In England inheritance tax, gift tax, and transaction taxes like stamp duty and payments on disposal of assets , are onerous and getting heavier. They weigh against change, innovation, entrepreneurial undertaking, and intergenerational equity; they block the redistribution of wealth among families and lead to the degradation of the physical patrimony of the country; they warp economic activity by rewarding stasis and locking away investment wealth.
The ending of stamp duty on house purchase is a good start and should be extended to its complete abolition; the proposed abolition of inheritance tax is less attractive, though its reduction to more reasonable levels and higher thresholds is urgently required; the abolition of inter-vivos gift taxes , coupled with inducements like tax exemptions or matched funding to aim those gifts at entrepreneurial activity rather than property acquisition is to be avowed.
Taxes on physical objects can be levied on change of ownership or on enjoyment of ownership. Schedule A, abolished more than half a century ago, was a tax on enjoyment of ownership, the tax being paid on an imputed income from house and land ownership, and on some other assets. It is an unattractive tax because it is a slippery slope - paintings hanging in your house? wines in your cellar? a library? we could end up with a taxable imputed income for being beautiful and clever. So while taxes on enjoyment of ownership are to be avoided, a reconsideration of taxes at change of ownership and a shift in the weight of these, so repressive of lively economic activity and intergenerational equity, must be a priority.
Of course it would run against the grain of the authoritorian, redistributive, atomising state; families would act together to create economic opportunity.
The family-based firm in Italy is so powerful a driver of the Italian economy it has its own niche in the theory of the firm. Such economic activity cannot be the whole story for a large advanced economy, but its lack, and the lack of an environment in which it can thrive, is an impoverishment of us all.
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HG - Good article on The Son Of the Bloody Manse in the LRB - here at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/mcki01_.html
God he gives me the creeps...
It denies matching any comments Elby, is this what is summarized on Newmania? Rich, creepy, bully son of manse?
Could you explain why it is worth bothering with inheritance tax at all if you exempt all inter-vivos gifts from taxation - they wouldn't raise anything except for cases of ignorance/stupidity and the proverbial thunderbolt!
I usually reject anonymous comments unless there is some obvious personal reason for their anonymity. However, this needs an answer:
Tax free inter vivos gifts encourage the transfer of family wealth between the generations, encourage the launch of economic enterprise, encourage family solidarity and exchange of services between the generations, and reduce the burden of support of diverse generations on the state and, thus, the need to fund that expenditure out of even more taxation, reducing both the size of the state and its overweening interference in the family and social lives of citizens.
While Learsyndrome is always a danger it's rarer and far less destructive than the deliberate atomisation of society and the destruction of family-based responsibility for nurture, education and care.
Don't think so, HG. Poorly presented (in typesetting terms), so it's overly dense to read (rather like Newmania!), but spot on in that which IS covered. And there is so much vile about the man, it is easy to miss things out when you lay into him.
On reading Newmania, Elby, the best way is to regard the text as a liana: grasp it firmly and push off from the ground with both feet, aiming for the tree canopy of discourse spreading out high above you. As you swing wildly past the densely packed jungle filled with monkeys and birds of paradise, lizards and scary spiders in glistening webs, orchids hanging from higher branches and parrots making remarks, do not be put off by the unpunctuated colourfully kaleidoscopic heterogeneity of it all -as long as you hold on tight you'll land where you're supposed to. Unfortunately you can end up there as darkness falls crying 'help, I can't get down' hopefully into the night.
Poetry too can offer an all embracing take on any subject, (even the complexly disgusting) where prose fails to present a complete, in the round version. ND did it very well! But I must agree, getting to grips with the Leader is a hard and nasty business.
Overly dense ? ...Surely not ... I would say sinewy and masculine like Donne ( also dense). Relentlessly chirpy and predictably iconoclastic ?
Cameron was superb over the weekend HG by contrast.I think the timing has caught us out a bit but he`s a good man at heart a Conservative in the sense I like. I`m not as independent as you are. Dangerous glittering eyed free spirit HG troubling but irresitible siren of radicalism. I would like you to fear change as I do..but could you cage a bird of such gorgeous plumage ?
YOu seem to be back to yourself ,
anyway . Good
XXXX
PS the problem with inheritance tax is that it will become addictive its not much revenue now but the rate of increase is terrifying.More for families say I , especially me .
with monkeys and birds of paradise, lizards and scary spiders in glistening webs, orchids hanging from higher branches and parrots
Will adopt Hemingwayesque terse manner.Tommorow.Bye.HG.
What do you mean Tomorrow , Bye?
