Gary gives me hope, not to mention how wildly successful his YouTube is and getting the message out there (the common sense message, I should add)

The problem here is that Gary's core thesis doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. We demonstrated this very clearly in the COVID years that injecting money into the economy (no matter where it comes from) doesn't of itself improve the lot of the man on the street.

He's incredibly disingenuous in his videos (and rather sneaky in his self-mythologising), in that 'the rich' are a convenient scapegoat that avoids having to scrutinise the other side of the equation, which is how our government spends its money. His answers are too easy, too simplistic.

Not that I disagree that wealth has been extremely concentrated in the wrong places under Western corporatism - but the answer here is to stop that concentration, not allow it to happen and then try and claw some back. Sorta the right diagnosis, very much the wrong cure.

You fix that problem, Gary is fixing the immediate one.

The thing is, he isn't. So long as they have control over the key economic levers (IP laws, corporate control, media control, political lobbying), the moment you put a wealth tax in place they'll find a way to pass it back to the consumer. He forgets the reason they're wealthy in the first place..

Im going to be careful about how I word this Andy... Maybe Gary has thought this through more judiciously than you think, and maybe you haven't listened to him as carefully as YOU think you have. He has talked about how you can catch "multimillionaire runners" through taxation on their UK assets.

Don't worry, I'm not ideologically bound, nor offended by disagreement. On the other hand I have worked in this sector (I led the team that built the UK's first online bank), and have watched quite a few of his videos. They're interesting as much for what they leave out as what they propose.

I get where he's coming from, and have a lot of sympathy for the ideas, but this is one of those policy areas where the "common sense" fix hides a lot of complexity and challenges.

It's like trying to control an invasive weed by clipping off the leaves... it keeps you busy and feels productive, but the problem is still there.

I think that's it, his tax idea is too likely to be circumvented, the only way to fix the concentration of wealth is to somehow make that "bad", but so much culture is biased towards celebrating wealth without consideration of whether that wealth is actually a good idea or not. How to change that?

The observation is that corporate lawfare has allowed individuals and companies to aggressively control market access. Extractive behaviour is baked into the system. Personal wealth is a side effect (and tends to collapse after a couple of generations), but corporates remain.

So this isn't about the fear that individuals might dodge the tax (though they will certainly try to), but that the real store of wealth will continue to be the corporates, who essentially tax everyday transactions through monopolies and gatekeeping.

As an aside I've had interesting conversations with my father in law who ran a company in the 70's under 98% tax rates - it encouraged some rather devious behaviour and quite a few champagne lunches.

There will be a revolution and Starmer needs to stop shuffling out of the way of it and be the hero to the many. Sadly given his weakness on Gaza I doubt he has it in him but if he tries and fails it’s better than to hand power to whatever Farage’s there will be in the future.