Mansion Polish

So Labour’s Mansion Tax motion is defeated. Champion of he poor and downtrodden, Saint Polly Toynbee, must be devastated. She talks in The Guardian about the ‘gilded few' “siphoning off national wealth into palatial properties, gold-plated pensions, bulging share portfolios, fine wines and fine art” Well, so what? They genuinely are ‘a few’ and they already paid plenty.

Those who create such wealth pay huge amounts of tax and provide employment and thus more tax payers on the way up and those who inherit that wealth tend to spend and squander it like drunken monkeys over a few generations until they’re broke and the ‘spoils’ are redistributed anyway. Wealth is already penalised, but the Toynbees of this world will never be satisfied until it’s a pants-down-in-public punishment.

Tax high earners unfairly on the way up and you will lose their enterprise and their money. Try and tax them on the way down and they'll just find a way of disappearing all that wealth by such measures as, say, buying property abroad, eh Polly? Then it’s gone for good.

But who are the so-called super-rich you and the voracious Labour Commissars want to punish so much? You will never really touch the properly super-rich, those you describe in such envious tones; they can afford to piss all over your punitive plans or else just piss off somewhere where they are welcomed. You must know this, so you must have your sights set somewhere lower – on altogether easier targets, such as those who genuinely want or need to stay in Britain. You’d prey on the very people Peter Mandelson praised?

Hypocritical Champagne Socialist poster-girls like Polly don’t ever seem to grasp the essential relationships between effort and reward, aspiration and the accumulation of wealth.

We create a poverty of effort when there is nothing to be gained by working harder – the higher tax rate is an insult to those who find that their reward for finally earning enough to have the same take home pay as a benefit capped feral family of deadbeats is to have their tax rate actually raised for daring to work harder or smarter, or be luckier. That’s like the attitudes in the old nationalised industries; the jobsworth mentality where a curtailed tea break becomes a national strike.

We create a poverty of aspiration if - having put up with being continually robbed by the state we nevertheless manage to live frugally enough to save for an uncertain future; investing, building and spending wisely in fear of old age, frailty and that rainy day - we are still in danger of being plundered. Having survived income tax, national ‘insurance’ tax, stamp duty, capital gains tax, corporation tax, council tax, road tax, fuel duty, value-added tax, beer tax, tax tax and carpet tacks, we are still not safe and our little Englishman’s castle, is broken into, broken up and taxed yet again.

Tax is theft, but it’s a theft we tolerate because we like to think we care about society and besides, there but for the grace, etc... But as tax taking becomes a mission, then tax avoidance becomes a game worth playing. And the people who MAKE money are inevitably better equipped than those who can only TAKE it to circumvent the taxman’s schemes and come out on top. And the ultimate tax avoidance scheme is to flee the coop.

Polishing off our wealth for generations

Polly Toynbee’s version of Socialism is a tax on one of our nation’s former finest resources, our character. Let people improve themselves in a modern economy and you will get prosperity and yes, fairness. Try to force them to be ‘equal’ and you will lose everything. We very nearly have. Polly, the champion of poverty creation talks about people hoarding “pyramids of gold”. The only place those pyramids are ever likely to stay safe is tucked up inside another pile. In Tuscany, perhaps?