Rob's Blog

Oh boy, this website is a hoot. If ever there was proof government should be kept as far away from education as possible, this is it. Here’s a sample. It’s a comic to teach children about why we pay tax. (Note that this only seems to work on Internet Explorer. If you don’t see a comic strip below, visit http://kids.direct.gov.uk/main.aspx and click Places, The Offices, and then on the magazines on the reception desk.)

Notice how expertly put together it is; very visually appealing. It’s worrying that the government is getting very good at this kind of thing — their “information” films have similarly high production values.

I find it interesting that in the tax-free world from the comic, there is no-one to collect litter or repair traffic lights, but there is someone to charge the children money for crossing the road. Therein lies a clue to another way the world might work without taxes.

More from NickM and the Adam Smith Institute.

Just in case it’s not clear what my problem is, I’ll spell it out. Here is a web site made by the government, funded with tax money. It teaches children that without paying lots of tax, all kinds of bad things will happen. But this is a political view: it is possible to imagine other ways that the world might work, including ways that involve low taxes and more services provided privately. So there are a range of ideas about tax. Education would involve teaching children about the full range of these ideas. Presenting one particular view as a fact is not education. Instead what is happening here is that the government is taking money from one generation in order to teach the next generation what a good idea it will be to take money from them. So not only is this not education, it is manipulation of children with the goal of making people think less about tax to make life easier for the government. This proves that the government should not be entrusted with the education of children.

My wife made a spreadsheet that calculated the family finances for various scenarios including differing lengths of unpaid maternity leave. “What your spreadsheet fails to take into account,” I said, “is that if you earn less over the course of the year then you will pay proportionally less tax.”

Debate ensued about how to calculate this. We would need a column for net pay. We would need to look up my wife’s tax allowance, and the various rates, and earnings levels at which they cut in. And then there is National Insurance which is another set of rules. In the end the spreadsheet would have encoded in its formulae the entire tax code. And if you work for half the year and not the other half, exactly when do you get the overpaid tax back?

This is my longstanding gripe: that not only do they take your money, they also use up valuable brain cycles thinking about all this, and valuable neurons storing knowlege about it.

In the end we decided that it wasn’t worth the effort, and I went off to play Eve Online, the intricacies of which are a much better use of brain space.

The front cover of the IET’s Engineering and Technology magazine reads: “Governments to spend $320,668,634,287* on engineering & technology. *That’s $320.7BN pumped into your industry”

Well, I’m not jumping up and down with glee about it. All that money will no doubt be spent on stuff that wouldn’t have been viable without it. In the UK it’s going on managed motorways (a way to make driving on the motorway even more boring), “energy efficiency” technology, and a general “Strategic Investment Fund” for whatever the government thinks is a good idea, and never mind what the people think who earned the money before it was taxed away from them.

Thankfully it’s not going anywhere near anything I’m involved with. I don’t want their dirty money.

The local council sent me a newsletter. Apparently their opponents have been saying untrue things such as “funding to the voluntary sector has been cut”. But no, “the budget for the voluntary sector is actually going up.”

On the back of the newsletter is a form I can cut out and send back to them. There is a box headed “my idea to improve my street/neighbourhood is” dot, dot dot. Well, here’s one idea:

Do nothing. The neighbourhood would best be improved by letting its inhabitants spend their money on what they want. Cut, cut, cut! Stop increasing the budget for the voluntary sector: I don’t see what’s so voluntary about having my money taken and giving it to some “sector”. So next time you think of some way to improve my neighbourhood, don’t do it. My neighbourhood is just fine and doesn’t need your improvements.

So there has been some legal shenanigans going on about whether Pringles should be taxed or not. The latest is that they should.

This is exactly the same as the bolts and screws thing I wrote about ages ago.

Obviously I don’t like tax and the fact that the money is being stolen in the first place. But that isn’t what really irritates me about this. What bothers me is you have all these lawyers and judges and appeal courts and politicians and journalists and bloggers all talking about how potato-y Pringles are. It’s a waste of human life.

Let’s take all the legislators and lawyers and tax accountants and set them to work doing something useful, like curing cancer.

I know, I know, it’s too late for them. But imagine if “tax accountant” wasn’t an available career path. So many people might have made something good out of their lives. No disrespect to tax accountants is intended (I know at least one personally). You’re filling an important hole that needs to be filled. But why can’t the bastards just stop digging the holes in the first place?

If I were the Pringles CEO I’d start selling 15% fewer Pringles in the same sized tube for the same price with a big red label saying “this many Pringles stolen by the government”. The shareholders might not like it but I’d get a kick out of it.