Money, snobs and politicians

Thursday November 24, 2011

Greed may not be good, but it’s essential, says Simon Hills

One of the more ridiculous spectacles of the Occupy London tented protest against bankers, nasty corporations and capitalist pigs in general was the arrival of one Reverend Billy, who jetted in from America to lend his support.

“Stop your shopping, stop your Starbucks!” the sixty one-year-old proclaimed. Er… “Except to use the toilet – praise the Lord – or use your computer. Amen.”

Two thoughts immediately spring to mind here. One is that sixty one years old seems a little old to be engaged in this kind of posturing. The second is Billy’s extraordinary conceitedness. Basically he reckons that someone should build and develop computers, start a coffee shop business, with all the risk and energy and finance that involves, in order for him to tell anyone imbecilic enough to listen that Starbucks is some kind of menace to society.

Dressed in his white suit, white cowboy boots and oversized dog collar, Reverend Billy – real name Bill Talen – is a colourful example of the economic illiteracy of the camp protestors. These latter-day Fidel Castros and Che Guevaras seem not to have the faintest notion of how things work in the real world.

Perhaps the greatest contribution to the development of modern society is usury. Our civilisation is based on the ability for a man or a woman with a good idea to convince a man or woman with some money to put that idea into practice. Rev Billy’s computer from which he creates his inane posts, those wonderfully lightweight tents the protestors are sleeping in (or not, as mostly seems to be the case), the whizzy iPhones that allow protestors to talk to each other. They are with us because you don’t have to have the wealth of a monarch to put a brilliant idea into practice. This is the cornerstone of freedom.

We all understand why bankers are painted as villains: short selling stocks; betting against the Euro; paying themselves massive bonuses. Not exactly honourable. And indeed there need to be checks and balances in any free society. That’s why you need planning permission to build a house and a licence to drive a car.

It is absurd, though, to vilify bankers because of greed. This is akin to having a go at elephants for possessing trunks and lions for a having a penchant for scoffing wildebeest. The whole point of banking is greed. If you put your money into Lloyds do you want some benign chap who’s quite happy as he is in his three-bedroomed semi in Ruislip and the occasional day out in Studland Bay, or a rapacious, money-obsessed City slicker with a passion for real estate and a nice holiday home in the Seychelles? Who’s likely to get you the better return on your investment?

It is sort of fine for a bunch of protestors to misunderstand the nature of money, but unforgiveable for governments to do so. It is quite astonishing for our business secretary Vince Cable to pronounce that he ‘sympathises’ with the feelings of the protestors whom the Rev. Billy has joined. Maybe Vince, a man stuffed with qualifications but who has not, as far as I can see, actually run a business himself, would like our emerging capitalists to send each other flowers in lieu of cash, and pay protestors not to do any work at all while they run their businesses.

Money is not a static thing. When you open a bank account you are not asking Lloyds to stick it in a great big sack round the back and give it to you some time later. If it were, you would be paying the bank for storage. You are saying ‘take my money, do something with it, and give me more in return when I really need it’.

And the beauty is, they’re paying you.

Indeed, for all their fine words and scrambling over each other to reach the moral high ground, governments are all for greed. Except that nice Ed Milliband calls it growth. What growth actually means is our buying more cars, more MP3 players, more dishwashers and making more extensions to our housing.

It is a bit rich, then, for the likes of Cable and Milliband to turn round and start attacking bankers – the same bankers who their predecessor Gordon Brown and Bill Clinton cosied up to in the good times, when they were funnelling enough money into the Treasury to build a hospital a week if they so chose – when they themselves are promoting greed as a cornerstone of their economic policies.

It seems not to have occurred to them that, while Steve Jobs was hailed as a hero of a generation for his development of white computers delicious enough to stroke, the men and women who had the foresight to lend him the money to do it are nasty fat-cat pigs. Indeed Jobs himself was a hard-nosed egocentric with a nice line in bullying.

Notice that it is not the poor who are demonstrating against the bankers, but the privileged. There is some nasty inverted snobbism here; something of the old landed classes about the demonstrators and indeed many of our politicians as they look down their noses at people in ‘trade’.

Nobody starts banging on about fat-cat actors, such as Kate Winslet or that handsome George Clooney. Or fat cat politicians like Tony Benn in his £2m Holland Park house. Or fat cat pop stars like Bono or Chris Martin, who roll off private jets to tell their adoring fans to help the poor. Or fat-cat playwrights with second homes in Tuscany. Or fat-cat artists raking in millions courtesy of Jay Jopling. What, pray, are they putting back into society?

Why are their millions kind of fine and bankers millions bad? They are not at the frontline of making the world work. The sort of people who take risks to underwrite, say, the mad rantings of idealists like Steve Jobs who want to manufacture a computer with a mouse.

Similarly, senior church figures in St Paul’s who resign because they agree that the excesses of those in the City of London are a bad thing forget that the C of E sits on massive piles of valuable real estate. Want to help the less well off, your reverends? Flog Lambeth Palace, set up head office in Corby and starting doling out the surplus to the poor.

At root, it seems the protestors are really looking for some kind of socialism-lite, in which politicians, rather than the market, will decide who will make money. Surely history will remind them that the logical conclusion of this way of thinking is a ‘fair’ society like Cuba or that nice North Korea, where an estimated 200,000 people are languishing in jail for not agreeing with their leader. Poverty isn’t pretty and isn’t desirable. But as Churchill said: ‘The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.’

The truth is every attempt to eradicate the gulf between rich and poor has been risible. These are the facts of life in the real world. One that the likes of Reverend Billy seem to have little grasp of.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine