🙂 🙂 Sorry! Was before my first coffee of the day!

Hi Charlie. I have no envy and quite enough buffalo, thank you. Cheap shot, as I mentioned before.

Exactly, CD. This talk annoys a lot of people 😉

My father took early retirement mainly because he could no longer stand the arrogant parents and kids. The Russian and Chinese parents were offering bribes to up their kids grades, and the kids had a habit of issuing threats of the ‘my father knows some dangerous people’ kind. An atmosphere far more poisonous than my state school, a smell not disguised by the reek of money. I only hope your money went somewhere healthier.

Well, whatever their priorities it wasn’t learning about the ‘other half’ through the prism of gutter television.

I seem to recall hard work. My mother raised kids and cleaned toilets, When I left for university she retrained as a probate lawyer, and retired as a partner (she says she came across more sh*ts in her second career).

My father was a nuclear physicist with BNFL, who retrained as a teacher. Funnily enough he went to work in a public school. However, there was never any question of me going to one. I went to a comprehensive. And no, no one was a ‘user’ as you put it. You may not have seen people like my family on ‘reality TV’. But take a look at actual reality. You’ll see a lot of us.

John, before reposting I’d be grateful if you removed the bit about people who can’t afford private education for their kids being drug users. This includes my family for a start, and they are not. This is quite apart from the statement being bonkers nonsense.

EDIT – THIS WAS POSTED IN RESPONSE TO A POST BY JG SINCE REMOVED

Or maybe if we accepted our collective responsibility and funded state education through taxation to the same degree as private education is funded by the wealthy looking after their own then the results would be on a par as well. The problem isn’t inherent in state versus private funding, John. It’s all money, wherever it does or doesn’t come from.

On a personal note, I take offence to calling my parents, who couldn’t afford to put me through private education, recreational drug users.

I’m your worst nightmare – living refutation of your dogma.

And there’s more – you mentioned “at the expense of others”. To be clear, how else is wealth obtained?

No one has adequately explained to me or anyone who has ever taken the time to question it how ‘wealth creation through being wealthy’ works. You might do or give something legitimate or illegitimate for which you are financially rewarded. But you haven’t created that money, merely acquired it. The wealth of nations comes about through the collective effort of the nation (and the money is merely a transactional tool – after all, it is printed at will with no real relation to national wealth or otherwise), and not from someone being better than the next person at concentrating that money, taken from the overall money supply, into their own bank account.

So what makes the person with the money more ‘excellent’ than the person they have taken or received it from, even if it was done as a legitimate transaction? It’s a bit like the phrase ‘Oh, He’s worth ten million’ , meaning he has ten million. When did we start saying that? He is in fact arguably the opposite of that – he has taken ten million out of the collective ‘money supply’ (and yes, I know there is no such thing – maybe ‘circulating cash’ is better). Certainly his overall worth to the rest of us is unrelated to the value of his assets or the cash in his bank.

I know some very nice rich people, and some skint people who are *soles, as well as vice-versa – mine are not the politics of envy – just to head that cheap shot off. I am just curious as to how it really works and why it doesn’t seem to tally with how most politicians say it works, really.