Dead Money

It's always good to discover someone who holds the same opinions and views as you. On the one hand it can simply serve as reinforcement of those views, as in the echo chamber of the dreaded 'socials'; or it can serve as validation for what you might formerly have imagined as a complete outlier view of things. Now, I've long, long held the view that economies are damaged by the accumulation and concentration of wealth for its own sake. I've said many times before [blog posts passim] that an economy with no fluid money movement is a failing economy, and that the hoarding of the stuff by a tiny minority of the population is basically *very* bad for the majority of us.

I recently became aware of an economic commentator who echoes my thoughts on the subject exactly: Richard Murphy, a professor of accounting practice and online commentator on all things economic. One of his central ideas is that the very rich are anything but the wealth creators that their political apologists tout to the public on a sickeningly regular basis; rather, they are an active force of economic stagnation: put crudely, they don't spend enough of their wealth, but seek to hoard more and more completely dead money; something I've been banging on about privately for years. The truth is that there is more money created in the 'wealth management' industry for the wealthy by the wealthy than reappears in the general economy, and in so doing paying as little in taxes as is feasibly possible.

Sum total? They contribute little to society as a whole, and yet are still deified by the political classes of particularly the Right [and to a certain extent by the Centre-Left]. What is needed for a healthy and beneficial economy - and one one with longevity - is the steady flow of money, back-and-forth to oil the wheels of general society: itself a concept much vilified by the monetarists of the last half century. The way things are going, change looks increasingly unlikely without either complete economic collapse or a revolution, either of the traditional, violent kind; or of the conceptual kind: a complete and institutionalised rethink of capitalism itself, which might just allow it to succeed on its own terms, under regulation and with a logical and fair system of taxation. I prefer the latter, but I fear the former.