#gary stevenson

“Follow the money. Who is getting richer? who is getting poorer? Whose taxes are going up, whose taxes are going down? Who is finding it harder to buy a house, who is buying 10 or 20 houses? Follow the money. Look at the distribution.”

“(…) your grandparents and your great-grandparents lived in poverty. And they fought for generations (…). And that is the reason why you don't have to live in the kind of poverty that they lived in. Because they came back from the war and they demanded food, housing, education, healthcare and they got it.”

“And they got it by taxing the rich. They understood that the only way to protect working people was to tax work less and wealth more. You need to fight that same fight. (…) They demanded that instead of the rich getting richer and richer every generation, wealth flowed back to the working classes. And they recognized you do that by taxing the rich.”

- Gary Stevenson

I felt weirdly optimistic about humanity for a minute there reading the comments section on this video

(which I only ran across because of this entirely batshit interview he did with the Guardian:

Gary Stevenson talks like a normal human being. He allows himself to show frustration—a frustration he could quite easily ignore and just get on with his life. He has ‘flaws’, at least by the standards of the slick, soulless types you see all the time—i.e. he expresses human emotion.

Again, I may be wrong, but I feel like Stevenson actually has the ability to talk to people who are deeply disenfranchised because he doesn’t speak in empty waffle that only serves himself and his crypto wallet. And he doesn’t spend his time, like so many middle-class ‘leftists’, attacking the idea of a ‘British identity’—or really, everything a working-class man might still hold dear.

He has more integrity than Andrew Tate… though frankly, so does a cucumber.

Paraphrased transcript (towards the end):

January 2024: Interest rates will eventually come down and asset prices will increase massively.

That's what we saw after 2008 and I think that's what we're going to see in the next year or two in the UK and the rest of the world.

In my opinion, increasing asset prices / house prices will be bad for 90% of society. Some people might be surprised to hear that.

Families that own their own property may feel like they're winning when house prices go up, but the truth is that the only way to actually benefit from rising house prices is to sell your home. And then where do you live?

In reality, when house prices go up two things happen:

1) it impoverishes 80-90% of society while enriching 10-20% of current homeowners 2) it worsens economic inequality which creates political division and instability

Rising property prices (that are not in line with wage increases) only impoverish future generations and is the cause of our economic inequality.

Overall, I think the economy will stay terrible. I think we'll see worsening living standards while asset prices and house prices are increasing.

You need to convince your parents and grandparents that rising asset prices is not society getting richer -- it represents society getting poorer. Living standards for the masses will get worse as a consequence of this growing inequality.

The only way to stop this is to tax rich people more aggressively so that ordinary people can have a fairer share of what we produce in our societies.

HOUSING IS FOR PEOPLE.

NOT INVESTMENT.