
Public sector workers also buy investment properties, just not the most expensive properties with spectacular price tags.
And in any case, that can be addressed directly, with a land tax. Any wasteful use of the scarce resource would then be heavily penalized, with those who engage in its waste paying a significant premium to society at large.
>>Not that the capital is used productively, or deployed efficiency in the real world, just that imaginary numbers are growing in a spreadsheet
Generally, good investments, that produce large private returns, increase the productivity of the economy. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't see such a strong correlation between liberalization of entrepreneurship/private-enterprise laws, and economic growth.
See China's pro-market reforms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
Or China's special economic zones. Or South vs North Korea, Or West vs East Germany. Or pre-Chavez and post-Chavez Venezuela. Or the pre-social-democracy and post-social-democracy West.
https://www.oecd.org/economy/outlook/Decoupling-of-wages-fro...
"Liberalisation of entrepreneurship"
Are we conflating cutting red tape and enabling tax evasion?
See the rapid transition to social democracy:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
And you're right, the results have been terrible.
>>Are we conflating cutting red tape and enabling tax evasion?
I'm making the point that private returns are generally associated with increases in economic efficiency, as evidenced by the correlation between laws permitting private enterprise, and more rapid economic growth. Your earlier comment suggested making money in the market is not associated with productivity increases.
But since you are HNs most blatant free market fundamentalist (proven by the ridiculous claim above that social spending alone constitutes social democracy, not to even mention the revisionism) I'm not expecting much more than tone policing.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
?
>>proven by the ridiculous claim above that social spending alone constitutes social democracy, not to even mention the revisionism
You should ask yourself why you are so angry and so intent on trying to discredit my completely reasonable effort to support my position, while the evidence you yourself provided is so absurdly flimsy, like minimum wage (which only affects 4% of jobs) not rising fast enough, and social mobility decreasing (which could very plausibly be due to any number of anti-free-market developments, like 1. growing regulatory restrictions stratifying the position of incumbents in the market, 2. growing government spending creating a more nepotistic economy that favors elite interests, like public sector unions, who tend to have the strongest political connections).
I have to ask, given around 40% of the economy now consists of the state, or those funded by it: do you perhaps have a financial conflict of interest in this debate? Do you work in the public sector, or otherwise hold a unionized job, which would make you a direct beneficiary of the state growing its control over the economy?
But to your point: the share of the economy that is forcefully redistributed by the state, for the purpose of funding social welfare programs, is in fact a completely reasonable proxy for the extent to which social democracy plays a role in a society. Do you have a more direct proxy?
As an aside, trying to gaslight critics of the social democratic establishment with this kind of bad-faith response profoundly damages the public discourse, and I urge you to stop doing it.
Why won't you just provide a single respectable, non-lobbyist, historian/economists that supports your claim?
Why ignore statistics and look for an argument from authority?
I am really confused by this obsesssion with public sector workers?
"We should do drugs"
"Public sector workers do drugs too!"
I recommend you study up on how investment finance works, and stop assuming that any characterization of the world that helps to protect rich people's profits is a lie to hoodwink the masses. That's a common reaction, and leads to erronous beliefs about the world. Wealth accumulation in the market is not zero-sum.
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/08/04/we-have-an-ingrained-an...
Someone did an analysis of the NYFD and noticed that overtime peaked during the last 3 years of service (no shit, that’s what the pension is based on).
They also noticed that a huge proportion were retiring with disability (like 70%) which provides a pension “kicker” and boosters it further.
What you ended up with was firefighters working 30+ hrs of OT per week and qualifying for disability and retiring with 120% of their normal salary versus the typical 60%. Dude we’re retiring with pensions of $120,000 per year until they die.
I don’t blame them for gaming the system but Jesus Christ.