The Biz Doc

About 250 years ago a quirky moral philosopher named Adam Smith discovered a chain of logic whereby the selfish desires of man would result in widespread prosperity. It’s one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Here’s how it goes… 1.Selfish desire seeks wealth, status, security. No virtue required. This is the raw material, as unpromising as it sounds. 2. In a market with property rights, you can’t take, you must trade. Theft and fraud are policed, so the only legal route to someone else’s money is offering them something they want more. Self-interest is channelled through voluntary exchange. This is the crucial valve: the baker serves your bread not from benevolence, but because it’s how he gets paid. 3.Every voluntary trade creates value for both sides. Nobody trades unless they prefer what they’re getting to what they’re giving. So each transaction is positive-sum by construction. Wealth isn’t moved; it’s made. 4.Competition forces the selfish to serve better. You’re not the only one chasing that customer’s money. To win, you must offer more value, lower prices, or something new. Greed disciplined by rivalry becomes, functionally, service. The customer becomes the boss of every capitalist. 5.Prices emerge as signals of what people actually want. Millions of trades compress dispersed knowledge - scarcity, preference, urgency - into a single number. No planner needed. High prices shout “make more of this” and falling prices say “stop making this.” The cure for high prices IS high prices. 6.Profit directs capital toward unmet needs. Profit is the reward for spotting something people want but can’t get, and losses are the punishment for guessing wrong. Capital flows automatically toward solving problems and away from waste - a self-correcting search algorithm running on selfishness. The profit motive pulls the greedy person towards genuine service and efficiency. 7.The pursuit of advantage drives innovation. The only durable way to out-earn competitors is to do something new - create a better product, a cheaper process. Each entrepreneur trying to get rich makes the previous solution obsolete and the average person’s life better. 8.Specialisation and scale compound productivity. Competition pushes everyone toward what they do best; trade lets them exchange it. Output per person rises. 9.Rising productivity spreads as falling prices and rising wages. Competition doesn’t let producers keep the gains forever - they’re competed away to consumers. The luxuries of one generation (cars, flights, antibiotics, computing) become the staples of the next. The rich get richer, but the poor get richer too. 10. Prosperity becomes self-reinforcing and civilising. Wealth funds education, health, science, and even the welfare state that redistributes it. Commerce rewards trust, reliability, and cooperation with strangers (doux commerce). A system built on self-interest ends up producing the most extensive cooperation network in human history: millions of strangers coordinating to put breakfast on your table. The hockey stick after 1800: from ~$3/day for all of human history to a 30-fold rise in living standards wherever this system took hold is pure magic.

Socialists imagine a class struggle. In their made-up fantasy the CEO is in competition with low level workers, the wealthy entrepreneur is stealing from the underpaid nurse. In reality, workers do not compete vertically they compete horizontally. Entrepreneurs compete with entrepreneurs. Investors outbid each other. CEOs are benchmarked against other CEOs. Nurses are hired from a pool of nurses. Etc. The CEOs pay has no correlation to the entry level workers. The Football star on £300K a week isn’t linked to the person selling drinks in the stadium. A biotech entrepreneur raising VC capital isn’t paid relative to a cleaner. What is linked is the demand and supply dynamic of each role. If a company places an ad for a qualified truck driver and 150 people apply for the role, then the company knows it does not need to increase wages for that role. If the company has an open role for months, it is forced to look at the compensation package. Same for a CEO. A board representing shareholders would like to hire a CEO for a lot less if they could. Their dream scenario would be to hire a CEO who brings in institutional investors, attracts top executives, drives innovation and growth, keeps margins steady and is a good public face for the business even under pressure. It turns out there aren’t a lot of these people looking for work and if you want one you have to pay more than other companies are offering. The class struggle isn’t vertical it’s horizontal. CEOs are in competition with CEOs. Retail workers are in competition with retail workers. Demand and supply dynamics set the price. Sure you can say that a CEO want’s profitability and would like wages to be lower BUT it’s not up to the CEO - demand and supply tension sets the price of workers. An Airline like RyanAir would like free pilots if they could get them but they can’t… so they pay the market rate. The reason incomes are rising at the top and falling at the bottom is not class warfare. It’s technology and globalisation. Technology makes basic jobs simple, remote or fully automated. At the same time tech makes executive roles more leveraged, more important and more valuable. A CEO used to run a smaller organisation. Today a CEO who’s 2% better on a $5B company is generating $100M more. Seems sensible to try and pay a few million to get $100M. Globalisation has put workers from all over the world in completion with each other - downward pressure on wages. Globalisation has given CEOs more market opportunities to explore - upside opportunity to unlock. The rich are not very interested in buying houses that poor people own. The poor are not buying up the homes the rich want. They are separate groups living separate lives. Try finding the genuinely rich people whose strategy is to hoard normal residential homes - it barely exists as a thing. About 85% of landlords are people who own 1-4 properties. Super-landlords (100+ properties) are 0.2% of landlords and own a tiny fraction of the 30M homes in the UK… and they’re heavily taxed. Class warfare isn’t real. It’s an imagined war in the minds of socialists. Demand and supply dynamics are real. To the degree it is measured in class, it’s a horizontal competition not a vertical one.

There's a difference between normal people spending money and really rich people spending money. And it explains why our economy is failing.

Britain is finished

Oddly over-defensive for someone who’s so confident he’s got the answer to our economic woes, by taxing other very rich people like him.