We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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These are not smart taxes in a service economy that desperately needs to increase productivity. We need a tax policy that encourages people to work longer hours, in the highest-paying, private sector jobs they can find. We need a tax policy that encourages money to move from unproductive assets to more productive investments, which hopefully make a profit and pay dividends. We need a tax policy that enables small and medium-sized businesses to continue to operate, employ people and pay taxes. We need a tax policy that encourages the global wealthy to live in the UK and spend their money here.
Worst still, besides risking the bulk of UK taxes by discouraging businesses and driving the rich out of the country, these tax increases still aren’t enough to pay for the Government’s additional spending. Which brings us back to the opening paragraph of this essay: A doom loop occurs when government policy reduces economic activity by over-taxing it, over-regulating it, or allowing unconnected third parties to stifle it with litigation. Lower economic activity lowers tax revenue, which in turn causes a debt spiral if the government can’t or won’t cut spending, which leads to increased debt and higher debt costs. In the 2024/25 financial year, the UK public sector net debt was £2.8 trillion, equivalent to 95.1% of GDP. Public sector net borrowing was £151.9 billion in 2024/25, £20.7 billion higher than the previous year and equal to 5.3% of GDP, up from 4.8% in the financial year 2023/24.
– Catherine McBride
“Mr. Merz is doing what no one else in the top ranks of Western politics seems willing to do, which is broach the fundamental dilemma of the modern West. Nations have built welfare and entitlement states that are so large they have outstripped the ability of slow-growing economies to pay for them. Yet because the entitlement cushion is so broad and reaches deep into the middle class, it has become nearly impossible to reform.
This is true among conventional politicians of the left and right. But it’s also true of the supposed radicals of the populist right. From Marine Le Pen in France to the U.K.’s Nigel Farage, the AfD in Germany and Donald Trump, the populists dodge difficult reforms of the broken welfare state.”
– Wall Street Journal ($) editorial, reflecting on the recent statements on the German welfare state by the country’s Chancellor, Friedrich Merz.
What began as scattered acts of defiance has blossomed into a nationwide movement: St George’s Crosses and Union Jacks hoisted on lampposts, motorway bridges, and public spaces from Birmingham’s Shard End to Tower Hamlets in east London, Southampton to Brighton, and even Cannock. Roundabouts painted red and white, zebra crossings marked with the cross, symbols of England asserting themselves in the urban landscape. Last night I cycled through London’s Labour stronghold of Lambeth, and road markings have been transformed with the St George’s Cross, a quiet but bold reclamation in one of London’s most diverse boroughs. Dubbed “Operation Raise the Colours” by organisers (though it is hard to describe the phenomenon as organised), it has seen thousands of flags raised, with fundraising efforts like Birmingham’s £16,000 drive sustaining the effort. I support this gentle uprising, for it breathes life into symbols long marginalised.
– Gawain Towler
Thousands upon thousands of ULEZ cameras have been destroyed by the Bladerunners (way more than 5,000 last year alone)
“We know that the Online Safety Act (OSA) is a disaster. The group it is billed as protecting, children and young people, is not only rebellious: it is precisely the class most adept at using VPNs and other devices to circumvent it. And this is even before you get to the unintended consequences. The more we try to regulate the semi-respectable internet sites out there, the more we push thrill-seeking young people to the darkest and most frightening corners of cyberspace, where they can suffer serious harm. Furthermore, the greater the pressure on the young to sign up to dodgy free VPNs, the greater the likelihood of their later suffering trolling and identity theft. Some protection.”
– Andrew Tettenborn
Following from my post of yesterday about the attacks on inheritance, and attitudes around equality more generally, I took another look at the Lewis Goodall attack on inheritance. Goodall, a journalist, argues that he is in favour of capitalism – he wants to cut income taxes – and therefore he is not just some malcontent Leftie who wants to hit people on the head with tax.
There is also a sort of intergenerational justice argument going on here. Quantitative easing and other forces have inflated asset values; Boomers have, to some extent, enjoyed final-salary pensions and been able to retire in their early 60s, if not before. Most Gen X (that includes me), Millennials and the Zs will have to work for longer. (Given hopefully rising healthspans, that might not be a bad thing, however.) True, those who were young adults in the 50s, such as my Dad, had to do military service, and there were other nasties to deal with that we younger adults did not have to handle. But still, there’s a sense of grievance that those who had “never had it so good” got to have the best of times, and their offspring have got the dirtier end of the stick. That’s certainly part of what is driving some of this anti-wealth/inheritance narrative.
Switching gears here, there are structures that people have, over the centuries, sought to form to stop inheritors becoming obnoxious and lazy, and also to hold families together so that they don’t fall out, as in the HBO series, Succession.)
For years, in my day job, I have wrestled with the trend of a multi-trillion dollar/equivalent transfer of wealth from the Baby Boomer generation. In the wealth management sector, particularly in the US, there’s a whole field of advisory work that goes on to help guide ultra-wealthy families about how not to spoil their children. The debate is often framed in the question of “how much is too much?” in transferring wealth.
