“It [taxes on property values] is tantamount to a quasi-authoritarian reopening of settled property rights and fundamentally reorders the relationship between the individual and the state. Her scheme begins to abolish freehold property, turning yeoman-owners into leaseholders, with politicians as the ultimate landlords. Her `high value council tax surcharge’ is best understood as a rent, to be paid to [Rachel] Reeves for the right to stay in one’s home. Labour hates ordinary landlords, but is desperate to turn the state into the most exploitative of rent collectors. It’s sub-Marxist nonsense, a form of legalised theft.”
Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph, 27 November, on yesterday’s Autumn Budget from Rachel Reeves, UK finance minister. He’s right that things such as “mansion taxes” – which in reality raise relatively paltry sums – are about forcing owners of properties deemed to be above £X or whatever into a situation where they own them at the sufferance of the State, rather than outright. And the temptation to lower the threshold on such a tax, along with everything else, will be irresistable.
On a related point, now seems a good time to introduce readers again to an essay in defence of absolute property right ownership – rather than the idea of owning it at the sufferance of the State. The essay, “Your Dog Owns Your House”, by the late French writer and classical liberal, Anthony de Jasay, is a masterpiece.
Yesterday was notable to me for two dogs which didn’t bark namely the alignment of capital gains with income for assessment purposes and changes to IHT.
Even if just for once the OBR projections are not wildly optimistic welfare and NHS commitments make another raid on taxpayers inevitable now that the low hanging fruit of freezing thresholds has been utilised. The 2% rate increases for “unearned income” are likely to be duplicated across all earnings on the spurious grounds that the manifesto commitments were never meant to apply across Labour’s whole term in office.
I wonder what the odds would be on a March 26 emergency mini budget?
We have to be approaching the death throes of the welfare state. Its parasitism can only survive for so long until it suffocates its host, and we are approaching that level. The ultimate expression of this are the gangs of foreign invaders living it large at our expense in hotels, fed, clothed at our expense, who repay our kindness with robbery and rape. If the Labour party is not cast into absolute oblivion at the next election, if there is one, then Britain is surely doomed.