Fun Online Polls: Olympics, China and Taiwan

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Who's excited about, or even mildly interested in, the Olympics?

Me!!! - 25%
Not me - 47%
What Olympics? Have I missed something? - 28%

Well done to the lucky 28% who live in blissful ignorance. I'm with the 47% on this one. I'm sure 95% of us are watching it on telly, if at all, so it might as well be anywhere in the world which approximately shares our timezone.
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Not content with forcing LOCOG to remove the Taiwanese flag from the streets of London, the People's Republic of China have gone one better and forced whomever to excise that country's name from the medals table (aka "the China meddles table").

Without looking it up, under what fictitious name is Taiwan listed in the Olympic medals table (as shown on e.g. the BBC website)?

Choose here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Killer arguments against LVT, not (43)

Adam Collyer bandies around the "s" word:

"Sounds like a good Socialist solution to a shortage and rising [house] prices - whack a tax on it!"

1. Possibly he didn't read the post properly. I was comparing and contrasting the tax systems of The People's Republic of China (25% corporation tax, virtually no property taxes) and The Republic of China (aka 'Taiwan') which has 20% corporation tax and a modest Land Value Tax. You tell me which country is more 'Socialist'.

2. Let me use another 's' word, 'Subsidies'. The Home-Owner-Ist solution - whether that's to rising prices, falling prices, or anything in between - is always to demand ever more subsidies. For example, a £300 billion taxpayer-funded loan to the banks to try prop up the house price bubble; a freeze on Council Tax; restrictions on new construction to increase scarcity value; vehement opposition to capital gains tax on hitherto untaxed and entirely contrived gains on second homes and investment properties*. All of this funded by savage taxation of true wealth creation (i.e. incomes, output, profits etc), as a result of which the number of young people who can afford to buy a house dwindles, and land and housing become every more concentrated in ever fewer hands.**

3. If any other commodity rose in price, because let's say the wheat crop fails in some parts of the world, then the markets would allocate what wheat is still available via the price mechanism, and as we know, the best form of rationing is price rationing. Putting a tax on those wheat farmers who make extra profits would be spiteful, as this is their pay-out for the risk they bear that they may be affected by a crop failure in the future.

4. These basic laws of economics simply do not apply to land, especially as the scarcity is largely artificial in the first place. Land is not like any other commodity. It is not produced, it is, in a literal sense, in fixed supply. Much more importantly, the Home-Owner-Ists refuse to allow new construction to increase to meet rising demand, thus generating windfall profits and capital gains to accrue to, er, themselves. What they are doing follows much the same pattern as The Corn Laws, whereby landowners tried to restrict supply to boost their own profits.

5. As a parting shot, how are 'publicly collected taxes' on incomes, profits and output at an average rate approaching 50% (which are used to subsidise favoured groups, including the Home-Owner-Ists***) in any way not 'Socialist'?

6. And on top of those 'publicly collected taxes', the productive economy (which creates the wealth that ultimately underpins land and property values) has to pay 'privately collected taxes' to quasi-monopolists for the 'privilege' of exclusive possession of one of the strictly rationed bits of land on which they are allowed to live or on which economic activity is allowed to take place. That exclusive possession is of course created and protected by, and synonymous with, 'the State' (i.e. by society in general) and not landowners in particular.

* To be fair to Adam, he thinks planning restrictions should be loosened and is not adamantly opposed to capital gains tax on housing - even on main residences.

** Thus making a mockery of the Home-Owner-Ists' mantras that they 'want to encourage [a wider spread] of homeownership' or that they 'want wealth to cascade down the generations'. In truth, their policies achieve exactly the opposite.

*** The bitter irony being that at least half the population is simultaneously wealth creator and homeowner, so the system robs them with one hand and bribes them with the other.

Epic Fail

How can we have overlooked this one?

It's even better than the video of the hotel falling into a river in Taiwan!