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Dec. 5, 2019 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:13:32
Delingpod 48: Dominic Frisby
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welcome to the Dellingpot with me James Dellingpot and And, well...
I am very excited about this week's special guest, but he is the most regular visitor to the podcast, and with good reason.
He's great.
He's Dominic Frisby.
Hi, James.
Welcome back, Dom.
Now, I think people think of you, if at all, as a lovable comedy character responsible for the classic 17 million fuck-offs and as a general kind of likeable cove.
But you have another string to your bow.
You've just written a book called Daylight Robbery.
And it's about a subject which ought to be boring.
It's about taxation.
And you...
And I'm not just saying this to blow smoke up your bottom.
Although you probably like that kind of thing.
It's a really good book.
I really, really recommend it.
Like your previous books, which I also recommend.
The one on Bitcoin and what was the other one?
Life After the State.
Life After the State.
You're writing about the world from a libertarian stroke, classical liberal perspective.
And the thing I loved about this book, one of the things I loved about it, was the way that you made it clear that pretty much the entirety of human history can be understood through the concept of tax.
That taxation shapes our civilisation and everything.
Um...
The Peasants' Revolt, for example.
I mean, tell me about that.
Tell me about the Peasants' Revolt.
Well, I'll backpack a bit.
Okay, yeah, you can.
Backpack, backtrack.
You can go where you want.
But the, yeah, I mean...
We can start at Sumer, maybe.
Yeah, well, we can start at Sumerians.
We're the ancient Sumerians or Sumerans.
There's never been a civilisation without taxation, which is one of the things that I discovered.
And, you know, the very first written records we have are tax records.
And it's probable that this sense of duty to the greater collective existed in the hunter-gatherer societies that predated civilisation.
And taxation isn't just, of course, for your money.
It's for your labour, for your produce, anything that you have of wealth.
And, yeah, there's never been a civilisation without taxation.
And once you start to look at the world as this, through the prism of taxation, so many things that have happened make incredible sense.
But The Peasants' Revolt is one of my favourite tax stories of all.
It was the most brilliant revolt.
In fact, in the next book I write, I want it to be like a historical drama set in The Peasants' Revolt.
But...
It goes all the way back to the plague.
And one of the games I used to...
I did an Edinburgh show about tax way back when.
This is where this all started.
And one of the games I used to play with the audience, I was like, get the audience to shout out events from history.
And any event, and I would endeavour to tell them the tax story behind that event.
Now, the problem with history is it's very competitive.
And everyone's imposing their own narrative on history.
And, you know, I remember one guy going, the Peloponnesian War.
You know, finding these really obscure things that I didn't know.
But...
Nevertheless, behind every war, you know, wars are paid through.
By taxes.
If you want to end wars, end taxes.
Because without tax, you can't have war.
And it's not just taxation during the war itself, but also afterwards.
A lot of leaders get into debt during a war and then they spend, after the war, paying that debt off.
A war is often a conquest and it's about taking control of the tax base.
You plunder and then you tax.
And so without war, without taxes, war would not be possible.
And so every war, there's a tax story there.
And similarly, the reverse of that is without war, many taxes wouldn't be possible.
Throughout history, leaders have found it very difficult to raise taxes during peacetime, and they often need some kind of emergency to impose the new taxes.
And then what tends to happen after the war is over is that taxes never go back to the levels they were before the war started.
And people wonder how it is that government is so big in our lives today.
How did government get so big?
In 1900, at the turn of the 20th century, taxes were about 10% of GDP. Today it's more like 50%.
The most expensive purchase you ever make in your life, people think it's a house.
It's not.
It's your government.
By far and away, it's your government.
Over the course of your life, roughly 50% of everything you ever earn will be taken through you in taxes.
I'm not feeling I'm getting very good value for money here.
Well, we're not getting good value for money.
And so, I'm coming eventually to the peasant.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Take your time.
Thank you.
And so...
Yes, the two world wars gave us...
In 1941 ordinary Americans did not pay income tax.
Only the very rich paid income tax.
And it was only the Revenue Act of 1942 that brought income tax to ordinary Americans.
And Irving Berlin wrote a song to try and get, to celebrate, he was commissioned by the American government to write a song to celebrate the joys of paying tax and make Americans understand why they were paying the taxes.
And the song lyric went, A thousand planes to bomb Berlin, they must be paid for, and I chipped in.
Or see those bombers in the sky, Rockefeller helped to build them, so did I. I paid my income tax today.
And that's this song.
And so it was ever the link between war and taxes.
Now, of course, after World War II was over, income taxes stayed.
And it was World War I that brought income tax to ordinary British people as well.
Well, the first case was actually the Napoleonic Wars, but then the income tax was abandoned after the Napoleonic Wars.
But prior to World War I, Ordinary English people pay very low levels of income tax.
And as I say today, the government has just gone incredibly big.
And in order, I mean, we're seeing it with the general election today, in order to win elections, this is the nature of democracy, governments make promises.
When they make promises, they take on obligations.
And usually the person who made that promise is long since gone, but the obligations remain.
And when the obligations are there, they've got to be paid for.
And so we have taxes.
So 50% of everything you earn in taxes.
And by the way, I include inflation and debt as taxes.
Inflation is a stealth tax.
Debt is a tax on the future.
