Why an Annual Land Value Tax is an AWFUL Idea
A familiar premise to those of us who err on the side of libertarianism is the axiom that we should "tax wealth, not work". Other than anarcho-capitalists, we all believe that government needs some revenue in order to function.
One school of thought which appears to be gaining traction with liberally minded people is a land value tax, which would be levied at a percentage of the value of any land one might own on an annual basis. This is portrayed as a tax that would hit the rich hardest, but actually its advocates do not understand that it would likely affect the rich the least.
So who would it affect the most? Let's take a few examples and determine who would be most ill affected by a land value tax in the UK.
Self Wars: The Unions Strike Back
It's in-fashion to bash the unions, which makes me somewhat reluctant to do it, but I really can't say anything positive about the November 30th strikes: they are simply a gratuitous power grab by the unions. And not against the government. They are a power grab against us, the taxpayer; we, who pay the gold-plated wages and pensions of public sector workers.
But isn't it illiberal to say that they can't strike? Surely the right to withdraw one's labour is reasonable? After all, it just levels the playing field, right?
No, actually, it really doesn't. In an equal relationship, the worker must have no right to which the employer cannot have an equal right. This would mean that if the worker can suspend his/her labour, or essentially suspend his/her half of the contract, then the employer should be able to do the same: to withdraw pay at any time that he/she feels the labour provided doesn't meet his/her standard.
What, in effect, this would mean is that contracts would be utterly pointless. We could simply refuse to pay taxes whilst the government failed to meet our standards, and the public sector workers could withdraw their labour all they wanted, but at least it would be an equal relationship.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by The Lib Dems
Up until yesterday, I was willing to brave out the hard times because I had a belief that the core tenets of the Liberal Democrat party were still in place. Transparency and honesty are cornerstones of any liberal device, but it seems like that party, much like Labour and the Tories, only support honesty and transparency when it's in their interests to do so.
At the General Election in 2010, the Liberal Democrats ran on the mandate of an in/out referendum on the European Union. I knew they would support the 'in' campaign, but they did offer this referendum. To back up this position, they had an official campaign for the in/out referendum on their campaigns site.
The more tech-savvy of you will notice that this link directs to the Archive.org record of the page. This is because after I spread the URL on Twitter, the party decided to simply delete the campaign page with no formal explanation. This happened on the 21st or 22nd October 2011. In my mind, this is certainly a betrayal of transparency.
Dale Farm: Regulation at Her Unnecessary Worst
Left-wingers, I'm going to be somewhat annoyed at you if you agree with the statement here but still campaign to keep Tescos out of your towns. Planning permission laws are ridiculous, and unfortunately it has taken people being forcefully evicted from their home of over a decade to make the left see what we've been saying all along.
In this instance, we're dealing with a special type of planning permission law, dealing with designated 'green belt' zones which are supposed to preserve wildlife areas between towns. When I talk about this, you're probably not imagining a concreted-over piece of land which was being used as a scrapyard, but that's pretty much what Dale Farm was in the 1980s when the Travellers started to use the site.
US Tax System Explained in Beer (similar to UK)
Found this little gem on Facebook and thought I'd share it...
Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:
The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.
So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. 'Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.
The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.
But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer.
So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so the fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 ( 22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).
Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. 'I only got a dollar out of the $20,' declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,' but he got $10! ''Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar, too.. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I! '
'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks! '
'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor! '
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night the tenth man ( the richest) didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction.
Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
Are We Headed For An Information Blackout?
When considering the characteristics of a free country, it usually doesn't take very long until we stumble upon the 'free press', but very few of us actually think about what makes a free press work, we just assume that it means that the press can give us the information which is in our interests, and hold government to account.
Several mechanisms exist to ensure that the press is capable of doing this: freedom of expression, of course, so that the press can print the stories which the government doesn't want it to; minimal regulation, to prevent certain viewpoints being shut down (we have regulations in TV media which create a very un-free press, but Fleet Street is usually exempt from this) and of course the right for journalists to protect their sources.
Why is that so important? Well, let's imagine a world where government employees just don't talk to the media because they fear ending up in prison even if what they're exposing is in the public interest. Even in today's world (a relatively free country), we would never have found out about the Millie Dowler phone hacking case, we would probably never have found out about prison corruption, you can see how this allows the government to sweep its own failings under the rug quite easily.
The “You’re Voting To Make The Poor Poorer” Fallacy
One of the devices the left like to use in debate is emotional blackmail. Instead of addressing your point, they will simply try to assert that you are immoral or that you are deliberately voting for / pushing morally reprehensible policies without truly considering the context within which policies need to be made. This is one of a number of techniques the left use to shut down debate which they don't want to partake in.
To give an example, let's say you're talking about pushing a campaign to lower the local housing allowance of housing benefit (which, frankly, is pretty high in some areas of the country - £250 a week for a 1 bedroom property). Instead of trying to reason with you about why the campaign is wrong (maybe it would make it harder to find affordable housing for recipients), nine times out of ten they will just try to shut down the debate with the following (or a variant thereof):
"You just want to give more to the rich bankers and take away from the poor!"
Of course, there are several issues with this statement. First of all, it's backwards, as we're not giving anything to the bankers or taking anything away from the poor. The natural state without government would be that the poor get nothing from the state, and the banker gives nothing to the state, therefore we are still suggesting taking away from the rich and giving to the poor, but "you just want to take away less from the bankers and give less to the poor, but still enough to rent a house without going to work" doesn't sound quite as powerful, does it?
You Cannot Blame Blackberry & Twitter for the Riots
It's a common concept amongst liberals that politicians look for any reason to assert control over the people, and I think we're going to find out over the next few days what the liberal credentials of our MPs really are.
I've been watching BBC Parliament with some alarm as MPs talk about how to deal with social media, talking about preventing access to social media to would-be rioters, and refer to false rumours being spread on Twitter as similar to 'police hoax calls'.
London’s Burning – Police Powers, The Army, The Left & Anarchy
A friend of mine came up to me earlier and said "Don't you think the police are being a bit heavy-handed?"
As a liberal (socially speaking), I seem to find that it's almost seen as my duty to criticise whatever the police do. People just expect me to. And normally, I'm more than willing to oblige. They definitely abuse their stop and search powers, they enforce a lot of laws which are not just, and they seem to spend more time pulling people over for not wearing seatbelts than they do catching rapists and killers.
Having said that, when it comes to these mindless acts of theft and vandalism, I can't criticise a robust approach. The police have a duty to protect people and their property, and that's exactly what they're doing. If they can prevent a shop being smashed up with a baton or a riot shield, it seems worth it to me. If people are willing to attack others and their property, the police are well within their ethical rights to use force to prevent those attacks.
In a free society, this would be an entirely legitimate function of the police force. The police are employed to serve and protect the public and that appears to be what they're doing, at great risk to themselves. I think that Cameron has made the right call in stepping up operations, and I hope that soon these mindless criminals will be brought to justice.
Thinking About Democracy
Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted, I've been caught up in things, but one of the subjects I keep coming up across recently is the idea that democracy is somehow a sacred concept. Many libertarians believe in consensus politics, and I tend to differ from them on this particular front, so I figured I could do a post about it.
First of all, to clarify, I'm in no way saying that democracy is a bad concept, or even not the best system of government, what I'm going to propose is that the way in which we have made the concept of a 'democratic society' so sacred is dangerous to the concept of liberty and individual freedom.
I fully expect this blog post to be controversial, because democracy is a very touchy subject for many people, and has been enshrined in our language as an inherently 'good' thing, but I'm hoping to show that it isn't automatically the case.
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