Captain Ranty's "Legal Fiction"

Captain Ranty recently posted the following:

Roger [Hayes] decided to not pay his council tax and see where it all ended up. The result is pretty stupendous. He got a judge to agree that he Roger Hayes, the man, was not MR ROGER HAYES, a corporation defined in law.

What does it all mean? In essence, it means that every time you bend a statute, you, the flesh and blood human, is not responsible. Your legal fiction is. I imagine that your legal fiction, like mine, has no money. So the liability for paying your council tax, a parking fine, a speeding fine, your income tax, or corporation tax, falls on your legal fiction, not you, the human.

1. This is what I do for a living, distinguishing between which person (natural or legal) owes what tax and why. It is quite clear, for example, that the legal liability for council tax falls on the occupant; a parking fine falls on the owner of the car; income tax is payable by the individual and corporation tax by the legal fiction known as the limited company.

2. It must also be clear that a liability for a tax is not enforceable against a human being, as such. If somebody turns up at HM Revenue & Customs, cheerfully admits that he has been paid cash in hand all his life and spent it all on wine, women and song and does not have a penny to his name, there is b-gger all that the tax man can do about it. For sure, the man could be declared bankrupt or imprisoned, but that does not recover one penny in tax, does it?

3. Conversely, if somebody else is caught out, having earned the same amount of money cash in hand and has stashed it all in a bank account, then the tax debt is recoverable (whether he gets a prison sentence is by the by).

4. So a liability can only be enforced against assets and not a human being.

5. Now, as it happens, the government upholds another completely artificial legal fiction, to wit the concept of 'land ownership' ('the State' and 'land ownership' are synonymous, of course), which involves matching up a plot of land with a name (which we traditionally assume relates to a human being or other legal entity) and giving that named person special rights and privileges as against all other citizens.

6. But if we follow Captain Ranty's logic through to its obvious conclusion, then surely the name written down at HM Land Registry also relates to the legal fiction MR ROGER HAYES rather than the human being who goes by the name of Roger Hayes? Or does he live in a fantasy world where 'land owners' have rights but no responsibilities and the State (which is all of us obeying these silly little customs, like respecting each other's property and not 'the government' in the narrow sense) does everything out of the goodness of its own heart?

7. If we are to argue that a human being doesn't have to pay tax because they are distinct from the legal fiction bearing a similar name (the tax only being enforceable against that legal fiction), would it not be a reasonable quid pro quo for the State to tell that human being that he has no rights over any land registered in the name of that legal fiction?

8. In summary, while I object to the whole concept of taxation of incomes or the free exchange of goods and services (for a number of tediously pragmatic reasons), I fail to see how any human being can object to the State levying taxes on (i.e. charging money for) the legal fiction of land 'ownership'. Render what is Cæsar's unto Cæsar; make the punishment fit the crime; poetic justice; all that sort of thing.

Just sayin', is all.