And presumably QE as well.
Well, again, QE was a perfect example of a crisis being used And so these measures being brought in, and yeah, QE is inflation.
It's a form of inflation, debasing currency.
Milton Friedman describes inflation as taxation without...
Oh, fuck, what's the bloody quote?
Taxation without...
Not taxation without regulation.
Taxation without...
Not taxation without representation.
I've got to look it up very quickly.
I quite like this.
I quite like the human face of Dominic Prism.
You're not just a kind of machine regurgitating data.
I'm afraid I had a very heavy night last night, and so my brain is not at 100%.
I think you should be telling us what you were doing.
I cannot tell you, I cannot give it to the public.
I can't find it.
Did it involve dwarves with little bowls of cocaine on their heads?
Let's just say you talking, reminding me of last night, has just brought me out into a slight sweat.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Well, I'm going to look up.
I think...
Yeah, you carry on.
I'll look up.
It's basically taxation without legislation.
Thank God for that.
God, it wasn't that hard to get there.
So, yes, every war...
Tax.
Every rebellion, every revolt is usually some kind of uprising against some kind of injustice perpetrated by the tax system.
Taxation is control.
Taxation is power.
Without control of the tax base, kings and emperors and rulers very quickly lose.
Even governments just lose their power.
So every revolt, every revolution, taxation is at its heart.
The French Revolution, the Ruffin Revolution, the American Revolution, no taxation.
The Gilets Jaunes, I suppose.
The Gilets Jaunes today, you know, it was oil taxes, petrol taxes that triggered it.
There was a great one in the Philippine Revolution, began with the cry of Pugad Lawin, exhorting citizens to tear up their tax certificates.
So that's like the most transparent one of all.
But one of the beauteous, beautiful revolts was the Peasants' Revolt.
And this goes all the way back.
One of the areas, great events, that often you struggle to find the tax story is natural disasters.
Because, you know, usually it wasn't some kind of taxation that caused the natural disaster.
But where the tax story comes in is in the rebuilding effort afterwards.
So, you know, the Great Fire of London, London was rebuilt with a coal tax.
You know, or the Indonesian tsunami, for example.
Taxation played a large part in the rebuilding effort afterwards.
But the Peasants' Revolt was preceded by the plague.
And the plague wiped out 50, 60, 80% of Europe, depending on European people.
But what it did is it transformed the economy because suddenly there was a shortage of labour.
And serfs were suddenly able, the value of a serf's labour suddenly increased because there was such a shortage.
And serfs were finally able to often charge for their labour.
Or in order to keep serfs on their land, lords would grant serfs their freedom and they started to pay them.
And so the peasant classes were handling money for the very first time.
So we can thank the rats for that, can't we?
The plague rats.
We can in a way.
They liberated us from serfdom.
Yeah.
Those that survived it...
Good old rats.
They were much maligned.
And so then we started to see poll taxes and citizens were charged.
And John of Gaunt, to this point, was the richest man in the country and he was effectively the ruler of Britain in the late 1300s, I think.
1380, something like this.
And Richard II was king, but he was the young king and John of Gaunt was basically ruling the country.
And he levied a poll tax in order to pay for his war in France.
And it raised a lot of money.
And so the following year, he raised another poll tax.
And peasants who were now handling money...
And it's called the Peasants' Revolt, but really it was like the new middle class.
They were artisans and, you know, tilers and just ordinary workers, basically.
It's called the Peasants' Revolt.
And ordinary workers were, you know, the ruling classes were desperately trying to keep the peasant class down.
And for example, they tried to regulate the clothes they wear.
Peasants had more money.
Sumptuary laws.
Exactly.
And they regulated the food that they ate.
And they tried to stop them wearing the same clothes as the middle and upper classes.
Sumptuary laws, exactly.
So there was this great battle.
Brewing already.
And then Gaunt levied his second poll tax.
And it didn't levy as much as was expected.
And then he levied a third poll tax in four years.
And this time it levied even less.
And that's always the way.
They impose onerous taxes.
It doesn't raise as much as they hope.
And so they increase the level of taxes.
The great irony of taxes is often if you lower the tax rates, revenue actually increases.
The Laffer curve.
The Laffer curve, exactly.
But anyway, on its third attempt to raise this poll tax, the tax collectors rode it into a village called Laughing in Essex, I think it was called.
And the villagers from the...
Told the tax collector to go away.
So he came back the next day with guards, with soldiers, and there was a big fight and all the soldiers were killed and the man who was collecting the tax rode away.
And that's how the Peasants' Revolt began.
It was a refusal to pay these poll taxes.
But there was this brilliant leader at the time called John Bull.
He was the sort of...
John Bull, not Bull.
Bull.
Bull.
Yeah.
As in football, not as in...
I said bull, but you're absolutely right, it's bull.
And he was the sort of intellectual, like I said, he was a heavy knight, but he was the sort of intellectual head of the Peasants' Revolt, the intellectual thought leader.
And he did these brilliant speeches, championing the common man.
And he got excommunicated loads of times.
And by the way, you know, I often, when I was a kid, I used to wonder why was excommunication such a big deal?
You know, you just go, so you get excommunicated, you stick your two fingers up and so what?
That's the end of it.
But it's not.
Because excommunication is that same device is being used in the world around us today.
