Unregulated capitalism will undoubtedly lead to disaster, ruin and misery. That much has been proven by the fantastic situation the Western economies find themselves in, thanks to a few banks and their investment arms that were considered 'too big to fail', after gambling with their depositors' money in an enormous game of hungry hungry hippos.
Therefore, 'blaming the rich for government overspending' shouldn't be the focus of this discussion. Government has a responsibility to represent the needs and wants of the people, no matter how skewed that concept may have become in our current Western democracies, with our unelected coalitions and our identical candidates. The majority of the people obviously support Hollande's tax plan; after all, he did get elected on that very platform. The question to be asked is why the people support it in the first place.
I refuse to believe that people are inherently jealous of the rich. In my experience, it's almost never the case. But people are getting very tired of this excuse governments provide for cut-backs, tax increases and social spending decreases, namely that 'we're all in it together'. Because every day, people see tax loopholes still open, people see taxes for the rich at low levels, and people see the men and women that caused this financial crisis that now requires these cut-backs, the bankers and other assorted members of the financial clique, rake in their multi-million pound bonuses regardless of the suffering they caused.
The wealthy members of society have little need for social security, or for social welfare. They are wealthy enough to carry on regardless. So when the social spending nets are cut, they're not overly affected. The closure or under-staffing of their local NHS branch won't affect someone who can fly to Florida for private treatment. However, social spending cuts do affect the poorer parts of society, those without enough money to live entirely independently of the government's assistance. And, rightly or wrongly, people believe that if they're all in it together, they should all suffer the cut-backs together. If social welfare is cut, people expect higher taxes on the rich, as their way of chipping in to this depression we ALL have to suffer. However, at the moment people aren't seeing that. They're seeing corporations get away with murder (see HSBC's slap on the wrist fine of money-laundering, for example), seeing tax loopholes and offshore tax havens being used to full effect by the richer members of society (as the Guardian pointed out earlier this year), and seeing those who caused the crisis getting away from punishment scot-free(as witnessed by the record bonuses enjoyed by the bankers in the past few years).
And at the same time they're seeing the police use violence to disperse protests, they're seeing petty offenders getting increasingly harsh sentences in the name of crack-downs on crime, they're seeing their local NHS (or other social welfare system) cut to the bone by private contractors eager to make a profit, they're seeing their taxes go up, and they're seeing their social security slowly ebb away.
This is what people are seeing, and they're not entirely stupid, contrary to government (and indeed, many conservative) views. And they're asking why; why the wealthier members of society have a standard of justice, of taxation, and of privilege afforded entirely to them, while the poorer members of society suffer these cuts made by the governments of the world in the name of fiscal tightening.
And they're angry about it. Angry enough to vote for government who promise super-taxes on the rich, using base populism to appeal to their angers and fears.
And there, in a nutshell, you see the genesis of Hollande's super-tax plan, and the genesis of this under-current of popular discontent at the wealthy, 'occupy Wall Street' and 'We are the 99 percent' being examples.
They're not all socialists. Most people are whole-hearted supporters of capitalism, of consumerism and of the principle of to each what he deserves.
But at some point, the system begins exposing the latent injustices associated with it. And it's up to government to provide fall-back options to people who are caught up in those injustices. When government fails to do so (as most conservative governments choose to do), you see increasingly radical alternatives being proposed. Such as Hollande's.