Get over to Dale and lend Lady Finchley and me a hand, N. Lower taxes, the NLNDs are spitting.
Donne I love. His sermons might have got me to church, and his swirl of god and body most wonderful. Way back I did an English degree at Oxford, which put me off serious literature for a good 10 years.
Newmania - always enjoy reading you. As for vines, and such, yes, I like my prose sinewy for sure. Can't stand the neurasthenic cul-de-sacs of Ian McEwen's novels, and many of his coterie. I have met enough weird and broken people as it is without wishing to read about them as well. No give me the punch of Roth - American Pastoral surely one of the finest howls of rage one could read; or Ellroy's dense and savage portrayal of ubiquitous corruption, and Pynchon at his finest in V and Gravity's Rainbow.
Sorry, got diverted there. Blogs that grab grist to the mill. Tip of the hat to the boths of yer ...
HG, Newmania:
Writers tend to define standards in relation to their own natural style. Orwell said good prose is like a window pane, and that's hard for most of us to achieve. Worth the effort more often than not, in my opinion.
But part of the joy of ascending the liana is the parrots and monkeys. Room for all sorts of writer, then.
Elby: agree on Donne, and I am simply in awe of Pynchon, judging by Gravity's Rainbow. He should have been born in a greater, more spiritual time.
Have looked over McKibbin's article. Wish Orwell had edited it. Doesn't change my opinion of Brown - hagridden by the desire for power, yet not willing to gamble for it. A Scotty, not a Kirk, maugre the manse.
Why Is There More Variety of Greene than of Other Colours?
It is because it is figure of Youth, wherein Nature would provide as many Greene, as Youth hath Affections; and so present a Sea-greene for profuse wafters in voyages; a Grasse-greene for sudden new men enobled from Grasiers; and a Goose-greene for such Polititians as pretend to preserve the Capitoll. Or else Prophetically foreseeing an Age wherein they shall all hunt. And for such as misse-demeane themselves a willow-greene; For Magistrates must aswell have Fasces borne before them to chastize the small offences, as Secures to cut off the great.
Donne didn't say anything about the other parties but he got the greens to a t.
S, Orwell's dictum is good, for journalism, though he often does not live up to it because there are polishing marks on the glassy surface of his prose, particularly on the writing about Burma. And it doesn't work well for novels at all, unless the woodeness of his novels is intended, in which case very clever, but why? Do you think it was just a fashion of his time, to strip embellishment away in reaction to the arty crafty people?
'Writers tend to define standards in relation to their own natural style'. I have the greatest difficulty in hanging onto that - a complete chameleon for the last thing I read; perhaps true writers have a style, the rest of us, just using words for communication, tend to get swept away. I'm reading George Sturt's Journals, but then you may have noticed.
Orwell`s well known pane of glass is not to be taken to seriously . He liked an unadorned style that’s all. Glass implies you look through the text to the meaning which is rubbish . The text is the meaning . In new Speak his innate understanding of this was clear. Writers are not always good at knowing what they are doing with some notable exceptions .
Lots of my favourites mentioned here though, people like me ..they must be lovely .
HG:
Alas, I haven't noticed the Sturt influence. For me, as for a previous commentator, Eng Lit studies nearly destroyed the love of reading.
And then for many years afterward, teaching deprived me of any leisure to become cultivated. One of the best-read people I met was a Cambridge chemist, who read while he was waiting for 12-hour long chemical experiments to mature.
It seems that in many areas of life, we must approach our goal as the Rose advised Alice to approach the Red Queen:
http://surf.de.uu.net/bookland/classics/carroll/alice_21.html
My life of horizontal mobility has been a long red queens race. I wish I wish I could go back to university and do Eng Lit again now. I was far to busy with other temptations at the time :)
You ARE doing Eng lit again, Newmsie - this time in the University of Life having graduated from the School of Hard Knocks. Okay - the only recognition you will get is an SFA as opposed to an MA this time (I'll leave you to work that one out !) but whaddaheck, you have an appreciative and articulate audience here (horny handed son of toil (moi) excluded).
Back to topic if one may, HG ...
Too many people expect their inheritance AND abrogation from responsibilities with regard to parental care - both their cake AND an electro plated nickle silver fork to eat it with. For once I agree with the harshness of making pensioners pay for their care from their own estates - perhaps better family cooperation could also act as an incentive to free up family dwellings from single OAPs earlier.
Of course this 'harshness' as been exacted towards the usual suspects - the only people whom the establishment has any desire to hold to full account. And then there's the West Lothian question ...
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