Brief political interlude

Its been with great interest that I've been reading Devil's Kitchen's and Sunny Hundal's discussion about the nature of class war and race war, how ugly Devil's Kitchen is and whether you need to have read Adam Smith to be the leader of a UK political party, and elsewhere the discussions on the nature of determining what class people are in.

Me, I had a privileged upbringing, my parents worked hard to provide for my education at what was then a good school, and now I'm scraping by just above minimum wage.

Anyhoo, I was attempting to summarise the debate for my attractive young ladyfriend, she gets quite angry when I'm so negative so I tried to spin my own views positive.

Firstly, the phrase 'taxing the rich' fills me with dread, surely they mean taxing high earners, for these are two different things. The former suggests kicking down a rich person's door and informing them that the powers that be have determined they are too rich and need some of their wealth redistributed to life's losers, the latter suggests that those who work hard and are successful owe the state more than the losers do.

Then there's the whole nature of taxing high earners, who my some measure of life's successful people. Should the state be dissuading, nay punishing them for being successful?

Succinctly, my political beliefs are to question why the state tries to take some much its citizens? Shouldn't the government endevour to let the population keep as much of their earnings as possible?

And if by some quirk of democracy the population have voted for a party that's into redistribution of wealth so there's more balance between rich and poor, shouldn't it simply be a case of determining the median wealth or income and then only taxing people on the rich side and not taxing those on the poorer side?

Sure, its far more complicated than that, there's the welfare state to pay for, and law and order, defending borders and taking away the rubbish. But surely such things affect all people to pretty much the same degree regardless of class and race.

Its been a couple of hours since I read the Devil or Sunny, and maybe the debate has moved on, that Sunny's point was merely that class war would be a good electoral strategy for Labour, rather than a good strategy for government.

Wasn't there a byelection in Crewe where Labour tried playing the class card and failed miserably? They could try it again if they like losing.