The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Link: BBC NEWS | Politics | The campaign group: Taxpayers’ Alliance.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, like the UK Libertarian Party, is an institution that should have existed for centuries. It is unbelievable that British taxpayers are so passive, so docile that, until recently, they never established a group to represent their interests. As the linked article notes, such groups exist in other major democracies.

This shows just how successful Britain’s Leftist mainstream has been in establishing the idea that taxes are good per se and that public spending is somehow more moral than private spending. In truth, of course, taxes are good to the precise extent that they are accurately directed to beneficial purposes. Taxes which are wasted, lost in fiscal churn or otherwise misdirected are not good at all. Unless, that is, you are the holder of a sinecure public sector "non-job" or a businessman ripping off what Wat Tyler over at Burning our Money (the blog I would read if I were restricted to just one ) calls "the Simple Shopper."

On trips to the United States I have always been impressed by the way their press holds government to account for its spending. People there are relatively well-informed (and suitably sceptical) about "pork barrel" politics and public sector waste. The fact that they must fill out their own tax returns and write cheques for their tax bills focuses their minds on how much of their labour is taken by force to be consumed by others.

Perhaps the worst innovation ever in Britain was "PAYE" (Pay As You Earn). Employers deduct tax "at source" and give it directly to the government, paying their employees only the net amount. Most employees only look at the bottom line on their pay slip. They never see their tax money and think of their net income as their earnings. Yet they are working until June each year as effective serfs of those who derive their living from the state.

Whatever the cause, in Britain, the press has failed dismally to hold government to account over expenditure. The formation of the Taxpayers Alliance has finally ensured that the point of view of the productive part of the population is heard, if not yet nearly as loudly as that of those demanding an every-increasing share of others’ earnings.

It’s saddening that the Taxpayer’s Alliance regards the BBC’s subtle hatchet job as a good write up. In an email bulletin to us members of the Low Tax Coalition, Matthew Elliott (the TPA’s Chief Executive) writes of Brian Wheeler, the author of the BBC piece;

He’s very complimentary about our work and the way we campaign for lower taxes and better government – and he seems to have got a real handle on what we’re about.

This, despite the fact that Wheeler manages, by focusing on Matthew’s denials, to give prominence to the idea that the TPA is "a Tory front." Indeed he begins by saying it was;

…founded in 2004 by a group of "libertarian"
Conservatives, frustrated by what they saw as the party’s decision to
ditch its traditional tax cutting message

Don’t you just love the way he holds the concept of "libertarian" at arm’s length with the linguistic tweezers of quotation marks, as if it were something very smelly indeed? He goes on to say (bearing in mind that one "admits" only something bad);

Mr Elliott freely admits that the Taxpayers’ Alliance
message – that the state has become bloated and wasteful and that
Britons are paying too much tax – is essentially the same as any number
of other right wing think tanks and pressure groups.

So an organisation which questions the use of public money is automatically "right-wing", a "Tory front" and (horror of horrors) "libertarian?" I hardly think any members of the Labour Party (who ought to be just as concerned to see their tax pounds wisely spent) are going to sign up on the basis of that account!

We have a long way to go in building public awareness. Election-swinging millions now live off the British taxpayer without the slightest compunction. First amongst them are the politicians who (during intervals from gorging in the public trough themselves) buy votes with the product of other peoples’ work. 

The TPA is doing a great job and I urge you to support it.