You know, if you say the wrong thing about the NHS, you are smeared.
You get all these things that people do to you when you have the wrong opinions.
You get no platform.
And basically, you're excommunicated.
Very good.
So it's not just social credit in China.
We already have a version of our own social credit.
It's just...
And when you have all the wrong views about stuff, it impacts you in all sorts of ways you don't know about, you know, overlook for jobs and things like that.
And people don't want to be excommunicated.
It's horrible.
And so, you know, you're like, oh, I'm not talking to you.
So I can see now why excommunication was such a big deal then.
But anyway, this guy, John Ball, just did not...
He didn't give.
D-N-G-A-S. He was hard as nails and he used to do these great speeches and he was banned from speaking in churches.
So he used to do his sermons in village halls and everywhere he tried to ban him.
The Archbishop of Canterbury.
And the church was one of the main tax collectors at the time.
And he was locked into Maidstone Jail and he predicted that he would be freed by 20,000 men and everyone laughed at him.
But the fact that he predicted it and then we got the uprising in Laughing and there were simultaneously uprisings in Kent and they realised it was obviously the whole Peasants' Revolt was carefully planned and orchestrated and 20,000 men came to Maidstone And a low
person.
Is how he's described in one of the contemporary chronicles.
And by the way, another really interesting thing about tax is we got our surnames.
Surnames didn't exist for ordinary people until the 12 and 1300s.
And we only got our surnames because of taxes, poll taxes.
And I needed to distinguish between, you know, Walter the Tyler, Walter who lived by the hill, Walter John's son.
And so you had these surnames as a means to distinguish people.
You were either defined by your patronage, who your dad was, by some prominent geographical feature where you lived, as in Walter Hill or Walter Ford, or by...
Your physical features.
Your occupation.
And yes, your physical features is another one, particularly in Celtic cultures.
So things like Kennedy means shaggy head or shaggy hat.
Cameron means crooked nose.
And Connolly means valiant.
So these are all ways.
But we have surnames.
The reason we have surnames is because of taxes.
Right.
And surnames in China go all the way back like 2,500 years BC, but they were levied for exactly the same reason.
They were imposed so that Emperor Fuji, F-U-X-I, could impose taxes.
So anyway, Walter the Tyler and his men arrived at Maidstone Prison and they freed John Bull and they marched on London via Canterbury because their first target they wanted to get was the Archbishop of Canterbury.
And at the same time, there were uprisings in Essex on the other side of the Thames estuary, and they marched on London, and they met in London at the same time.
The two armies arrived in London at exactly the same time.
So it just shows how coordinated the whole thing was.
And when they marched on Canterbury, unfortunately the Archbishop of Canterbury wasn't in Canterbury, he was in London.
But they did this thing.
They systematically, wherever they went, they opened all the prisons and let all the prisoners out, most of whom were in jail for tax offences of one kind or another.
And they burnt all the tax records.
And they went to all the lawyers and all the churches, and they systematically destroyed every single tax record.
And they went right to the zero patient, if you like, the place where all the ills were emanating from.
And they timed their advances, because John of Gaunt was in Scotland at the time with the army, and there was another war going on in the continent.
So there were very few soldiers in London at the time.
So it meant they could win that war.
And they came to London and ran right in London, killed all the lawyers, and burnt all the tax records.
Was it naughty of me when I was reading that section of the book, when they started killing all the tax collectors and all the lawyers, I did get a little sort of frisson of naughty delight.
Yeah.
And that's where we get the line from in the Shakespeare play, when he's writing, I think it's...
Yes, Jack Cade, he says...
First, let us kill all the lawyers.
Yes.
But Shakespeare...
And that's what the peasants did.
OK, but Shakespeare, as I understand it, was not really endorsing Jack Cade saying that.
He was kind of...
He was saying, look, this is what these awful people do.
He wasn't going, yeah, let's kill the lawyers.
I think it was a gag.
I think it was a joke.
Because the peasants...
He was talking about a different revolt, but he portrayed the peasants as stupid.
Right.
And they're like, what are we going to do?
What are we going to do?
First, let us kill all the lawyers.
And you can see that getting a big laugh when they're all arguing.
Very popular with audiences, I would imagine.
So, yeah, so Peasants' Revolt, and it's a great story.
And there's so much skullduggery and backstabbing.
Well, this is how it plays out, isn't it?
That...
I mean, it's one of those great counterfactuals.
Imagine if the peasants, who weren't peasants really, they were us, they were the middle classes, imagine if they'd got their way.
And they nearly did.
But the bastard establishment lied and cheated, like it always does.
It lied and cheated.
So tell us what happened.
Well, they...
Richard...
They still believed in divine right in those days.
And their beef wasn't with the kings.
It was with everyone around them.
So they wanted to get John of Gaunt.
They went to John of Gaunt.
He was the richest man in the country.
They went to his castle in the Strand and looted it and stole everything.
But they didn't keep the possessions.
They were quite honourable, these guys.
They looted and sacked his house and threw everything in the river.
Do you think John of Gaunt would have been a Remainer?
Of course he was a remainer.
Yeah.
He would have been, wouldn't he?
Yeah.
What Tyler was a lever?
John Ball.
John Ball would have been like your Benite lever.
Right.
When Adam delved in Yvespan, who was then the gentleman.
