Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Sugar tax doublethink

Proposals are being put around for a tax on sugar. The aim is to discourage people from eating food and drinks with sugar. Advocates of this idea have grasped the obvious point that if you tax something, people are discouraged from doing that particular thing.

So why do governments persist in raising most of their revenue from taxes on successful legal economic activity - on things like work, goods and services? Do politicians have a few missing vital connections in their thinking apparatus?

Kommentarer

This is all true.

Its also a highly prejudiced government action.

Government getting involved with things history shows it does badly.

Proving once again that all kinds of taxation are inherently prejudiced and unjust.

So taxation should be abolished prior to any other activity. Such as whence the revenue now free from the injustice of taxation.

True, the minority never elected any government or tyrant, another astonishing observed fact of history.

Even Hitler would never have been such a 'success' if the people had opposed him. Like Marx and Obama he had an enormous 'court' doing his bidding for money and power. 40 million Germans strong.

So the blame for all the world's social problems lies with you and I, We The People. Who I'm afraid are not conscious of our complicity.

And by this ignorance we escape from complicity by blaming wealth and power.

And nothing important changes permanently.

And so it goes...

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...