Water protestors are just trying to re-balance our unequal society

So despite the best efforts of the great and the good, the Eurozone economy remains stubbornly stagnant (Irish Examiner, Novermber 18).

Far from wealth trickling down, as was promised with unregulated capitalism, it trickles inexorably upwards — the top one per cent continue to increase their share of the world’s wealth. Regressive taxation, decimation of public services and erosion of labour protections have undermined trust in the economic and political system. Badly paid, over-taxed and insecure workers don’t borrow, don’t buy and don’t consume.

The Troika, led by unelected bankers, are dismantling the great European post-war social-democratic achievement and re-structuring society along market lines. But unrestrained capitalism, divested of the counterbalancing wealth-distributing forces inherent in social democracy, produces such untenable inequalities that it leads inevitably to economic paralysis.

A recent Oxfam report on inequality recommends shifting the burden of taxation from consumption and income, to wealth and capital. The global financial sector is subject to hardly any taxes at all. Ireland has refused to sign up to an agreement that would tax transactions of shares and bonds which would yield a revenue return of €500 million per year.

The water protesters should not be demonised as anarchists, but viewed as ordinary people attempting to re-balance a system that has become unsustainably skewed in favour of the rich.

Maeve Halpin

Ranelagh

Dublin 6