Yeah.
That was his phrase, wasn't it?
Yeah, and he was a great champion.
Exactly that.
And he was a great champion and he wanted everything to be owned by the commons.
He would have believed in land value tax.
Can I just pause you there?
Isn't it odd the way that our version of history has been skewed in a way that...
I seem to remember thinking of the peasants as, when I was at prep school, you know, the peasants as probably being an unruly mob that were properly squashed by the authorities, and that's the way it was.
And also, in the same way, my view of history was coloured by, I mean, wars, basically.
Wars are great, because England wins, you know, so often, you know, Cressy and Agincourt, and it's all cool.
But reading your book...
Turned on its head my view of history.
And I now understand that the peasants, who weren't peasants, were really good guys.
They were fighting on our behalf.
The establishment, as always, is ghastly, corrupt, just trying to screw us for every last penny.
And if only we could channel that understanding of history.
Here we are at the moment where Corbyn is trying to galvanise the people by saying, yeah, I'm going to raise taxes even more and I'm going to spend.
Whereas actually, wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a coalition of the so-called left and so-called right saying, we're against government.
We're against big government.
We want to have lower taxes so that we're free.
And no one's campaigning on that.
I know.
It's just, like, so annoying.
And they're all making promise after promise.
And, you know, they're taking on so many obligations.
This Tory thing of trying to own the NHS and, like, claim the moral high ground over the NHS. I mean, please.
And, like, who do you vote for if you want lower taxes, greater individual responsibility and less government?
Even though that's what the people who voted Brexit really wanted for, I'm sure.
That's what it was about.
I'm sure it was.
And, like, they've been given a free ride by the Brexit party.
You know, maybe the Brexit party have made a mistake.
Maybe it's a very generous thing for the greater good.
Or maybe the establishment put them under so much pressure.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Because that's what they do.
They stab you, don't they?
Yeah.
As we're about to learn...
Well, they did it in the Peasants' Revolt.
To what, Tyler, what happened?
So...
Wattyla, they arranged to meet with the king, and the king sailed up from Windsor in the royal barge.
And he arrived at Blackheath, or it would have been Rotherhithe or somewhere like that, where the peasants were congregated before they marched on London.
And the king's advisors saw the sheer number of people, and the king wouldn't get off the barge to meet with the peasants.
So the peasants Marched on London and the Essex rebels and the Hertfordshire rebels came in at Aldgate and the Kentish rebels came in over London Bridge and the gates of the city were supposed to have been closed and somebody left them open.
So the peasants had allies on the inside of London.
And they basically just, you know, raided London.
The place was burning.
They looted John of Gaunt's house.
Actually, the looting of John of Gaunt's house happened the following day.
And they just ran riot.
And like I said, they would have had a lot of ally, a lot of sympathizers on the inside.
And so the king said, OK, I will meet with you the following day outside the city gates.
And the peasants had all sorts of demands that they wanted.
They wanted an end to the poll tax.
They wanted the abolition of serfdom so that people were employed to work, not compelled.
They wanted free trade, to be able to buy and sell goods freely.
I mean, who doesn't?
And they wanted rent limits.
Of four people per acre.
And they wanted charters, they wanted royal charters that granted them the same rights as free men.
So not unreasonable things to demand.
And the king, and they also had a list of all these people that they wanted beheaded, who included the Archbishop of Canterbury and John of Gaunt.
And so the king began writing out these charters, but he had only so many clerks with him.
And basically, he gave these charters to the rebels from Essex and managed to get the rebels from Essex to go away.
I agree to everything you want.
And he gave the rebels from Essex what they wanted.
But the rebels for Kent, for some reason, stayed.
And then they went to John of Gaunt's house.
And as I say, they looted it.
They found the Archbishop of Canterbury and they beheaded him.
And then the king met with Wat Tyler the next day.
And it's really not that clear quite what happened because there are so many different versions of events, but it looks like Wat Tyler might have been a little bit drunk, maybe drunk on his own success.
And he's said to have ridden up to the king on a pony.
For some reason, I don't know why, but his pony wasn't as high as the king's horse.
And this was still the point.
The rebels had the greater numbers.
The battle was theirs to be won.
Somebody, they staged this guy.
What Tyler was basically, he was framed.
Some guy came along and he said, I saw you committing some crime.
I can't remember exactly what it is.
It's in the book.
And then the mayor said, what do you mean you saw this person committing, what Tyler committing this crime?
And so he was had for a crime.
And then what Tyler then...
And he kept calling the king brother, which was an extremely rude thing to do.
But he was trying to get this equality thing.
And anyway, the mayor of London had come to this meeting fully armed with a sword.
And Wat Tyler didn't.
And he stabbed Wat Tyler for his rudeness to the king or for whatever reason.
Wat Tyler tried to ride back to his peasant armies and couldn't.
Because he'd been stabbed and fell off his horse.
And that was like the last point that the rebels could have won the war.
And then the king rode over to the peasants and he said, I am your king, I am your king, don't fight.
And they were confused.
And then that was just enough time.
And all the time the king had been buying time.
That's why he kept saying, I'll meet you tomorrow, I'll meet you tomorrow.
Because he was buying time for armies to get back from Scotland and so on.
