Burning moral indignation

A man you may not have heard of (he is, in fact, a journalist so there’s not reason why you should have) called George Monbiot wrote an article in The Guardian recently complaining about the fact that rich people get away without paying their fair share of tax**.

The UK Treasury he said, loses £25 to £85 billion per year from tax evasion. Those figures are from a pressure group called the Tax Justice Network, and given that the UK Treasury says it is not itself able to put a figure on tax evasion, I don’t know how they came up with those (quite widely differing) amounts. Be that as it may, Mr Monbiot has a point. It is iniquitous when rich people do not pay tax owed to the society where they live.

He has three solutions. I’ll summarise them for you, so you can see what you think of them.

One, make all tax avoidance illegal. So no more clever structures designed to minimise the tax you pay.

Two, European tax harmonisation. No incentive would exist, thinks Mr Monbiot, for people to shift assets across borders.

Finally (you’re going to like this one) everyone’s tax returns should be made public.

Leaving aside a certain reflexive authoritarianism implicit in these suggestions (total government scrutiny of people’s financial affairs wherever they are, enforced publishing of them, and a prohibition on employing professionals to be on your side against the government) Mr Monbiot seems not to have thought his arguments through.

Make all tax avoidance illegal? What gets defined as avoidance? Business expenses? Gifting an estate to your children before you die? The very concept of a Trust? Or does Mr Monbiot just have a hazy dislike of what he sees as rich people employing tax advisors when not everybody can? If there are particular financial rules in place that are unfair, change them.

European tax harmonisation? Well, that’s been suggested for years. But what are its political implications? One would be that every society would have to have the same size and – presumably – type of government. The age-old debate between Left and Right as to what size government should be, and what it should be in the business of doing, would be finally settled; but not by people actually agreeing, but by Mr Monbiot’s legislative fiat born of his burning sense of moral indignation.

Finally, publish everyone’s tax returns. This is a new one on us, I have to admit. You would think that it is an idea so ludicrously intrusive and oppressive that no-one could seriously hold it. But Mr Monbiot does. As justification, he points out that salary levels are made public. But that’s in the newspaper jobs pages, and rarely individually. If tax returns were made public, he says, everyone could see who was contributing fairly and who was not. But how does he define ‘fairness’ in this sense? There is something creepily 1789 about Mr Monbiot’s notion of fairness – individuals would be, as it were, dragged before the tribunal of the public will to have it determined whether they have been a good fiscal citizen, regardless of anything else they may have done or contributed.

I mentioned Mr Monbiot’s burning sense of moral indignation, and I wasn’t being facetious. It is good that people have a moral sense. But his solutions – and they are popular in some quarters – are inherently illiberal. He needs to convince us that his vision of society is the right one, not use the power of the state to simply make it happen.

** ‘Publish and be Damned!’ www.guardian.co.uk/comment