Wednesday, September 21, 2011

a "new" tax meme

A couple of weeks ago this tax theory “meme”, launched by a PR company on behalf of undisclosed corporate interests, was officially a Major News Story:

Twenty of Britain's leading economists have urged the Chancellor to scrap the 50p top rate of income tax – for the sake of the recovery

It’s sort of jarring, but at the same time completely predictable, to see wooden 90s neoliberalism once again paraded as serious scientific work. All these people have is a theological rejection of the acquisition and use of resources by the state in furtherance of a social democratic agenda, arguing:

1. That profit at current rate is really a necessary cost of production

2. That all activity for profit is productive

Both are untrue; but the current economic crisis, brought about by the overdevelopment of clearly unproductive activity in western countries, should surely have made a person interested in describing the real world have second thoughts about this inherited dogma.