I am not sure that I entirely agree with leg-iron on the subject of tax:

Crank up taxes on the rich, and the rich move overseas and pay no tax at all here.

Is not the purpose of the immense pressure being placed by the UK and the USA upon those smallish countries which still offer old-fashioned confidential banking simply to ensure that if one is a citizen of either of the former one will pay the taxes of one’s mother country whether one lives there or not?

Nostradunderclass prognisticates: before all that long it will also become necessary for the government, like those of all failed socialist paradises, to prevent people from going abroad (during the Cold War we used to call it ‘defecting’) before they have been completely dispossessed.

The Irish, once again, showing the English how ’tis done. Slashdot reports that the Irish government has unleashed its Blarney-stone-kissing word-weasel on the problem of taxing computers, and that worthy has come up with the following definition of a TV set:

…an electronic apparatus able to receive TV signals or “any software or assembly comprising such apparatus”

Well, the software required to receive BBC broadcasts (Flash) happens to be missing from this computer. Their move.

It’s not often that I disagree with Ian Parker-Joseph, but in this case, on the subject of motoring costs:

There is a limit to what people can pay, indeed what people are willing to continue to pay, and these latest figures go some way to show, that for many, this limit has already been reached.

I would say that the whole idea is ‘to extract from the villein’ [Sellar and Yeatman] the maximum possible amount. Of course some will be ‘unable’ to pay. In fact, as any tax collector will tell you, this actually means that they are ‘unwilling’ to pay. The draconian treatment of the few will of course encourage the many.

The government certainly doesn’t want people to stop driving; this is why it ensures that we all live a long way from both our work and the shops, and has so ensured for decades.

But it does feel that the percentage of our disposable income that we can be forced to surrender on this basis can be increased without people (who will, of course, shortly have to drive all over the place looking for work) actually giving up their cars.

The limit has not been reached; if it had, the number of motorists would be falling.

The tax collectors will already have predicted a point of diminishing return, and, had this been passed, no further increases in taxation (of the various kinds that IPJ lists) would be undertaken for the time being.

In the 20th century society was radically reconfigured around the motor car and the potential of this situation for social engineering and tax exploitation have been apparent since long before anyone invented ‘the environment’ (those of us of a certain age may remember that among the first stories dreamed up to justify car taxation was the one about road maintenance; indeed, a tax disc was for some time officially called a ‘Road Fund licence’).

They will certainly not flood their own goldmine until they are satisfied that there is no more gold in it; indeed, that they continue to fund the pumping (carried out by the usual contractors, Messrs. ACPO) suggests that they believe that much profitable extraction remains to be done.

Sent in by a reader, petrolprices.com reports that

In just 2 weeks fuel duty will rise again, bringing the total tax paid at the pumps to 71 pence in every pound – despite Prime Minister Gordon Brown promising not to raise fuel duty.

Knowing little about this source, I can’t say whether or not this is true. All I can say is that it certainly feels true.

Just for once I find I can bring myself to disagree with leg-iron, if only on a technicality:

…as an actual, real scientist with certificates and a publication record to prove it, I recommend that Sir Liam Donaldson be the recipient of a fifty kilogram mass delivered at a minimum fifty metres per second in the region of his solar plexus because it is the right thing to do.

Two points arise. For one thing, Sir Liam Donaldson is only doing his job. Which, in this case, is to contrive a medical case, howsoever implausible, to justify the government’s intended increase in alcohol taxation. Gordon Brown has been reported as ‘opposing’ his plan in order to boost Brown’s popularity, which is currently displaying a negative value. Further lies and spin will eventually allow the tax to be put in place without denting the Leader’s cult-of-personality.

For another thing, if one were after all to decide to make a specific, scientific example of a particularly egregious specimen such as this then I think that one ought to be able to do better in the modern world than a substantial but really rather slow-moving solid shot.

As a Clarkist I would naturally suggest something elegant (or, in the ominous words of Oppenheimer, ‘technically sweet’). Perhaps what is sometimes called the ‘deVere-Courtenay death-ray’.

“It was a ray. It killed someone. What more do you want?”
[Sir Arthur C. Clarke]

I am very much obliged to mummylonglegs, at And there was me thinking…, for this complete, correct and concise summary of the principle of operation of taxation:

This is how it works

4. Create some false statistics that back up your spurious claims that taxing the fuck out of breathing has prevented so many people from dying from it. Blah fucking blah fucking blah.

I have been raving about this for some time now and was, frankly, despairing of persuading anybody of the validity of this point of view.

One more time, then, for those at the back who are more concerned to string up tax-paid patsies than to pass the exam, no matter who is put up to say otherwise things are taxed not because they are bad for you, not because they are bad for the environment, nor yet because they are disapproved of by God; they are taxed because you will buy them anyway and can be made to pay more.

Economists call it, I believe, ‘the low price elasticity of demand in the short term’. Anyone who doesn’t believe it can go and look it up, like I had to. The only things worth taxing are those which people are not prepared to manage without. Motor fuel. Alcohol. Tobacco. Chocolate, now. Other foods soon. This is why there’s a ‘War on (untaxed) Drugs’. Nobody in business much likes competition.

No government ever bothered to make any pretence about ‘health’ or anything else when imposing a tax on windows (the bricked-up remnants of which distinguish some buildings of a certain age to this day), or bricks (double-sized, tax-beating bricks, called ‘gobs’, became briefly popular in some areas before being more heavily taxed themselves), or candles.