Anyway, the rebel forces were dispersed and what Tyler's head was put on a pole and stood on London Bridge and the peasants unfortunately lost.
Now what happened was, this is how evil they were, the charters that had been written out granting these people the rights of free men, they actually became their death sentence.
Because people would go to royal authorities and say, look, look, I've got this charter, and it grants me the rights of free men.
And then the king's forces then said, you've got the charter, you were involved in the Peasants' Revolt, and they cut off their head.
So it was terrible, terrible, terrible.
But it put an end to poll taxes for like 100 or 200 years, and it eventually ended what was the, I think it was the Hundred Years' War, and England eventually lost that.
But it ended it because the ruling classes were less reluctant to try and raise money for overseas military intervention after what had happened with this Peasants' Revolt.
And John Ball, right to the last, refused to apologise.
He was beheaded and he refused to...
He basically condemned himself to going to hell.
But he refused to back down, so he kept it pure right to the last.
He was the Nigel Farage.
Yeah, I wonder if there's a statue to him anywhere.
There ought to be.
In Essex there are.
But he was a really great man.
And he was like, no compromising, and he didn't bow down.
I tell you what, you've made me feel much better about the end of Richard II... Where he wastes away in his castle wherever they imprison him.
I'm glad that Richard II died.
I'm glad that Henry IV took over.
Well, Richard, yeah.
I mean, I think Richard was a bit...
I sort of seem a bit like David Cameron.
In that he wasn't so bad himself, he was just badly advised and it was all those around him were worse than he was.
Right, right.
If that's a good, I don't know if that's a good analogy or not.
There's so much history stuff in your book, like King John.
King John.
The reason we know him as bad King John is because he was bad.
He was Mr Tax, wasn't he?
He was Mr Tax.
But then, so was Richard the Lionheart, Richard Coeur de Leon, who we've been taught to think, you know, with his red cross on his crusader outfit and...
Beating or competing on equal terms at least with Saladin.
He was a terrible king.
He was king of England for ten years and he spent less than six months for his ten year rule in England.
You've transformed my understanding of our medieval rulers.
In fact, I'm against kings now.
Whereas before...
Well, it depends who the king is.
Because you look at, you know...
Henry VII. Henry VII was a great king.
We do like him.
Why?
Explain.
Well, he was just...
He was...
He was good and bad, but one of the things he did was he outlawed private armies.
So it meant barons could no longer have their armies.
And in doing that, he assured the sort of supremacy of the crown.
And he just confiscated so much land.
But he got involved in like one war in his whole...
Isn't that your key point?
That he didn't get involved in wars?
Yeah, he got involved overseas.
He pursued marriages overseas instead of war.
And alliances.
And he laid the foundations for the Tudors to go on and be that great dynasty.
Can I just fast forward a bit briefly?
I haven't got to the Napoleonic Wars yet, but I can see why you are quite justifiably against unnecessary foreign wars.
Yeah.
But say you were England in the, well, the early 19th century, sort of the era of the Peninsular War.
Napoleon is taking over Europe.
What are you going to do with him?
Are you going to treat with him, are you, and just kind of cut some cosy deal?
Or are you going to fight the bastard?
In which case, you need to raise taxes, don't you?
Yeah, and I've just read about it.
This one's not actually in the book.
I only found out about it last week.
But William Pitt was like Gordon Brown.
He just had hundreds and hundreds of petty taxes.
So many.
If there is an object, he will tax it.
And he taxed, like, dogs, coats of arms.
Dog taxes, horses, carriages.
He just taxed windows, glass, everything.
By the way, the expression daylight robbery, the title of the book, comes from the window tax.
I think we can talk about window tax.
I was shocked by how long it lasted.
160 years, give or take.
Yeah, yeah.
But William Pitt also levied a tax on wigs.
And there was a particular wig powder.
And so wig powder became very expensive, so people started using flour instead.
And that, of course, then pushed up the cost of flour, which pushed up the cost of grain.
But there was a core of people who were opposed to the Napoleonic Wars, and they felt that Britain should not get involved in them.
And in order to make their statement of opposition to the Napoleonic Wars, They stopped wearing wigs and cut their hair very short so that their taxes couldn't be taken from them to use on the war and that's why people started wearing their hair short.
Is that right?
So that's interesting from a kind of TV adaptation perspective.
But it was a bit like The White Flower or something like that in World War I. You wore your hair short and it was a bit like saying, I'm against...
I think I might have worn my hair short, you know.
I think I might have done.
I think I would have been like Cobbett and Cobden.
Yeah.
The debasement of our currency to pay for these.
Yeah.
Cobbett was brilliant.
Because the gold standard.
Yeah.
The gold standard keeps us safe from wars, doesn't it?
It does.
And what they did, what happened in the Napoleonic Wars, is that Pitt forced the Bank of England off the gold standard temporarily.
Yeah.
And again, in order to print money to pay for the war, same thing happened in World War I. And, you know, French and German governments also took their countries off the gold standard.
And if they'd stayed on the gold standard, there was not the gold to pay for the war to go on for as long as it did.
So debasement of the currency is another form of...
Taxation without legislation.
Off the brooks, isn't it?
It's like you won't notice.
It's the ultimate stealth tax.
I've got, for my metal detecting, I've got a long cross penny.
Okay.
And you know about long cross pennies, don't you?
