Richard Murphy's excellent argument for a lower overall tax burden
We here at the ASI have to be very selective in our mentions of Richard Murphy, the crusading tax campaigner. His normal output is such a target rich environment that we could spend entire working lives correcting his errors and misapprehensions. But there are times when he manages to, through some form of serendipty perhaps, get things right and it's worth our pointing to those happy events when they occur. So it is with his recent observation that, given that the collection of taxes is a burden upon both business and the citizenry then therefore we should work to lower that tax burden:
If, through its neglect, the government forces all the UK’s honest smaller businesses to compete with businesses that HMRC and Companies House are failing to regulate then it inevitably follows that the government are giving an unfair economic advantage to the cheats who do not pay their tax. No wonder as a result that the High Street is being decimated, bar the occasional fly-by-night pop up shop. And no wonder young people cannot find the jobs and apprenticeships they need with local employers when those honest enough to invest in jobs for those young people are likely to be competing against rogue traders who do not charge VAT on their sales and pays cash in hand wages.
As he points out that collection of taxation leads to the decimation of the High Street, to the young, the future of the nation, being wasted on the scrapheap of untrained unemployment and no doubt to many other horrors as yet unmentioned. The solution therefore is clearly to reduce that economic birden of those taxes. As we here at the ASI have been saying for some decades now: reducing the burden of taxation is a desirable thing in and of itself of course, but also because it will make the nation richer.
No doubt Murphy's next missive will include the evidence that he's got this point: for no one could, as he has pointed out, note that tax is a burden without then arguing that the burden should be reduced.
Could they?