Don't tax me and my mates, says Allister Heath.
Remarkably, as the clamour for wealth taxes demonstrates, the thinker who has re-emerged, yet again, as the guru of the moment is one Karl Marx, buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery 130 years ago and supposedly long since consigned to the dustbins of history.
Marx, of course, was not the first to argue that there is such a thing as ill-begotten “unearned” income, the fruits of capital in the form of rent, interest, dividends or capital gains, not to be confused with earned income from selling one’s labour. But somewhere deep in Britain’s collective consciousness, even among passionate opponents of socialism, some Marxist ideas remain influential, albeit in an implicit, cultural sort of way. A “heavy progressive or graduated income tax” and a war on inherited wealth were key demands in the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party; they were scandalously extreme by the standards of the day but are mainstream today. No wonder, therefore, that Marx’s influence can be detected in the present debate, even if many supporters of wealth taxes will express horror at the thought.
Yet regardless of its intellectual origins, a tax on people’s assets is ethically wrong, economically destructive and would damage growth and job creation, with the poor and middle classes suffering intense collateral damage.
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Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.