That government nowadays sees fit to depart from the shamelessly arbitrary taxation practices of earlier centuries in attempting to justify its measures with reference, by whatever devious means, to some supposed consequent public good is to my way of thinking indicative only of the amount of our money that they now have available to spend on so doing.

The Grumpy Old Sod protests the forthcoming tax on chocolate:

Oh here we go, the first step in medicalising “chocolate addiction”.

My understanding was that however one chooses to describe (as ‘addiction’, ‘dependency’, or whatever) the fondness that some people have for chcocolate, there seems to be some reason to believe that many of these people might be inclined by it to buy chocolate, perhaps in preference to other foods, regardless of its price.

I do not accept as evidence any of the piffle spouted by state-funded quangos-with-a-licence-to-beg or their spokesthings. I accept as evidence the personal statements of a number of people (mostly, I have to say in all scientific objectivity, ladies) whom I know for whom chocolate forms rather more of a lifestyle statement than it does for me.

It is exactly the same principle as the taxation of fuel, alcohol and tobacco. The economists, I gather, call it ‘the low price elasticity of demand in the short term’. If it can be established that people are going to buy a thing anyway, whether they have to have it to get the car to work or because they’re addicted to it / dependent upon it / whatever, then it is obviously worth dreaming up a story (about ‘public health’, ‘the environment’, etc.) to justify taxing it to the utter limit that the market will bear.

If the government wanted us to give up tobacco and alcohol – really wanted us to – they’d simply ban them. If they really wanted us to use less petrol, diesel and Jet 1, they’d make it easier for us to do so, or at least stop making it so difficult. If they really thought chocolate was a dangerous addictive drug, they’d have it under the Medicines Act, at the very least.

They have done, and will do, none of these things. But they will impose the maximum levels of tax that they possibly can while their contrived justifications continue to be believed.

Me? I can take it or leave it alone. I’ve never quite understood the curious tradition in this country which holds that every major Christian festival should commence at about 0400 with mass attempts by children at suicide by chocolate-poisoning.

IF there is anyone out there reading this who doesn’t already read the excellent blog of Ian Parker-Joseph (who is the leader of the Libertarian Party of the UK), AND IF that person happens to be a driver, THEN I would really recommend their consulting the link above, which contains information which may be to their advantage, ELSE they may end up paying the state even more than they didn’t expect to pay now.

The Devil, ranting about the compulsory old-age insurance racket which I mentioned briefly earlier.

He demands:

Isn’t anyone else tired of the government lying to them about NICs? Isn’t anyone else tired of seeing what is ostensibly their old age insurance being spunked up the fucking wall on fucking NI databases and subsidised bars for MPs? Because I am fucking raging…

To be entirely frank I had been labouring under what may have been a misapprehension that everyone in the country knew perfectly well, and has known for decades, that NI is just a means of extending income tax without saying so, and that all the revenue thereby accrued has always been spent as income.

I am of course open to correction but I believe that for some time now all government revenue has been passed through a single account called the Consolidated Fund, the true (as opposed to ostensible) purpose of which is to prevent the revenue supposedly intended for a given purpose being identified at all, let alone selectively withheld.

Over the years, this government in particular (but previous ones almost equally so) has wasted billions of pounds of our money—and now they are not even going to live up to the most basic of promises that they made.

Having seen a photo of a decidedly Mephistophelian young gentleman whom most intelligence agents and anti-terrorist police would agree to be the Devil (incarnate), I am forced to the conclusion that he is simply too young to remember Harold Wilson.

David Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance, is exercised by this item from the Telegraph:

Drivers will have to declare every 10 years whether they are medically able to get behind the wheel, according to proposals… Tests, costing up to £80, will be offered to drivers to check whether they are fit to drive. Anyone who chooses not to take the tests but declares themselves able to take to the roads will be committing a criminal offence if they fail to meet the established standards.

What is not mentioned in the Telegraph article is how insurance companies will react to this measure.

My guess is that they will massively load the (state taxed) premiums of those who do not send in a chit from the office to certify that they have paid their £80. I do not suppose for one moment that there will be anything like the Night of the Long Knives foreseen by DD; motorists are far too valuable as revenue-generators for their numbers to be substantially reduced. A few of the most blatantly blind, halt or daft drivers will be very publicly hounded off the road, to persuade people that the scheme is ‘working’, but there will certainly be no significant drop in the numbers of payers of car tax, fuel tax, ‘congestion’ charges, camera fines, parking fines, council parking charges, etc. etc. ad naus.

Faced with a choice between paying the state £80 blackmail money every 10 years, which is only £8 a year, or paying their insurers an unpredictable and arbitrary loading which can hardly fail to exceed this modest figure, most drivers will elect to pay the state.

Once the pattern is established, and people are accustomed to the new exaction, the interval between tests will be reduced to 5 years; once again the insurance industry will be relied upon to persuade drivers that the alternative is worse.

Finally the tests will become compulsory and annual, and rather more costly. The insurance industry will not lose out; the state will repay its assistance with yet another scare campaign, probably this time about ‘driving standards’ rather than health, allowing vast increases of premiums paid by those who elect not to retake driving tests on a regular basis, and the gravy-train will start on another circuit of its curiously pointsless track.