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The Independent today reports criticism of Lib Dems' ideas for switching some of the burden of taxation off incomes, especially lower incomes and onto wealth accumulation, predominantly by the already well off and well paid, in the form of capping the tax relief on pensions contributions to the basic rate. I seem to recall the story will probably disappear from view for non-subscribers but you can still read it at the moment.

Of course regular readers will know that I'd prefer to tax only real property - the occupancy and ownership of scarce natural resources that we all depend on such as land, and not capital, but the criticism is unwarranted. You see, they complain that:

they would cut incentives for people to save for their retirement at a time when it was important to boost saving to help avert a long-term pensions crisis

and New Labour's John McFall, chairman of the Commons Treasury Select Committee, said:

"This comes at a very odd time. When the Government is trying to give every encouragement for people to save for pensions in later life, this cuts across those proposals. It goes against recommendations by Lord Turner and others to encourage savings. Instead, this will do the reverse. It is well-intentioned but naive."

Well-intentioned but naive is better suited to McFall's criticism though. There is no greater disincentive to saving for pensions than not having enough money left to put anything aside in the first place. And people in that situation are going to benefit from the transfer of part of the tax burden off of lower incomes and onto the ability to salt away ones excess income.

Already New Labour, friend of the working classes, has removed the cap imposed by the Tories in their heyday in 1989 on the proportion of one's salary one can put away in a pension fund. The effect? People with high incomes can choose to keep as income only what they need to survive and salt all the rest away in an ever wider range of pensionable assets, such as homes that other people might aspire to own instead of rent from the rentier pension fund, safe from the tax man.

As I blogged before, fully 50% of the population share just 7% of the accumulated marketable wealth of the UK. With a median household income - 50% of people live in households whose total income is below it and 50% above it - of just over £23,000 you have to be in the top 14% of households to fall into the Lib Dems' proposed higher rate (40%) income tax band of incomes above £50,000 and therefore be affected by this change - presumably even fewer individuals since this study is about household incomes (source: Institute for Fiscal Studies, Poverty and Inequality in Britain 2005 - this year's study shows no doubt similar figures, though I haven't looked at them yet).

Everyone else will have more (albeit slightly) left in their pockets and so increased capacity to save for a pension or anything else. Just who do New Labour, friend of the poor, want to help these days?

Me - I don't particularly like the tax proposal, and nor do I believe that it is feasible in the long term to rely for our pensions on being able to put away now some of what is already inadequate often to fund a decent lifestyle in the present, and hope that it will miraculously keep us in relative comfort in our dying days. But this criticism is, as they say, well-intentioned, perhaps, but naive, definitely.

Technorati Tags: lib dems, pensions, wealth distribution, tax

...to think that, in a few short weeks , it looks possible that party activists of all political colours will be expected to trudge the streets once again asking people to believe a lot of spin, unachievable promises and heartfelt apologies and vote for for a "change", or maybe that should just be "vote, for a change".

Actually, I tell a lie, it doesn't completely overwhelm me. Sometimes there is a little frisson of excitement at the possibility that the people of Britain might just once collectively call time on this comfy carousel of political clap-trap. Just say no! as the song went...

No, Gordon! No, Dave! No, Jack, Hillary, Harriet or whoever! No, not even you Nick!

We've had quite enough for these past decades, nay centuries, of being shunted up the gary glitter by folk who think they know better than us but whose ambitions so clearly exceed their abilities.

What would happen if we all got up one "Good Morning" Polling Day and simply voted "no"? At what point would the Westminster clique conclude they had completely lost our confidence and call a halt to their corruption and crookery? Or at what point can we refuse, with impunity, to submit to their authority?

And then, how do we create a new, bottom up, rather than up its own arse, democracy? This has much to commend it.

Having established myself as an anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist I can't help wondering why is it that many libertarians seem to gravitate towards the Conservative party. A party with less libertarian instincts I can hardly imagine. Whatever their rhetoric on occasion, when they tactically oppose Labour's assaults on peoples' freedoms for example, when it comes down to it they are the archetypal we know best patristic party that is happiest telling the plebs what they can and cannot do, should and should not expect.

They may point to Thatcher's rolling back of the state in the form of privatisation of government owned business assets, but a true Libertarian cannot be happy with reform merely of the economic sphere. Rolling back the state means ending interference in all areas of our lives. Anything else is authoritarian. And so, it is with little surprise that I find this reported in today's Observer:

Tories highlight cannabis dangers in drug blueprint

Jo Revill and Nick Watt
Sunday July 8, 2007
The Observer

The health risks of cannabis are so great that it should now be reclassified as a class B drug, carrying much greater penalties for possession and trafficking, says David Cameron's new blueprint for dealing with Britain's growing addiction problems.

The Tory leader has been convinced by emerging evidence that a strong form of the drug, skunk, is causing an epidemic of mental health disorders. A report being published this week by a Conservative policy commission will confront the issue, recommending an upgrading of the drug to class B, as well as arguing the case for a complete transformation of addiction treatment in Britain.

What utter bollocks. Look, the rush to create ever stronger strains (and actually the evidence is mixed - while people report finding stronger strains the prevalence of those strains is far from clear) mirrors precisely the ever stronger concoctions of alcohol produced under prohibition. If you want to control such production, the best way is to free it up and regulate it lightly. If the problem is primarily with growing brains (and the science here is also mixed as I've mentioned before) then, as with alcohol and tobacco, make it illegal for licensed vendors to sell it to minors. But while all vendors are unlicensed and unregulated there are no controls and it is pot luck, if you pardon the pun, as to whether the authorities catch someone selling to kids.

It is fact that cannabis can be a sociable drug. It is fact that cannabis can be a soothing drug for all sorts of ills, from stress to MS and arthritic pain. Indeed only on Friday there was a case of a grandmother effectively being allowed by the courts to continue to use cannabis as pain relief. But the silly side of the law means she cannot cultivate it for her own use, so she has to go to a criminal to get hold of it by definition.

The drugs laws in this country are a mess. And no party seems really to want to grasp the nettle and look at how individual freedoms to do what one wants with one's own body and mind, where it does little or no harm to anyone else, can be combined with protecting the truly vulnerable. Yes, addictions kill. But they mainly kill because the market in addictive things is so often criminal and the vulnerable are open to the worst kind of exploitation. Therefore I say that the authoritarian state, with regard to addictive substances at least, is complicit in those deaths. And by extension, the party that imposes more prohibition are murderers.

They can change the language if they like - the Tories say the phrase "war on drugs" is outdated and doesn't convey what they want to achieve - but returning to ever more criminal sanctions will harm more people, and will do the law itself a disservice by continuing a charade that everyone knows is upheld more in the breach than the observance. If you ever want to even imagine you might get the vote of this anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist, Cameron, you're going to have to do a lot btter than this knee-jerk classic moral panic nonsense.

Technorati Tags: tories, conservatives, Dave the chameleon, libertarianism, cannabis, drugs laws