No, I don't think I do.
Long cross pennies have this cross, which goes to the edge of the coin.
And the reason is to stop the coin being clipped and debased, because you can see where the edge of the coin is.
That's rather clever.
So it fits your thesis that everything connects with taxation.
It does.
And every great empire from the Romans to Islam to the British to America now, they debase their currency to pay for their outgoings.
What you said earlier about the tax rate in 1910 being 10% makes me think that very late Victorian, early Edwardian England must have been an absolutely golden era before the First World War.
It was a golden age.
And you know who the great British tax reform was?
Peel.
He was the man.
And he actually brought income tax back in 1842, I think it was.
But he did so.
In doing so, he repealed like 300 to 600 other taxes.
Either repealed or reduced them.
300 to 600.
I mean, that's massive tax reform and tax simplification.
And that was like...
Basically laid the foundations of free trade.
And from free trade you get exchange, and it's by exchange that we progress.
And that's why the second half of the 19th century was such a glorious era in terms of British invention and innovation and all that.
It all started with...
It's interesting that we think of...
When we think about the great prime ministers, and Disraeli and Gladstone get a mention...
But you're suggesting, perhaps, that Peel ought to be high on the list of really great ones.
A lot of his tax reform apparently was accidental, but he got rid of glass duty, which was, you know, that was a duties on glass was one of the terrible, terrible tax.
Because, you know, that and the window tax meant that people didn't have any windows and that the tenement blocks were all built without windows.
And so all the cases of cholera and typhus and smallpox, all the diseases during the Industrial Revolution were made far worse because of these damped, cramped windowless dwellings.
And, you know, and there was a huge lobbying power to keep these taxes in.
Peel got rid of the glass duties.
He didn't actually get rid of windows tax.
That came slightly later.
But it was only Peel, it was only like, it was ten years after Peel.
But it was only because Peel had brought income tax back.
And it was, again, it was very low rates that he was able to get rid of duties and glass and windows.
But Peel's real heroic thing was the Cornwall that he got rid of.
And, you know, he paid for it with his own career.
But, you know, people...
You go to Ireland, and, you know, I was in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, Kilcanomics, and you're still angry about the famine, the great famine.
Right.
And, you know...
The Corn Laws made that famine so much worse than it would otherwise have been.
Because the Corn Laws were introduced to protect British landowners, farmers, against the falling cost of bread and grain after Napoleonic Wars.
And as a result, they put tariffs on imported grain.
And it meant that grain prices stayed high, so that was good for the landowners, but it was terrible for the poor.
This is one of these things like you always get the IEA championing the consumer.
Well, that's the equivalent, because anything that results in lower prices for the consumer has to be a good thing.
And these corn laws pushed up the price of grain.
Britain's population, and Ireland was part of Britain at the time, was exploding in the first half of the 19th century.
Because there was no competition from abroad, agricultural production didn't improve in the way that it should have done.
It got sort of bloated and just inefficient.
And there was loads of grain waiting to be imported from America.
You know, if you think of the expansion of America into the Midwest.
And they were all desperate to export their grain to the UK and Ireland.
And the high cost of imported grain meant that people...
You know, we didn't produce enough grain to feed ourselves anyway, let alone during a potato famine of Ireland's main crop, All Ireland's grain that it produced was sold into mainland Britain.
And because of the Corn Laws, it couldn't afford to import grain to replace the lost potato.
And so a million Irish people, a million people starved.
And another million emigrated to America.
And if you think of the impact on the Irish on America, is it 19 or 20 American presidents claimed to have been of Irish descent?
Just think, from Obama to Kennedy, all these people, just think of the impact of Ireland on America.
Well, that was all, not all, but in large part due to the stupid Corn Laws.
And Peel had the, you know, he stood up and got rid of them.
And the Tories didn't want to get rid of them because the Tories were all landowners, all suited.
Well, indeed.
And he had to get liberal support to do it.
And, but, you know, there's a quite an interesting book by an economist called Sam Wilkin called Secrets of the 1%.
richest people in history and how they made their money from crassus to whoever and he constantly makes the point that a lot of the richest people in history didn't make their money from being brilliant entrepreneurs or risk takers anything like that they got it because they manipulated legislation to suit their own businesses and you know what we would call rent seeking or crony Like Branson buys government monopoly.
You know, he owns the train line or whatever.
He effectively owns a government monopoly and is constantly lobbying for protection of his monopoly.
But...
You know, the great estates of the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Cadogan, the Duke of Westminster, and you think of, you know, the huge parts of central London they all own, those estates were all built on the back of profits from their land made on the back of the corn laws.
And, you know, the Duke of Westminster, even today, is still one of the richest people in the world, and it's all from those stupid corn laws.
You...
Don't like the Corners.
I love your reference to the fact that Mr.
Darcy, when Jane Austen wants to demonstrate just how fuck-off rich Mr.
Darcy is, she talks about how many windows he's got at his home.
I had no idea that...
Well, the window tax lasted so long, and it must have had a tremendous effect on architecture.
There were notches.
So if you had...
The notches changed over the course of history, but it was things like the notches where if you had below seven windows, you paid one tax, and then seven to 14 windows, you paid another tax.
And so these notches actually guided architectural styles.
And you see houses were built with the windows...
But bricked in.
