Simplify, Clarify, Multiply...

There's a good piece in this week's New Statesman by Will Dunn, a man with no small measure of sagacity in matters politic and economic. Briefly, his contention is that the UK's current Byzantine taxation system needs to be ripped up and replaced with something more logical and frankly just plain simpler to manage. The complexities and absurdities of the extant tax regime serve only to complicate and obfuscate what is, after all, a relatively straightforward goal: to raise money from the working populace in order to run the country and its public services. Simple. He suggests removing National Insurance altogether and hiking direct income tax to compensate. I agree: National Insurance long ago lost any semblance of its original meaning or function, and is an over-complication which serves no concrete purpose of its own. Similarly, Road Tax; originally the Road Fund Licence, which was designed to act as a central fund to maintain the highways: completely inoperable in the present day, and yet another way of sucking monies from the driving public without return. Like National Insurance, its cost benefits are outweighed by the administration that supports its assessment and collection.

VAT - a European-derived tax that we have stubbornly held onto since leaving the EU - remains in force. Why? Our taxation complexities and idiosyncrasies are truly, truly weird and each year, a user manual to our tax system is published, amounting to 23,000 pages of such absurdity that even Dickens would have struggled to parody it. Dunn is absolutely spot on in his analysis of the folly we are governed by, which has accreted throughout history an inherent bias towards supporting the wealthy over the poor; that brief blip post Second World War of a decent socially-biassed and mixed economy has simply slipped back into obscurity as the mandarins of the Civil Service and the forces of the British Establishment ensured that socialism has been corralled in the service of the 'worthy'. The cloud of unknowing with which the British Taxation System cloaks the realities of poor economic theory, the self-serving privileged classes with connections and the mechanisms of concentration of wealth by the few at the expense of the rest of us, needs to be dispelled and replaced with the clarity of simplification. William of Ockham's precepts yet again show us the example by which we should conduct society...