Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

-----is the pretty big retrenchment in investment, here and generally across Europe in the aftermath of the crash? Those with money are very nervous about where they put it and they do not really want to invest it in the real economy. So we try to cajole them into investing in the real economy. To facilitate that and encourage them, and I heard mention of capital gains taxes and all that kind of stuff, we end up incentivising them and I really worry about that. There is another way to deal with the problem of loads of privately accumulated capital and savings sitting there not invested in the real economy unless it is no risk and absolutely guaranteed to make a big profit - I thought capitalism is all about risk, but it appears it is not. Private capital today is the enterprise of investing and ensuring no risk. I believe we actually need to address the fundamental problem of risk averse private capital resulting in no investment. What we need to do is take some of that money back from them and into the hands of public authorities, controlled by the people, in order to have democratic investment decisions. That is the problem we grapple with - too much money concentrated in the hands of too few people.