Douglas Carswell has a great peice poking fun at Polly Toynbee and her idea that we should all publish our tax returns. Her scheme is to publish the details of what we paid to the tax man out of which income we earned. He suggests that, perhaps, if we also published who got given that money we would see a gravitational pull in the direction of smaller Government.

The logic seems reasonable, especially in a fun-poking article, but it misses the point somewhat. The idea of publishing tax returnsis that transparency is an effective way to ensure that the money taken away from person earning is appropriately high. The purpose of the transparency is to ensure it does not go too low. Yet the money David Cameron or Ken Livingston or Rod the baker from my local Sainsbury’s earn is, generally speaking, not actually mine to start with. David Cameron and Ken Livingston, do in fact, get an awful lot of my money while in office but a great deal of their income, I expect, will come from people voluntarily giving of their money to hear them talk, or get a book written, wall-paper their home or whatever else it is politicians do on the side. The bit of their income paid from other people’s taxes is my business, the bit they earned flogging stuff is not. Rod the baker is a nice guy and his income does not come from my taxes, I wasn;t forced to give it to hime, it comes from selling me bread. Much as I like Rod, I have no reason to be curious about his tax return, when I went to the check out and paid for the bread my money was no longer mine and no longer my business.

Polly’s mistake is that she thinks owning stuff is wrong. She thinks that because I own something I am taking it from someone else. If I stop someone else having my house or my money I am evil. Quite what the moral status is of the person who would otherwise come to be using my money or house, I don’t know, but this is beside the point. The point is she is wrong about this. My money is my money. That she has this wrong is why, per Toynbee, people have a right to see what I’m earning and what I’m paying. The fact that Norway, Finland and Sweden made the same collective mistake doesn’t make her views anymore accurate.

Norway, Finland, Sweden and Polly Toynbee went wrong when they failed to make the distinction between dirty tax money extracted at pain of inprisonment and the moral earnings of people that exchange goods and services for cash in a free-market. All sorts of ecomonic circumstances sometimes persuade people to part with more money than they would like but energy company bosses, Top Shop employees, chemists and online-bookshops were not able to throw customers in gaol if customers did not want energy, clothes, pharmaceuticals or books. That is why high standards are expected when officials spend taxpayers money, and since it does not apply in the free-market transparency is of limited use.

The one purpose of transparency (even if, per Carswell, benefits were also transparent) is so that people can decide if I have a proper amount money, in their opinion. Per Carswell and Toynbee it wouldn’t matter if they were tax money or bread money, people would still be able to decide and the evidence from Norway, Finland and Sweden is that they tend to decide quite readily, as Toynbee confirms. Carswell seems to treat it as an issue of dignity and privacy, but it isn’t. Claiming the right to know my affairs is a step on the road to claiming control over them. Not just control in the hands of an expert army of little-tyrants at HMRC, but control in the hands of an angry mob.

Image by Amigomac