London Mayor; Greed is Good, some people are not clever enough to succeed in life

[hogwash]

listen to ‘Boris Johnson's greed is good speech’ on Audioboo

In an attempt to shore up his support on the Tory right, as he positions himself as the natural successor to David Cameron, the London mayor called for the "Gordon Gekkos of London" to display their greed to promote economic growth.

Delivering the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture, Johnson also called for the return of a form of grammar schools.

He qualified his unabashed admiration for the "hedge fund kings" by saying they should do more to help poorer people who have suffered a real fall in income in recent years. But he moved to forge his own brand of Conservatism, which contrasts with the early modernising of the prime minister, by claiming that it was "futile" to try to end inequality.

In highly provocative remarks, Johnson mocked the 16% "of our species" with an IQ below 85 as he called for more to be done to help the 2% of the population who have an IQ above 130.


"Whatever you may think of the value of IQ tests it is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 while about 2% …" he said as he departed from the text of his speech to ask whether anyone in his City audience had a low IQ. To muted laughter he asked: "Over 16% anyone? Put up your hands." He then resumed his speech to talk about the 2% who have an IQ above 130.

Johnson then told the Centre for Policy Studies think tank, which helped lay the basis for Thatcherism in the 1970s: "The harder you shake the pack the easier it will be for some cornflakes to get to the top."

‘I worry that there are too many cornflakes who aren’t being given a good enough chance to rustle and hustle their way to the top. We gave the packet a good shake in the 1960s; and Mrs Thatcher gave it another good shake in the 1980s with the sale of the council houses. Since then there has been a lot of evidence of a decline in social mobility, as Sir John Major has trenchantly pointed out.’

Johnson moved to associate himself with what were seen as the excesses of 1980s Thatcherism as he said: "I stress – I don't believe that economic equality is possible; indeed some measure of inequality is essential for the spirit of envy and keeping up with the Joneses that is, like greed, a valuable spur to economic activity."

He made clear, however, that Thatcherism needed to be updated for the 21st century. "I hope there is no return to the spirit of loadsamoney heartlessness – figuratively riffling banknotes under the noses of the homeless – and I hope that this time the Gordon Gekkos of London are conspicuous not just for their greed, valid motivator though greed may be for economic progress, as for what they give and do for the rest of the population, many of whom have experienced real falls in their incomes over the last five years."

On the politically sensitive issue of inequality Johnson warned that the growing competition Britain faced in a globalised economy meant that inequality would deepen. He said: "No one can ignore the harshness of that competition, or the inequality that it inevitably accentuates, and I am afraid that violent economic centrifuge is operating on human beings who are already very far from equal in raw ability, if not spiritual worth."

Johnson called for the rich to be hailed for their contribution to paying for public services as he said that the top 1% of earners contribute 30% of income tax. "That is an awful lot of schools and roads and hospitals that are being paid for by the super-rich. So why, I asked innocently, are they so despicable in the eyes of all decent British people? Surely they should be hailed like the Stakhanovites of Stalin's Russia, who half-killed themselves, in the name of the people, by mining record tonnages of coal?"

The mayor added: "It seems to me that though it would be wrong to persecute the rich, and madness to try and stifle wealth creation, and futile to stamp out inequality, we should only tolerate this wealth gap on two conditions. One, that we help those who genuinely cannot compete; and two, that we provide opportunity for those who can."

Guardian

Spectator for the Full Transcript of Speech

[Weebler I]

Dangerous speech for a politician to make, some okay points but some well wide of the mark too. Typical Boris really.

[New England]

i'm not going to speak on his thoughts about "cleverness." as weebler said, that's dangerous rhetoric.


his stance on economics, though i didn't go through all of it [or have sound to listen to his video,] sounds reasonable enough. not everybody is going to agree with the idea, or even appreciate the success of the concept, but taxing the wealthy at a lower rate stimulates spending. that spending runs the country. those are the people who own the businesses that provide the goods and services, and hire and employ people.



go get your paper, limeys. i ain't mad at ya.

[fight_professor]

BJ is 100% correct.

[Canelo Phresh]

His logic is sound. Capitalism works.

[One_Tycoon]

His logic is sound. Capitalism works.

Capitalism does work...but not the way this so called Mayor describes it. Maybe crony-capitalism (though I hate to put the word Capitalism right next to Cronyism). This guy endorsed Obama and is a huge admirer of Mayor Bloomberg ...that ought to tell you all you need to know about him. He does not support Capitalism but the financial services industry of London and generally favors a centrally planned economy. Smh@ Using Gordan Gekko (a fictional character created by a Communist sympathizer) to get his intelligible point across. But he is a Tory after all...

[DARKSEID]

Greed is not good.

Simplicity and Contentedness are. Greed is an endless void that will never be filled, at the expense of all those who are destroyed by the nature of its soul-less ambitions.

Capitalism is most certainly not an effective system. The top 1% own 40% of all the wealth in America, and the discrepancy is only going to get worse with time.



"For to those who have, more shall be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what little they do have shall be taken away."

- Matthew 25:29

[cupocity303]

With his hair and the way he said it, it looks like SNL parody video.

And what's with all these Mayor's in the news recently. One character after another emerges.

[One_Tycoon]

Greed is not good.

But of course it is. Here is one example of how greed works to the benefit of society:



Notice how his analogy didn't involve guys from the Financial service Sector (unlike the Mayor's example) but actual goods production. You know...real Capitalism which has nothing to do with guys papering things over and shuffling around printed money.

Capitalism is most certainly not an effective system. The top 1% own 40% of all the wealth in America, and the discrepancy is only going to get worse with time.

But of course it is. The thing is...we don't have real Capitalism at this moment. But a variety of media and academia leftists/Progressives/Socialist-Collectivists would have you believe that in order to justify even more Govt "solutions" even though govt is the cause of the problem. Fiscal Policy and Monetary Policy are the problem. The solution is embracing REAL Capitalism, the repealing and abolishing of certain existing laws, regulations and govt agencies. We need Liquidationism and not of the Marxist kind. Remember...the word Capitalism was first coined by Marx as a pejorative but we've taken the word back kind of like black people took the N-Word back. So look into it and get the definition right.






If only these videos would actually show what these statistics MEAN instead of throwing them at viewers in an attempt to persuade them without any actual ANALYTICS.

"Wealth inequality" is a misnomer. There are far better response videos to that one where they actually address the causation/correlation rather than just list off nominal stats ...but they're not going to be as popular with the simpleton Collectivist crowd.

[DARKSEID]

The top 1% own 40% of all the wealth in America

The bottom 80% own 7% of all the wealth in America

Nuff Sed.