I liked this letter from Paul Nicolson in the Guardian this morning:
It is the decisions of parliament that have led to banks' unruly behaviour. Parliament deregulated lending and rents, and allowed the free movement of capital in and out of the UK. It was as if Moses flipped, went back up Mount Sinai and deregulated the Ten Commandments in the name of freedom, and was then puzzled by the increase in theft. Better political leadership and the implementation of rules that enable markets to function in the interests of us all seem long overdue.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Chair, Zacchaeus 2000 Trust
That methaphor worked for me
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You may, if so inclined, like to count the number of Moasic laws broken by Mitt Romney. Krugman has written a lot about tax recently: blogs July 9, 2012 ‘Classy’, July 9, 2012 ‘What You Add Is What You Get’, and he reproduced the table from Piketty and Saez in his July 8, 2012 ‘Taxes at the Top’.
Is there an equivalent detailed view for UK tax takes broken down into such fine detail? I have a table of ‘shares total wealth’ for England and Wales in Alan Booth’s ‘The British Economy in the Twentieth Century’ (2001) which looks at the period 1911 to 1981 and which breaks the analysis down by looking at the richest 1%, next 4%, next 5%, and the remaining 90%, but it would be nice to have information about tax and wealth, and for it to be up-to-date.
We might want to go back a few centuries and remind ourselves that if Parliament hadn’t handed over the authority to create money to the privately owned banks in the first place none of this could be happening. When you create a central authority and agree to abide by its dictates, you expose yourself to this kind of oppression. We had a bad one then, one that was there for the benefit of the banks and not the broader commmunity, and the one we’ve got now is just the same. Parliaments like these make anarchy look appealing!
And where exactly does illegally obtained information used to convict a tax evader sit in this moral discussion?
There is a long legal history of paying informers to secure criminal convictions
Your problem is?
Justin
We don’t care. Do you want to see criminals caught or not? It’s yes or no.
Conviction! I would call it paying what you owe?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_the_United_Kingdom