We have seen the rise, in their thousands, of what are called family offices. These are structures – operating around the world – that act as a sort of trusted point of control for a family’s private wealth. FOs operate in North America, continental Europe, the UK, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Australia, and other developed countries. (I predict a big expansion in India, as many businesses there are family-owned.)
Sometimes FOs emerge from the executive suite of a family-run firm; they run the liquid wealth of a family, and that becomes a sole focus once a firm is sold or floated on a market. FOs are designed to hold families together – they even have their own “constitutions” and governing procedures – and create a sort of structure through which families handle payments to different members, run investments, deal with philanthropy, personal and cybersecurity, bill payments, and more. Once obscure, the family office industry is a large, multi-trillion sector. The original FO was, arguably, founded by J D Rockefeller, the oil tycoon. Today, the likes of Michael Dell and Bill Gates have them, as do the founders of Google, the governing family of Walmart, Home Depot, shipping dynasties in Denmark, Mittlestand firms in Germany, and many more. (Germany has many family offices, most of which are obscure.) Families that are far less wealthy than the foregoing can create family offices, although they aren’t economically efficient to run if assets under management go under $100 million.
Another structure for we lesser mortals is the trust. These are creatures of the English Common Law, and are extensive in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and biggest of all, the US.
Trusts remain an incredibly useful tool for ensuring orderly transfer/control of assets by families. If people such as Lewis Goodall are worried that inheritors become spoiled brats and lose a work ethic (if that is his genuine concern, it is a fair one to have), then trusts can, or could, be structured so that a beneficiary only receives payouts from it if certain terms and conditions are met.
Governments sometimes try and clip the wings of trusts. In 2006, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown moved against the trusts sector, on the specific issue of inheritance. The use of trusts in the UK has, on balance, shrunk, but they retain their uses.
If people fear that inheritance saps the ambition and energy of inheritors, then trusts and other structures can be set up by parents and others to avoid that from happening. In a way, this sort of discussion is not so different from those that come with Universal Basic Income – what happens if we turn the entire working-age public into a bunch of loafers?
To some extent, considering the impact of inheritance on inheritors – or UBI recipients – are empirical questions, based on an understanding of incentives, behavioural issues, values and so on. The morality of it is a different one. UBI is funded via tax – a coercive move of money from the individual to the State. Inheritors of legitimately acquired wealth are receiving something that was legitimately held and transferred by consent of the transferrer.
On a friend’s Facebook page I left the following comment about the claim of the writer Abi Wilkinson (in the Guardian!) that inheritance should be confiscated by government to fund the UK’s welfare state. What could possibly go wrong?
I wrote:
The hostility to inheritance also comes from a mistaken sense of fairness. As Robert Nozick argued in Anarchy, State and Utopia (I quote from memory), people wrongly think life resembles an athletics race, where the racers compete to hit the finishing line. As a result, those “lucky” athletes endowed by nature/god whatever with stronger muscles etc must be handicapped by having weights in their shoes, for example. Just as a child of rich parents must be deliberately held back to give poor kids a more “fair” chance of winning. But as Nozick said, life isn’t like that. It is about people exchanging goods, services and ideas with one another. There’s no fixed end-point to which we are all racing.
Also, the idea that there is some “prize” that humans compete for implies that someone or some entity has created that “prize” in the first place. But that’s smuggling in a sort of communitarian assumption into the actions of individuals. In an open society, the prizes on offer are varied and multiply constantly.
I should add that the second section of Nozick’s renowned book dissects and ultimately rejects forced redistribution for egalitarian or other forms of “patterned” notions of justice, and he robustly defends what he calls an “entitlement” concept of justice.
One of the approaches that the late Prof. Nozick used was the thought experiment, such as the example referenced above about a fictitious athletics race in which the entrants are hampered/favoured to make the race more “even”, and then assuming that society in general should be like this. A race, held by people who know the rules and seek to abide by them, is not like an open society. “Open” is the key word here: there is no single end to which persons are heading, such as winning the race.
And yet a lot of the metaphors one comes across around discussions around equality, including equality of opportunity as well as outcome, seem to borrow, perhaps unwittingly, from this “race competition” worldview. To give another example, I remember reading some months ago about a university professor (Warwick) who suggested that when parents read stories to their children, this is a form of privilege. This also plays to the idea that life has a fixed end-measure of success, so that anyone giving a value to someone else is giving the latter an unfair “head start” on someone else. It would require a State to exercise totalitarian control of our actions from the moment we wake up to go to sleep lest our actions unfairly advantage/hamper someone in the “race” they are considered, by this worldview, to be on. (It also, by the way, shows that today’s Higher Ed. is full of certifiable fools and worse.)
On a related note, Thomas Sowell is good on this sort of topic. His book, A Conflict Of Visions, is an example.
Update: The UK journalist Lewis Goodall – he appeared on LBC the other day – says inheritance should be confiscated. No ifs, no buts. His argument is that no-one should have any wealth they haven’t “earned”. But that takes one down some very murky philosophical paths. We did not “earn” the good fortune to have been born in the current era, with its modern healthcare, high-speed travel and technical marvels. We could have been born in the Dark Ages, for instance. We did not “earn” this or that. We haven’t “earned” our genes, or for that matter, been “punished” for them, either. They just are. An inheritor is entitled in the narrowest sense of that word to X that is handed down because the person handing it down was the legitimate owner of it.
