Letter in Wednesday's Financial Times
Feb. 21st, 2018 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ndrosenAn evidently well-read man named John Read had a letter published in Wednesday's Financial Times:
No one asks why human labour should be taxed
Sir, Lesley Spencer (Letters, February 14) highlights the taxation loss when employees are replaced by machine, yet nobody seems to question why the commercial use of humans should be taxed while the use of machines is tax free. After all, we have to work to live so why charge us for fulfilling that obligation?
One of the great tricks pulled by the landowner-controlled governments in the industrial revolution over the past 250 years was the transfer of the main burden of taxation from land to labour.
An effort was made with the People's Budget early in the last century to stop this, but following this failure and the growth of misguided attempts to solve the problem by increasing taxes on labour and capital, either directly or indirectly, governments find themselves increasingly locked into a situation of artificially inflated borrowings and land prices that cannot be sustained, the threat of catastrophic economic collapse appearing now to be a veritable sword of Damocles hangs over us.
Is it any wonder that nobody in power dares to speak the truth?
John Read
London NW11, UK
No one asks why human labour should be taxed
Sir, Lesley Spencer (Letters, February 14) highlights the taxation loss when employees are replaced by machine, yet nobody seems to question why the commercial use of humans should be taxed while the use of machines is tax free. After all, we have to work to live so why charge us for fulfilling that obligation?
One of the great tricks pulled by the landowner-controlled governments in the industrial revolution over the past 250 years was the transfer of the main burden of taxation from land to labour.
An effort was made with the People's Budget early in the last century to stop this, but following this failure and the growth of misguided attempts to solve the problem by increasing taxes on labour and capital, either directly or indirectly, governments find themselves increasingly locked into a situation of artificially inflated borrowings and land prices that cannot be sustained, the threat of catastrophic economic collapse appearing now to be a veritable sword of Damocles hangs over us.
Is it any wonder that nobody in power dares to speak the truth?
John Read
London NW11, UK