So they gave the homeowner the option to knock the bricks out and put in a window if he wanted.
Or, you know, if the laws changed, they had the option to put a window in there.
That's why you see so many windows bricked up.
But yeah, a guided architecture for, it was John Stuart Mill called it a cause of deformity in buildings.
Well, yeah, I can see that.
There are so many unintended consequences, aren't there, to taxes?
Yeah.
I mean, the window tax...
I mean, there's a great story with the window taxes.
Until the 1690s, we paid half taxes, half money.
And twice a year, tax collectors would come into your home to count the number of fireplaces you had.
A bit like the licence fee guy comes into your house to see if you've got a telly or not.
Yeah.
And the English hated these half taxes...
And originally they'd been paid to the church, but they were made statute by Charles II, I think, who on the whole was a pretty good king, but he gave us half money, which was not such a good thing.
And so we started paying chimney taxes.
You paid, I think it was a shilling per fireplace every six months or something like that.
And then William and Mary became crowned after the Glorious Revolution.
They were crowned.
And they wanted to find a way to ingratiate these new monarchs with the people.
Because remember, you know, there was a lot of loyalty to James II. William was from Holland and so on.
So in the English Bill of Rights, they abolished half money.
And in order to erect a monument of their majesty's goodliness in every hearth through the kingdom or something like that was the reason, was the quote.
So they got rid of hearth money and, you know, William was pretty popular at first.
And then by the mid-1690s, the government's massively short of revenue.
He's got a war in Ireland to fight.
He's fighting off James's allies in Scotland.
It's the eight years war in the continent.
And William's like, how am I going to pay for all of this?
There's also a run on the English coinage going on at the same time, because the coins are worth more as bullion than they are as their face value.
So people are melting down silver and gold coins, particularly silver, and selling the silver on the continent as bullion.
So it's massively short of money.
And there's two solutions to this.
One is the forming of the Bank of England.
And then, you know, that was sort of the beginning of...
The end.
The beginning of the end.
Because presumably once you've got a central bank, that's it.
Yeah, I mean, it's the way of the world.
But, I mean, we had Isaac Newton was warden of the mint for 20 years in the early 1700s.
And he was pretty good, Isaac Newton.
And he put England on the gold standard.
But anyway, the other way that William, they decided they were going to raise this money was window taxes.
And window taxes, the infrastructure was already in place because of half money, but window tax was much more effective because you could just walk past somebody's house and count the number of windows they had, and no engagement with the taxpayer was required.
You didn't have to go into their house.
And so it was, you know, it was a more effective tax.
And it was also, in a funny kind of way, considered progressive, in the sense that the more windows you have, the richer you are likely to be, and therefore the more able to pay your tax.
It was slightly inconsistent because, you know, a large house in the country might have lots of windows, and a small house in London would have very few, and the small house in London would be worth a lot more than the house in the country, but it paid you much lower levels of tax.
So it didn't quite work out, but that was the thinking behind it.
And in the window stacks, it's fantastic because you see the cycle that every tax seems to go through, which is it's enacted at a time of need, usually to fund some kind of war.
It's presented as temporary.
It's always presented as temporary, but it ends up being permanent.
Let me...
Very low amounts of tax payable at first, but it increases over time.
It violates some kind of basic freedom.
In this case, the right to light and to fresh air.
Many go to great lengths to avoid paying it, such as blocking up their windows, so it distorts how people behave.
Not wearing a wig.
Yeah, not wearing a wig, exactly.
And then there are millions of unintended consequences, which gets worse as the tax matures.
In this case, the unintended consequences is it made people ill.
Even after, you know, it went on for, you know, there were like scientific inquiries showing that this tax made people ill.
And there was huge campaigns, pamphlets handed out, songs sung.
Charles Dickens hated the Windows tax.
You know, he went on about how the adage, as free as air is extinct, he called it.
And then...
There's some kind of campaign, a protest, a revolution to get rid of it, and government is slow and slow and slow and reluctant to do it.
And the story is, when the matter was debated in Parliament, some MPs were crying out daylight robbery.
But it wasn't, it was like 1860-something, I think, maybe 1850-something, so it went on for 160, 170...
No, it started in 1690, so 200...
No, my brain's gone again.
170 years, something like that.
That's a long time.
Yeah.
That's a long time.
I think we should just go back in time now, because I've seen his name being cited quite often by Boris Johnson, among others, Ibn al-Khaldun, who's clearly, he ought to be one of our heroes.
Yeah.
Up there with John Cooperthwaite, who we're going to come on to later on.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, he was...
Tunisian?
He was a Tunisian philosopher.
But actually, he wasn't the real hero.
Yeah.
Let me just backpedal a tiny bit.
The real hero was, let me just get his name up here.
Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth caliph.
And Ibn Khaldun was like in the 1200s and 1300s.
But historians argue, how is it that Islam...
Became so mighty so quickly.
It was literally in about 30, 40 years.
In the space of that quicker time, it went from nothing in Saudi Arabia to controlling much of North Africa and much of the Middle East.
But it was all built on low taxes.
Because the Islamic, you know, if you think of the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian Empire, bits of the Roman Empire, burdened with years of war and years of taxes under these heavy things.
And in many cases, these...
States welcomed the Islamic invaders because the Islamic invaders gave them low taxes.
