Fun Online Polls: Wealth creation and changing the clocks.

Thanks to everybody who took part in last week's Fun Online Poll: "How do people create wealth?", the results were as follows:

By working hard, starting a business and or investing wisely - 83%
By owning their homes or other land and property - 9%
Other, please specify - 8%

Which must be the 'correct' answer. Why did I ask such a dumb-ass question, you will be wondering...

The oft-repeated mantra is that "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing."

Now, it is quite true that an individual can become wealthy by owning land and buildings, but as rental values and land values are, broadly speaking a function of overall disposable incomes in the economy, the profits only arise because of the wealth-creation efforts of others; the same applies to people who own nothing more than their own home, if you see exclusive occupation of land as a form of 'consumption' (but a special form of consumption where there is no identifiable 'producer').

So that mantra deliberately misses the point. What we should be asking is why are we taxing the goose (hard work, entrepreneurship, wise investments) in the first place, remembering that £1 raised in taxes on output or income reduces the size of the economy by another 50 pence? Why aren't we taxing the 'golden eggs' (rental values, land values etc), which will increase over time whether they are taxed or not?
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On a lighter (or indeed darker) note, and while it's still fresh in everybody's minds, I wonder how many people are up for scrapping the EU-mandated system whereby we have to alternate between Greenwich Mean Time and British Summer Time, and would like us to experiment for a year or two with sticking to GMT or BST throughout the whole year, and if so which?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.