Imagine that every country was so prosperous that there was little need for migration. That the climate crisis was fixed, with wind turbines and electric cars in every land you visited. New drugs for every conceivable illness were not just freely available, but there were active substitutes for each of them waiting in laboratories. There were no hungry children at all, and everyone in the world had an old age pension. Would about $250 billion* a year about cover it?
That’s what could be obtained if there was a single world effort to fairly tax the planet’s 3000 or so billionaires, according to a report by Gabriel Zuchman, helpfully written up for us by Larry Elliott of the Guardian [1] At the moment this gilded class pays about 0.3% of their income in tax, which compared to most of us is nugatory indeed. But we’ll let Larry’s article cover the details-(you must read it), and instead riff on a theme of our own. The case for tax is not moral, nor Marxist nor religious, nor based on Natural Justice . It’s actually historical, and its about survival
The 18th century, or Enlightenment, or whatever, was full of learned economists who preached the gospel of lower taxes as the source of the wealth of their nations. The country that really put this in to practice was Imperial China, then the world’s largest economy. But the western barbarians-nations like England, Portugal and so on, kept their taxes high, despite all the domestic preaching. The result? Huge fleets and armies, able to dismember poor China’s attenuated defences, and open them to the enlightened benefits of trade. The chief result of which was a mass opium addiction. The moral? You need taxes if you are going to survive. remember that next time you read a bit of propaganda from a billionaire think tank or news outlet.
*in these pages billion=109
#china #opium war #tax #billionaire #G20 #Gabriel Zuchman
Learning, Science and Society 