Tuesday 19 July 2011

Frédéric Bastiat or Paul Henry?

Ah, the ups and downs in the life of a blogger. Just when I was feeling quite chuffed about being compared to Frédéric Bastiat, Eric points me to the comments section of the Labour Party’s blog, where I am compared to Paul Henry. Specifically, commenter bbfloyd described my comments on Labour’s tax policy as
a series of personal opinions based on a worldview that can only be described as the result of a privileged upbringing
followed by
update.. just checked seamus’ blog… he writes like paul henry with a university degree. similar degree of narcissism.
Eric says that bb has me about right, although it is not clear if when he checked the blog it was my posts or Eric’s much more numerous ones that he was looking at.
This is all good fun, but it is the “worldview … of a privileged upbringing” that puzzles me. I’d describe my upbringing and current socio-economic status as comfortably middle class, which is privileged, but hardly what one would normally associate with that term. For the record, I have an income well in excess of $5,000 per year, well below $150,000, no assets that would ever be subject to a capital gains tax, and am a vegetarian who spends an absurd fraction of his income on fresh fruit and vegetables. That is, like most comfortably middle class people, and probably more than most, I would stand to gain a lot from Labour’s proposed tax policy. Such is Director’s Law. How that is consistent with my worldview, I’m not so sure.

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