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Tristan — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:33:01 +0000

I thought that might be your take on things.

I'm glad the 50% rate has been dropped, and I'm glad of the small step we've taken.

I was also pleased to hear Mike Williams calling for more land tax, although I'm not convinced it should be the only tax.

There's a long way to go to pursuade people that income tax is not the only tax, and that its infact a pretty bad tax. People still equate wealth and income too much, but the argument is swinging in the right direction, eventually even Labour might start to accept it (I doubt the Tories ever will, not until it becomes the status quo- then they'd defend it as 'tradition' or something)

Tax Debate: A view from a distance

Jock — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:22:00 +0000

I don't get to go to conference. It's always freshers week here at university and I get to give my one speech of the year to a crowd of a couple of hundred steadily drinking freshers who don't want to hear what I have to say and this year were crushed to hear that the arrivals meeting took up the first half hour of the Arsenal-Man United game.

But lame as I am, after a weekend working and with next weekend on duty, I decided my brain felt already a bit like I imagine an egg feels when it realises its next role is as an ommlette and I belatedly took today off work (leave, not sick). And so I was able to see at least part of the Lib Dem conference debate on the Tax Commission proposals on quarter of a TV screen on my set top box.

They say every journey starts with a single step, and it will be no surprise to people who know me as a Georgist "Single Taxer" nowadays to hear that personally I think that the Tax Commission's work has been just that first step. And what a debate. I am glad to be in a party in which such steps are taken democratically, with full and frank debate, with opposing views heard and applauded. But party is only part of the story.

Whether or not Ming's leadership was on the line, however, were they to have voted for Evan Harris's 50% amendment, I very much doubt. Other people do not seem to understand liberal leadership and make everything a test of strength (and let's face it, the Tax Commission was not Ming's vehicle but the party's, triggered by Charles Kennedy after the last election and well on its way to a final report before Ming became leader). I do think my own membership would have been on the line, though, because whilst we might have taken that first step, for me we would have instantly withdrawn our foot and it would have become an uncertain shuffle.

Gareth Epps mentioned in his speech that he was in the party to win elections, and that was what the party also needed to do more than anything, and that "economic purists" were unlikely to achieve that because "economic purism" is difficult to sell to people. Far more difficult, to him and many others, than by maintaining an easily understood totem indicating where our hearts are - that we can and would take from the best off to help the worst off. But it was a totem that, had it been retained, would have been at 180 degree opposition to the economic theory of the rest of the paper, of shifting the burden of taxation off people and onto resource use and depletion. The beginning of the end of the peonage of taxing the results of our efforts and enterprise.

So maybe a political party is not the place for me at all. I don't want to win elections (and I have a fair amount of practice at not doing so to prove it...:) - I only want to change the world. And I don't really believe that politicians change the world. Winning elections may give them the opportunity to do so, but rarely does it actually seem to happen. It's ideas that change the world. And watching today's conference debate made me realise that selling even the most modest ideas to a democratic body is an almost superhuman task. And one left to far better salesmen, demagogues and the occasional spiv than I will ever be.

As I wrote back in spring, Anthony Fisher, Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon became my unlikeliest of political heros when I discovered the history of their part in selling an idea, probably the last idea to revolutionize western politics, to the politicians that actually began to understand and appreciate it and try to implement it. Of course, I could be cynical and suggest that that idea, monetarism, morphed into nothing more than another opportunity for one party to gain an electoral edge. One wonders whether, if Conservative policy in the seventies had been set the way Liberal Democrat policy was today through such open and democratic means, a room full of people would have understood John Hoskyns's Stepping Stones plan (was that its name?) let alone approved of it, or whether it was more a case of strong leadership and a conjunction of celestial bodies taking control behind the scenes.

Anyway, back to the debate today. There were many comments, from both sides of the debate, about being proud of Lloyd-George a century ago and of his peoples' budget. So am I. But I remind everyone that a large and probably the most radical part of that budget was never implemented. A radical idea that many of us, including several members of the Tax Commission itself, are still fighting for while many others who invoke L-G have probably forgotten or never even knew he stood for! Land Value Tax.

It was good to hear Mike Williams who chaired the Tax Commission highlight it as an area we wanted to do more work and produce new policy for as soon as possible. I was sad to hear him say that there are no silver bullets, because those of us who are convinced by the "Single Tax" do believe it is just such a killer application. In the debate over whether to tax incomes or asset wealth it would be worth some of those in favour of the 50 pence rate to consider why L-G was never able to implement it; the implacable opposition of the wealthiest and most advantaged in the land and "their representatives" in the House of Lords and what they gave away - no less than the right to govern - in order to ensure it wasn't implemented.

Today the party took a small step. It wrapped it up in cuddly, saleable, spinnable terms like "Green Tax Switch" which will serve it well. But it has yet truly to grasp the fairness, simplicity and philosophical superiority of the Single Tax idea, shifting away from the envy and arbitrariness of taxing personal success completely and onto externalities and economic rent. Shifting the whole rationale for the state's interference in what we do with what we make into the stewardship of the resources we share and take and use.

In the process, Land Value Tax would, almost incidentally, achieve more environmentally sustainable patterns of living and working, a better distribution of the wealth generating capacity around the country and create a system that puts more responsibility and freedom to choose back to the individual and community and away from the monolithic state apparatus. The next steps may be harder. They could and should go way beyond the 5% of the total tax burden that this paper switches - the more the more effective. But they head where Liberals should not fear to tread.

Jock's Place - Tax Debate: A view from a distance - Comments

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Tax Debate: A view from a distance