Fun online poll results: For a given level of taxation ...

Here are the final results to the simple question:
----------------------------------------------
For a given level of taxation (the lower the better, obviously), would you prefer:

Low and stable house prices; lower taxes on incomes; and a steadily growing economy? 87%

Wildly fluctuating house prices; higher taxes on incomes; and a boom-bubble-bust economy? 13%
----------------------------------------------
Believe me, the choice is that simple.

Some days I wake up hard as a hard right, free-marketeer and think "Why should 'wealth creators' - from the shelf-stacker or production-line worker all the way up to the innovators, entrepreneurs and the investors who make their new ventures possible - pay any tax on their incomes whatsoever? But we need taxes to pay for the core functions of the State. As nobody is forced to own houses or buildings or land in the UK - and landowners can hardly be said to be 'wealth creators' on a par with the shelf stackers etc. - a tax thereon would be a voluntary tax, and probably enough to cover the cost of those core functions."

Other times, I think "Maybe - besides paying for the core functions - we as a society are happy to chuck in a bit of redistribution as well, from the healthy to the sick; from the high earners to the low earners; from the working age to the elderly ..." but if you are going to go that far, why not add "... and from the property owners to the tenants."?

Whatever your point of view, it is quite clear from the past few decades that property price booms are not just the precusors to, but also the cause of the subsequent recessions (which a tax on property values would help prevent); and that high taxes on income (with the implied subsidy to property ownership) are in and of themselves bad things.

So the answer must be, a shift - however modest - from taxing production and incomes* to taxing land values. In case you think I asked a leading question, I ran three parallel Fun Online Polls last April that led to the same conclusion (albeit on a lower turn-out).

* Please don't waffle on about "taxing consumption". A straight user-charge on scarce resources is a 'consumption tax', fair enough. But a general tax on spending - like Value Added Tax - is just a cleverly disguised turnover tax on the value that the producer creates. With the narrow exception of land values, you cannot have 'consumption' without having 'production'. That's the beauty of it - you can tax spending or value received without deterring production.