Why you should vote Lib Dem

From page 10 of their pocket manifesto:

Fairer local taxes: Scrap the unfair Council Tax – The Council Tax is an unfair tax which bears no relationship to the ability to pay*. Liberal Democrats believe that it should be scrapped and replaced with a fair local tax, based on people’s ability to pay. We will pilot a fair local income tax in areas that choose to try it out.

I am perfectly aware that the readership of any 'blog is largely self-selecting, and I do not imagine for one second that all my diatribes about taxes on land values being the least-bad taxes have had any impact whatsoever on the overall consensus that it is perfectly acceptable to tax wealth creation in order to subsidise home-ownership or ultimately land-ownership.

But this particular policy must be music to the ears of the vast economically illiterate majority, such as Ian B, who (to his credit) put up a good fight yesterday, and actually came out with the time-honoured classic:

Income tax has its own severe problems, but is at least only paid once, when you have earned some money to pay the tax. An asset tax is a state rent on simply owning something, paid every year in perpetuity... If I earn £10, I might pay £2 tax on it, but then I'm done with the state**.

An asset tax takes the £2 every year, even though the asset isn't earning any money... With an income tax or a profits tax, the State taxes you once. With an assets tax it taxes you again and again and again until you are forced to part with the asset because you can't afford the taxes, since any non-earning asset (e.g. the land of an owner occupier) generates no income.

So that's one happy customer at least. Heck knows what economic damage replacing Council Tax with an extra 3.5% on income tax or National Insurance will do, but right now, who cares? Heck knows what economic damage the ensuing boost to the house price bubble would cause, but as we are under the mass delusion that high house prices = wealth, this must be political gold. And just to try and maximise their share of the Home-Owner-Ist vote, they precede the Local Income Tax idea with these noble words:

Control over what is built in your area – Residents should have the power to appeal planning applications where an authority has said 'yes', just as developers presently have the right to appeal applications to which a Council has said 'no'.

Criticising developers for what little new housing is built about as stupid as criticising car manufacturers for all the cars on the road, IMHO. Supply, demand? Anybody remember these terms? Remind me to do a post on what a Car-Owner-Ist economic policy would look like.

* Of course, Council Tax is, taken in isolation, a bad tax because it is to a large extent a Poll Tax and so cannot possibly relate to 'ability to pay', but that is not an argument against property taxes as such, that is an argument against Poll Taxes.

** So 'having done with the state' he is no doubt happy to relinquish right to vote, to call the fire brigade or the police, to use the NHS, to lobby the local council to ban new construction, to have his bins emptied or to take people to court.
------------------------------------------------------
The rest of their manifesto appears to be a right old magpie job. Bits of it have been nicked from UKIP (again, to be fair, we did read the Lib Dem output before we wrote ours) but, remembering that the Lib Dems are the most rabidly EU-phile party of all, I did like this one, lifted straight from The Tories on page 5 of the pocket guide:

Cut regulation and create a fair playing field for business – We will properly assess the cost and effectiveness of regulations before and after they are introduced, reforming Impact Assessments. We will move towards a ‘one in one out’ system so that for every rule introduced, another one is scrapped. And we will change the culture of regulators to help, not hinder, business.

One-in-one-out? What sort of stupid rule is that? Chuck out the bad ones or pointless ones (most of them) and keep the sensible ones (a tiny minority), end of.

And then, as a final flourish, to roars of approval from the crowd, in Part 4 of this:

We will end ‘gold plating’ of regulations originating from Europe, ensuring that they are not extended beyond their original intention.