A vote for Zack Polanski is a vote against success

Another useful CAPX piece, this time from Eliot Wilson who writes about the war on success promoted by Green Party leader Zack Polanski.


A vote for Zack Polanski is a vote against success

• The Green Party leader's belief in wealth taxes is based on opinion polls rather than economic experience
• Wealth taxes are supported by Marxists to punish those deemed too successful
• The Green Party's plans for Britain's economy will make us all poorer

A wealth tax is a hugely attractive concept for many, as it sounds simple and fair: the wealthy, of course, are those whom we ought to be taxing, since they have, as Labour politicians forever remind us, the ‘broadest shoulders’. It is certainly popular with the voters, and a YouGov poll last week found that 75% of those surveyed supported its introduction. By contrast, only 22% supported a higher rate of income tax or an increase in National Insurance Contributions, while 14% of people backed a rise in VAT.

The whole piece is well worth reading as a confirmation of something we've known for decades, fostering malice towards a social class most voters will never join is a powerful political technique. 

Polanski does not descend to the muddy arena of finely grained economic statistics, however. His approach is much simpler and, to give him credit, much more frank. He explained to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg recently: ‘this isn’t about creating public investment, we can do that anyway, we don’t need to tax the wealthy to do that’.

Set aside how he would ‘do that anyway’. If he is not primarily concerned with raising revenue, you might wonder why on earth he wants to introduce a new tax at all. The answer is frightening in its simple-mindedness:


It’s ultimately about reducing inequality… this is ultimately about tackling the deep inequality in our society.

Translation: Polanski thinks that there is some objective measure by which some people can be judged to have too much money, and the gap between them and everyone else judged to be too great. This can be solved by taking more money away from the rich and decreasing their wealth. This is a measure designed to punish those deemed too successful.

And as B.F. Skinner pointed out to us decades ago, punishment leads to escape behaviour, but presumably Polanski isn't too concerned about that. In a sense he's right too, if success escapes then we'll have less of it to dilute the egalitarian purity of failure.