[varispeed]

This grinds my gears as this attitude essentially reinforces the serfdom in the society. If you are born into a working class you will remain working class.

The salaries are taxed in a way that a worker cannot easily save money to start their own business, they need to beg bankers for a loan or go cap in hand to the rich people - and oh be sure they'll have to give shares to the business.

In the UK we used to have a nice route for workers to build up their start up fund - basically you could create a company and sell your (and your co-founders) services to other companies. You could pay yourself a small salary or dividend or both to be able to cover rent, bills and day to day outgoings and in a year or two you could have amassed sizeable capital while gaining expertise. As an example, if you wanted to sell Kubernetes based SaaS product, you could have offered Kubernetes maintenance services etc and learn what kind of pain points corporations have and then work on incorporating solutions into your start up offering. Problem is that government believed it was a tax avoidance and closed this route (IR35). Now you can still offer services, but you are getting taxed on revenue which has no advantage over just being an employee and taking forever to save money.

[dazc]

The Gov't believed it was tax avoidance for the simple reason that it was.

It is still possible to build a business in the UK the old fashioned way of working hard and making personal sacrifices.

[varispeed]

Government was never able to prove it was a tax avoidance. If you wanted to draw all the money from the company you would pay broadly the same tax as an employee. The only angle that one may consider as avoidance was that the client wouldn't have to pay employer's NI - but given the freelancer services were charging considerably more than employees, that wasn't an incentive either and they weren't employees, so it shouldn't apply either. Basically tax avoidance angle is a red herring and based on research it was the best carrier for this law to gain public acceptance plus it could paint freelancers in a bad light. The real reason this was adopted, was that big consultancies had a hard time competing with freelancers - they offered better price and expertise and as it happens a lot of government members and party members have vested interest in these corporations.