Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Somehow the UK is really in a downhill trend. For decades. BREXIT kind of accelerated that; people such as Nigel Farage won't follow on their promise. There won't be noteworthy economic growth for the common man.

The naval situation is even worse, because the UK totally depends on the USA now for its own nuclear arsenal. The UK has basically stopped being independent. Changing this will be hard and I don't think anyone in the UK wants to do that. There is no way for the UK to compete against South Korea's production; Canada will buy more equipment from South Korea. UK has never been in the race for competition (only Germany has). The UK kind of went into decline ever since Thatcher ruled, with a (too) few years in between that were not terrible.

BREXIT accelerated this but isn't the root cause - the root cause has to do with structural problems: https://www.ftadviser.com/uk/2025/7/21/the-uk-is-losing-weal...

The conclusions of the FT article are completely wrong. With fewer rich people around, chances are that legislation would be less frequently bought to benefit them at the cost of the country's overall prosperity.

If you insist on only focusing on the negatives of their existence, then sure, eliminating wealthy people sounds like a good idea.

Out of interest what are the positives? Other than cultural, in flagrant displays of excess, I can't think of anything they couldn't accomplish by them existing as poorer business leaders and having competent national wealth funds empowered to lend/give grants.

What I'm saying is you may be defending billionaires when you mean to be defending a system you believe is optimal but still has the negative outcome of billionaires (not to imply the billionaires themselves are intrinsically bad as people but the concentration of wealth in their hands is).

That is closer to my intent, yes, not a direct defense of billionaires as an intrinsic good, more a rejection of the idea that removing them via any means automatically leads to a less bad state of affairs. Careful reform that reduces them can be good, but it depends on what exactly that reform entails. Simply scaring them away and experiencing capital flight does not achieve good things.

The stuff in the article, that the UK is losing rich people isn't a long term issue but fairly recent, basically since brexit and the getting rid of non dom tax breaks.

So you complain about dependency to US but think that it should completely depend on Brussels? Also what does Brexit have to do with a 130 years long decline?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com