Should the Louvre, a homage to inequality, have to be culturally cancelled?
Sir, I refer to Ruchir Sharma’s “The billionaire boom” FT Weekend, May 15.
In this case, as so often happens in articles about the wealthy, it is illustrated with yachts.
As likewise always happens, the fact that the wealthy froze their earned in “good or bad industries” money, or their outright ill-gotten money, by handing it over to those building or selling the yachts, and most probably committing to employing a yacht crew, is an issue of no interest.
Just as with respect to taxes on wealth the question of what assets and to whom are the wealthy to sell these in order to raise the money to pay for the taxes on wealth it, is scrupulously avoided by the tax proponents.
Where the wealthy’s money flows, should be an integral part of the overall analysis. Then we would be more alert to the possibility that taxing it, and handing over the money to bureaucrats, for them to decide on its use, could lead to the most unproductive use of wealth.
Sir, a personal anecdote. Walking around the museum Louvre in Paris I suddenly saw an 1560 by Pierre Reddon for King Charles IX. I then asked myself who in his sane mind would request this type of absolutely useless shield? Clearly it had to be someone extremely wealthy and powerful, someone who did not care one iota about his own security being threatened on a close range, or about its enormous costs.
In that moment it suddenly dawned on me that basically nothing of what I was seeing at the museum would exist, if it had to be produced by a society where income and wealth was equally distributed. In other words, all this art around me, to have become a reality, has actually required a very unequal society.
In other words, Shhh... just between you and me Sir... since the museum of Louvre is, unwittingly, a homage to inequality, should it be cancelled?
PS. Sharma writes “Sweden has long abandoned central elements of the social democratic agenda, including wealth and inheritance taxes, as impractical.” There might indeed have been certain policy intermezzos, but legend holds that when Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, chief strategist of the 1974’s Carnation Revolution in Lisbon, told Sweden’s social democrat leader Olof Palme: “In Portugal we want to get rid of the rich”, Palme replied, “how curious, in Sweden we only aspire to get rid of the poor”
PS. And, as I have written to you soon 3.000 times, those “subprime banking regulations”, with their risk weighted capital requirements, impede that much of that money the wealthy are sloshing around, is efficiently allocated to the real economy. Now, whose fault is that?
@PerKurowski
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