Why do we pay taxes?

What MW’s LLC friend, see below, should first do is go back to basics and ask why do we pay taxes?

There are two separate classes of State spending.

Core spending on those items we cannot provide for ourselves.  Defence, foreign affairs, police, justice, transport etc

Re-distributive spending on items many of us could not afford. Pensions, welfare, schools, hospitals etc

If most State spending is re-distributive, this must be because there is not a fair distribution of the factors of production to begin with. This is why we pay most of our taxes.

Assuming we have competitive markets, reproducible factors Income and Capital should already be fairly distributed. If they are not then the efficient solution is to reform the market, not higher taxation.

Land is irreproducible and it’s value unevenly distributed.  Therefore, even in competitive markets, there will always be an unfair distribution of the value derived from it,  unless we all gain an equal share through the tax system.

Failure to equally share the value derived from natural resources leads to inequality.

All taxes lower  rental income and the selling price of Land.

The fair, efficient way to share the value derived from Land is a direct tax upon it ie a 100% Land Value Tax

The indirect, unfair, inefficient way to share the value derived from Land are taxes on income, capital and transactions.

We have chosen to do more of the later, which creates the double whammy of not fully addressing the issue of inequality caused by unequal land value distribution, while at the same time shrinking the economy by taxing produced factors.

If Land were reproducible like any other factor, the only morally defensible, or indeed necessary way of paying for core services would be a Poll Tax.

My conclusion is that Socialists seek to preserve an unjust distribution of income, capital and land in order to maintain the large State apparatus needed to mitigate all the ill effects that result from such an economic system.

This is why they will never fully embrace a 100% Land Value Tax. They love control more than they love equality and justice.

As for the Tories, I’m sure they cannot believe their luck. They do even have to try in order to maintain the Status Quo.