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I mentioned the "Political Compass" website in my post from the other day about coming back from "the brink" of left extremism. I've done this test several times before now, and as I mentioned have usually come out way in the bottom left of the chart - in the anarcho-syndicalist area I suppose.

I still think some of the questions are a little awkward. My main concern is that, like many of this sort of questionnaire it assumes to an extent that "private" equals "corporate". I think that there are many models of business and social support and some of them are collectivist, but that such collectivism should be voluntary and not coercive by governments.

So, while I am quite happy saying that, for example, I strongly agree that the sole social duty of a corporation is to return profit to their shareholders" I don't necessarily believe that a corporation is the only way of successfully organizing production. Is that too much of a contradiction?

Anyway - these quandaries, I would suspect, pull me back from being on the very far right of the economic scale, but I am quite surprised (and not entirely unpleasantly), to be, for the first time, to the right of the origin in the left-right economic axis. And definitely pleased to remain in the near anarchist area of the authoritarian-libertarian axis:

Economic Left/Right: 1.63

Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.69



Interestingly, from their analysis of contemporary politicians and such like, there is nobody in this whole quadrant. They do put Friedman in this area, much further to the right but also much closer to neutral on liberatarian/authoritarian issues, which I suspect misunderstands him by painting him solely as an economic ideologist. And just as interestingly they feel Tony Blair is further right and more authoritarian than the supposedly right wing Angela Merkel.

James Graham has done the short version of the Georgist objections to Conservative Plans over Stamp Duty and Inheritance Tax and, whilst I have blogged in the past about why we should indeed abolish IHT completely, I spotted this yesterday on "The First Post" which I think highlights a common confusion about IHT and, in particular, "real property" - ie your home...

Arguments for and against inheritance tax:

ARGUMENTS FOR (abolition/reform):

Inheritance tax no longer fulfils its original intention. Initially designed to raise money from the very wealthy, it now penalises more and more members of the middle classes. The very wealthy, however, can often afford financial guidance and find ways to avoid having to pay.

If that's what people are basing the inherent unfairness of IHT upon then I think they are wrong. Whilst one cannot argue with the second sentence (and the LVT solution would solve that fairly) I am not at all sure from the history of the various Estate Duty, Capital Transfer Tax and then Inheritance Tax regimes leading up to now that the tax was in fact "initially designed to raise money from the very wealthy".

In 1857 tax was due on estates above £20, though apparently rarely collected unless the estate was over £1,400. Using the RPI these two sums equate to just £1,200 and c£90,000 in 2006 prices, or £33,000 and £857,000 using average earnings indices. No, given the discussions around the various ways of levying land taxes in the People's Budget of 1909, I believe that death duties were intended to capture land value increases in a way that would not impact on the owner while they were alive.

It just so happens that around the turn of the 20th century, most land was in the hands of the "very wealthy" - landlords and large real estate holdings. Now, whilst it is much more widely spread, the increase in land values, seen especially in the past decade, are still a problem which the lifting of IHT thresholds will not address, in fact as James Graham points out, will exacerbate.

One other of the arguments for abolition in the First Post article goes as follows:

In taking a share of money from people who have already contributed income and capital gains taxes, inheritance tax is a form of double taxation.

This too is to misunderstand the nature of property price rises, where the increase in values comes from and so on. The property owner has not paid tax on the capital gains in their first home at least. Nor have they paid income tax on that increase. They may (but not necessarily I suppose) have paid income tax on the money used to buy the property in the first place. Nor have they contributed much, if anything, to the increase in value. That comes about because the location becomes more popular - more people need to have access to that location or ones like it. It is a monopoly profit in a zero sum market. Contrast this with the profit made from healthy economic investments such as equity in companies which only arise because someone, the company, is creating additional wealth.

Yet in attempting to take the family home out of IHT the Tories are doing precisely the opposite of what is fair and equitable. The monopoly "real property" profit the family is allowed to keep, whilst healthy investment assets are more likely to be taxed, if anything is. Of course I do not believe in waiting till someone dies before collecting the land value from the estate. It should be, as Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Winston Churchill suggested the main or only form of taxation. Such would keep house prices down, allow people to save the rest of their income in productive assets instead, and be difficult to avoid, even for "non-doms". Then abolishing IHT would make sense, taking all the other productive capital assets out of what is a pernicious tax.

Only Jock should be able to access this url .

UPDATE:  It looks like I might have managed to do this - so well done me for delving into the PHP and riting a load of new code.  SOmething I am not expert at.

So I can now get back to proper blogging and hope thath someone links to a post of mine before too long and I can find out if it has worked! 

If you want to  see what I've done - you can have a look at http://drupal.org/node/175805

I'm just sitting listening to the Any Questions Lib Dem leadership contest special and I just heard Chris Huhne, in response to a question about whether they were more afraid of Gordon Brown or David Cameron, say that one thing that scares people about Gordon Brown is that he cannot keep his hands out of other departments' business.

How timely an answer, because it has just been announced today that Kate Barker, she of the housing market report that was commissioned a couple of years ago (and who said herself that she didn't know much about housing economics at the time!) has now been asked to do a review of the Land Use Planning system...by...The Treasury:

The terms of reference of the review are:

To consider how, in the context of globalisation, and building on the reforms already put in place in England, planning policy and procedures can better deliver economic growth and prosperity alongside other sustainable development goals.

In particular to assess:

• ways of further improving the efficiency and speed of the system;
• ways of increasing the flexibility, transparency and predictability that enterprise requires;
• the relationship between planning and productivity, and how the outcomes of the planning system can better deliver its sustainable economic objectives; and
• the relationship between economic and other sustainable development goals in the delivery of sustainable communities.

I wonder how much Ms Barker knows about planning. She's turning into the economist's version of Louise Casey methinks.

Hot on the heels of news yesterday from the Oxford Mail that Oxford City Council need to look at how other places are run, citing Lib Dem run Cambridge City Council, comes news that our Central area committee have approved a scheme to license people who hand out flyers that end up littering the place (though only in the city centre it appears, despite the problems elsewhere in the city).

They could look at how Cambridge does this. Perhaps OX1 could run it as a profit sharing business that puts the money gained back into the advertising venues and street improvements?Œ