Wednesday 13 May 2015

Daily Mail on top form.

Ex-public schoolboy, 19, found dead by his barrister father in his £2million London home after injecting lethal cocktail of drugs

On the bright side, they've just made a massive tax free windfall capital gain.

7 comments:

James James said...

Off topic:

DBC Reed calls a land tax only on future increases in land value a "Sentinel Tax".

Mark Wadsworth has attributed the "Sentinel Tax" to John Stuart Mill.

What's the real story here? Who invented the idea, and does it have any other names?

DBC Reed said...

I used to use the term Sentinel Tax for what was basically John Stuart Mill's Land Value Tax as, using JS Mill's name attracted unfriendly fire. The idea was that it sprang into life like a sentinel only when land prices started to go up, the rest of the time remaining dormant.Martin Wolf later proposed the same form of LVT in an FT article in which he used the formulation "from here on": so I started to call it the from-here-on Land Value Tax.To little avail as other LVT supporters call it LVT-lite and opponents just rubbish it (and all other forms of LVT). The theoretical justification for this form of LVT is found in the work of James Mill, John Stuart's father.

James James said...

Thanks very much Mr Reed. Do you have an exact reference to hand, or can you point me in the right direction?

DBC Reed said...

There are several useful quotes :
from James Mill "Elements of Political Economy"1821 p244
"Where land has,however been converted into private property without making rent in a peculiar manner answerable for the public expenses; where it has been bought and sold upon such terms and the expectations of individuals have been adjusted to that order of things, rent of land could not be taken to supply exclusively the wants of government without injustice."

John Stuart Mill's Programme of Land Tenure Reform Association (formerly Society)."The Society do not propose to disturb the landowners in their past acquisitions.But they assert the right of the State to all such accessions of income in the future."

Proof that I kept this tradition of LVT alive before Martin Wolf got in on the act is to be found in Moneyweek 16.1O.13 "The trouble with a land value tax- and a way round it" by Merryn Somerset Webb.

DBC Reed said...

PS Programme of Land tenure Association 1871.

Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC thanks for dropping in again!

James James said...

Thanks.

http://moneyweek.com/merryns-blog/trouble-land-value-tax-way-round/

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XtlCAAAAIAAJ