As Andrew Lilico in the Spectator argues (paywall, sorry), taxes on inheritance are attempts to block people from using their property as they choose. But what’s the point for many people in amassing significant wealth if they cannot transfer it to their nearest and dearest? Also, if the likes of Goodall claim that they are for capitalism, they cannot decide that this or that form of wealth is “unearned” and have the State seize it. The acquisition and transfer of property is an embedded feature of a free society.
As ever, F A Hayek was excellent on this sort of topic. See “Equality, Value and Merit”.
There’s a pattern: the foolishness unfolding under the Starmer government often gestated under the previous Conservative ones. The Online Safety Act is probably the most egregious example (although some Tories attacked it at the time, to no avail). Another might be that the UK embarked on the idea of offloading the Chagos Islands – a strategic blunder that may yet be countered by the Trump administration – under James Cleverly (then foreign minister). (Cleverly has, with some level of brass neck, since denounced the Chagos fiasco.)
Another example is creating a football regulator. The UK pioneered football (aka soccer) more than a century ago, and it has become a global phenomenon. The English Premier League is a big and profitable brand (judging by all the people I see watching games on TV when I am on business trips in Singapore, New York or Dubai). Yes, there have been controversies about players’ taxes, and crowd behaviour. But that’s what HM Revenue & Customs and the police are there for. But apparently the “beautiful game” requires supervision from a regulator. The usual warnings about “regulatory capture” apply, and one assumes that Conservatives might have been aware of such a risk. But no. The former administration proposed it. And unsurprisingly, the incoming Labour government liked the idea, because it likes regulation almost as an end in itself.
In the fag-end of the last government, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt signalled that if re-elected, he would scrap the UK’s resident non-domicile tax system and replace it with a residency-based system. Hunt probably thought he was being clever in trying to “shoot the fox” of Labour, which has railed about non-doms for years. But he could have changed the narrative and challenged the economic illiteracy of those who want to hammer wealthy foreigners. Instead he conceded to Labour the terms of debate, which a good general never does.
Another case: shotgun licensing. The UK now requires that an application for a shotgun requires two referees, not one as before. This move was initiated under the past Tory government, reacting to a case of a shooting in Plymouth, southwest UK. While designed to stop problems, it also makes it that much harder for a farmer, for example, to obtain one to shoot game and vermin with such a weapon.
And so on and so on. Hence why you hear people refer to Labour and the Conservatives as a sort of “uni-party”. Even when that is a bit unfair, because differences genuinely exist, there is an edge to the criticism because it does speak to a genuine problem. The Tories contain a lot of people who are at base paternalists in how they think of the role of government, and also share some of the same post-colonial cringes of those on the Labour side. There is also, arguably, a failure of nerve and self-confidence that goes very deep.
This is interesting.
“American businesses do not surrender their First Amendment rights because a foreign bureaucrat sends them an e-mail.”
Hopefully more sites and services outside the UK will refuse to comply with the appalling Online Safety Act.
A trade group representing companies that build age verification systems is now lobbying to extend these checks to anyone using a VPN in the UK. The Age Verification Providers Association (AVPA) wants online platforms that fall under the UK’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act, to not only detect VPN usage but also analyze user behavior to guess whether someone might be a minor in disguise.
If flagged, users would face a prompt: prove your age, or allow a one-time geolocation to confirm you’re outside the UK.
According to the AVPA, this process is necessary because VPNs can mask users’ actual locations, allowing them to appear as though they are in countries where age verification laws do not apply. The association points to data showing a dramatic increase in VPN use around the time the UK’s new internet rules were enforced, suggesting people are using these tools to bypass restrictions.
This approach treats privacy tools as a form of defiance. Here, VPNs, once considered sensible and essential for online security, are being rebranded as suspicious.
– Richard Eldred
“Middle Class Britain is bulking with aging radicals who are desperate to relive the heady days of their youths protesting the Vietnam War or patriarchy or capitalism. They possess an abundance of the resources necessary for the life of demonstrating — spare time, spare cash and, having left the job market, a willingness to acquire a criminal record.”
– Adrian Wooldridge
There’s the point made a few years ago by P J O’Rourke that there is a reason why centre-right folk tend to avoid demonstrations – they’ve got jobs to do and they are intelligent enough to be able to sign a petition, write to their MP, and considerate enough – mostly – to avoid irritating ordinary folk going about their business. There are a few exceptions if the cause is seen as big enough. In my lifetime, I recall that exception to the rule: the Countryside Alliance one in the Blair years, where the ostensible cause was to protect the hunting of foxes with hounds (you can still shoot them with a rifle, by the way). And the rural angle returned when farmers recently drove their tractors into Whitehall to protest against inheritance tax on their businesses. But the vast majority of demos are for banning things like fossil fuels, and supporting enemies of Israel. (I haven’t come across many demos about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lately.)
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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