Happy Monday morning, everyone. Let’s get straight down to business …
2 Must-Read Blog Posts
What are other Liberal Democrat bloggers saying? Here’s are two posts that have caught the eye from the Liberal Democrat Blogs aggregator:
- “Change”: deliberate, disingenuous, dangerous deception (Jock Coats)
There can be no “change” whilst the wheels of State rumble on. Changing how the State is run for a few years does not alter the fundamentally evil reasons for which “State” was invented and which it continues to pursue, inevitably.
- Broken Britain is sadly a reality for many (Lisa Harding)
Whilst I don’t always agree with most of the comments of my Conservative friends, I am drawn to admit that their comments that society in Britain is broken in some ways is actually more accurate than some of us would like to admit.
Spotted any other great posts in the last day from blogs that aren’t on the aggregator? Do post up a comment sharing them with us all.
2 Big Stories
The end of the recession is officially here
No matter that the economy is groaning under the weight of debt, with a public sector jobs squeeze still to come, the worst recession in 90 years ends tomorrow. Here’s how The Independent reports it:
The worst recession since the 1930s should be officially declared over tomorrow. Economists are almost certain that the Office for National Statistics will reveal that the UK’s economy grew by about 0.3 per cent in the last three months of last year, leaving Britain the final major economy to have emerged from recession. Gross domestic product (GDP) is 6 per cent below its 2008 peaks.
An apparent rush to the shops to beat the increase in VAT on 1 January, the Government’s vehicle-scrappage scheme, and a revival of exports are thought to be boosting output. The widely anticipated announcement will mark the end of 18 months of continuous economic decline that has cost the economy £100bn in lost output, and has seen 1.3 million workers made redundant and 50,000 families lose their homes through repossession. Last year was the worst year for the British economy since 1921.
Carry on working, says Equality and Human Rights Commission
The BBC reports:
People should be allowed to work beyond the age of 65 and with more flexible hours, the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said. In the UK a worker can see their employment end at 65, even if they do not want to retire.
The commission wants ministers to scrap the retirement age, saying it is out of date and discriminates against people who want to carry on working. The government has promised a review of the law.
A long overdue end to outdated discrimination? Or yet another way of exacerbating inter-generational inequality, with younger people finding it harder to get their foot on the job ladder?
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8 Comments
Simples. Stop taxing jobs and we’d have plenty to go around. Also, letting the olds stay on would perhaps mitigate some of the complaints about not taxing the land out from under the “income poor asset rich”…:-)
It is hard to see that it is as simple as that Jock.
How do we stop taxing jobs? What do we do about the shortfall in taxation?
How do we know that taxing jobs will help?
Well, aside from the fact that there would be more people in work and therefore less of a shortfall anyway, the whole point is that you stop taxing productive things like work and start taxing properly economically neutral things like land values.
Our national labour force, if such a thing can be conceived of, is thirty-five per cent and some over priced because of income and payroll taxation. *That* is why our industry has been in inexorable decline for fifty years. *That* is why we are so ridiculously resigned to being a “service economy” and our utterly stupid reliance on “global financial services” to keep our country afloat. This is a tariff. The working person of a century ago knew this too.
Okay. What country has moved taxation to land value taxation and achieved the jobs benefit you project?
Models are fine but we have to see if they work in practise
Oh – well, that place at the head of the economic freedom table Hong Kong for a start. Could do worse! Individual places in the US have seen their local economies boosted with jobs when their differential payroll taxes have been lowered and replaced with land based taxes – such as Harrisburgh in Pennsylvania.,
Nonetheless., if we for ever wait for someone else to do it so we can look at it we will get nowhere. Incomes tax in this country is the triumph of the land owning classes. For nine centuries this country’s tax income came from, in decreasing proportion, land, not labour. The advent of a permanent, and then growing, income tax is a reversal of history that has seen our industrial competitiveness decline alongside its growth. Go figure.
Models are fine but we have to see if they work in practise
So, let’s do it and see.
Jock
Well, aside from the fact that there would be more people in work and therefore less of a shortfall anyway, the whole point is that you stop taxing productive things like work and start taxing properly economically neutral things like land values.
Yes, but that would require the state to determine what these land values are, and to collect the tax, by force if necessary, and then to redistribute it. But this is what you wrote about the state in your article:
The State was created in order to enable the political means of fulfilling the needs of one group by exploiting another. It has always done this. It continues to do this to this day. There is no evidence in human history that it can do any other.
So by what you have written there is no evidence that the state can do what you want it to do. If land value taxation were proposed, anyone making money from land value would throw back your very words and say “Your insistence that I should have tax forcibly taken from me just because I own land is just the evil State taking money from me and giving it to lazy people who can’t work hard to buy property as I (or my parents) have”.
In case it escaped your notice, Matthew, because I don’t believe you are so deliberately obtuse, the comment with regard to land tax versus productivity taxes was in reference not to my post, but to the comment at the end of the Daily View piece about the age of retirement and whether younger people would get jobs if all the olds were working till they dropped.
Nonetheless, many of your claims are quite wrong. The “state” doesn’t determine what land values are (though they often contribute to those values by artificial restriction to it over and above what private ownership manages to do as well as by its expenditure on surrounding infrastructure), even in a land tax based economy. The market in land does.
And of course one of the biggest ways in which the state creates this means of exploitation is itself through the granting of monopoly privilege such as in land. So in a very real sense it is fair to say that shifting to a land taxation system significantly reduces not just the revenue collected by the state, but also significantly redresses an imbalance that the state itself creates through privilege.
Nor does land “tax” require a *state*, as opposed to a government. Since it is a market based tax, it does not need the sort of arbitrary legislative decision-taking that the current system does. So *government*, as opposed to *state* will suffice. Anarchists and libertarians have been divided on the land question – the author of “Our Enemy The State” by whom much of my posting was inspired, Albert Jay Nock, was what would now be called a “geo-libertarian” and a friend of Henry George, whilst Nock’s own anti-state inspiration, Herbert Spencer, was virulently anti-Georgist (having misunderstood it, of course!).
But actually, in a truly market-anarchist society, this privilege the state currently confers and protects in land, would not exist, and those who wanted their title to land protected would have to pay to have that done – either in the form of land title insurance or in terms of the costs of physically protecting land.
So, it’s not at all inconsistent to say that while we have a state, a measure such as land tax helps to reduce its power and reach and the ability it has to create the means for exploitation of one group by another. And that in the complete absence of a state, which you are right, would be my preferred option, the sort of externalities that the state currently prevents being fully accounted for would be internalised and paid for anyway, by the very people who benefit.