If you converted to Islam, you were made exempt from the poll tax.
Otherwise, you would have to pay the poll tax, and if you didn't pay the poll tax, you were killed.
So it was death, taxes, or Islam.
Which are you going to choose?
Islam.
Everyone chose Islam, and the whole thing was built.
But this guy...
Let me say his name again.
The fourth caliph was a big believer in...
He actually advised his generals not to tax people if the weather was bad, if for some reason there were crop failures, if there was flooding, whatever the reason.
He said, just don't tax them.
And he had this belief...
If the weather was bad, I was thinking, oh, it's raining, they're going to be really unhappy today.
Yeah, no, no, no, because it resulting in unwarranted crop failure.
Yeah.
And because he always, you know, the expression, the Cooper Thwaites expression was the revenue will eventually make its way to the exchequer.
And the wealthier the people, the more able they are to pay taxes.
So do everything that you can to ensure that people are wealthy.
And Ibn al-Khaldun, the guy you cite, the philosophy you cite, is cited by Laffer, Arthur Laffer, who's famous for the Laffer's Curve.
And this idea that higher tax rates do not necessarily mean greater government revenue.
Because with lower taxes, people are more incentivised to work, there is more profit, there is more money flowing through the economy, and so more money makes its way to the exchequer.
But it was this guy, the fourth caliph, who was like the great proponent of it.
Although, have you noticed how whenever Arthur Laffer is cited in the mainstream media these days, it's always to explain why actually his theory doesn't really apply.
All our economics writers are all basically Keynesian, high tax.
They're creatures of the establishment, aren't they?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's in the nature of economics, is that you're trying to solve things that often don't need solving.
And so economists all come up with these theories and they say, well, if the government did this, it leads to that.
And the whole profession is just intrinsically related to government and the setting of policy.
And the idea of do nothing, what Cooperthwaite called positive non-intervention, it's just sort of...
Alien.
Yeah, where's the role for them?
Exactly.
And their expertise.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
This was the great thing about Kalpathway.
He was, you know, banning the Office of National Statistics.
I know.
I'm zigzagging, aren't I? And actually, just go back to the fourth caliph.
Yeah.
Whose name I've forgotten already, but he's not Ibn Khaldun.
He's way, way early.
Talid.
That...
Do you not...
So, are we talking about the first two centuries of Islam, when it was this golden era?
Yeah.
I mean, I think Muhammad was born in 600 and something.
He was his rule.
He only ruled for maybe eight years.
Muhammad was, I think it was 632 to 64, something like that.
He had like 10 years.
He wasn't actually the first caliph.
You call it Caliph?
Caliph.
I think it's Caliph, isn't it?
I don't know.
I've always called it Caliph, but it doesn't mean I'm right.
So the first Caliph is actually Muhammad's father-in-law, called Abu Bakr.
Right.
And this guy, Ali Talib.
I wonder if it's Nassim Talib.
You know the guy.
I wonder if it's the same...
Almost certainly.
Anyway, I wonder if he's a direct descendant.
I would have thought.
But Abu Bakr, on his deathbed, repaid the treasury all the money he'd drawn down from it to rule during his rule.
He paid it back.
And, you know, that's an incredibly selfless thing to do.
But those first four caliphs would have been from about 630 to 660s, something like that, and they were called the Rashidun.
And there's maybe, so it's only a 30-year period.
And they managed to occupy, you know, that was the time of huge expansion.
It continued to grow in the 700s, but that was the time they got us, you know, took most of North Africa and the Middle East.
Right.
And it was all built and loaded.
But they were building those beautiful buildings, the Alhambra and so on in Spain.
That was presumably part of this golden era.
Well, slightly later.
Slightly later.
But you say that later on in Islam, they went the way of all tax regimes and their tax rate increased and they started taxing everyone and they had these dimmies.
Yeah, and you were no longer given exemption if you converted to Islam.
And they did this thing where they really taxed the Jews very heavily.
That seems to be a recurring theme in history.
Recurring theme throughout Jewish history.
And then the Christians in Northern Europe copied them and they started taxing Jews very heavily in Northern Europe.
And, you know, governments are very quick to copy one another if they've got an effective tax system.
But isn't it a shame?
Again, one of these...
But Islam went through the same cycle as every empire.
No taxes at the beginning and high taxes at the end.
We should be celebrating the early days of those golden centuries of early Islam when they had this enlightened tax policy and people were generally free, I imagine.
If you think of great invention, great art, great innovation, great mathematicians, great architects, all these things follow.
Because I thought...
That all that stuff was basically white, liberal, Christian Westerners trying to kind of make Islam feel better about itself for its failures.
There's probably a bit of that going on as well.
Yeah, of course there is.
But nevertheless, wouldn't it be nice to imagine that there were a kind of...
Islamic radicals who were campaigning to kind of restore that low-tax, small-government freedom attitude that prevailed in those golden years.
I bet there are.
Instead of trying to recreate the kind of the horror and the head-choppings off and things like that.
The good stuff.
Yeah.
Well, there probably are.
Yeah, and I bet they're not doing very well.
And they're probably, you know, platformed and smeared and get all this stuff that the same people get over here.
Well, the Imam of Peace, I think he's pretty good on that.
Yeah.
Well, what a shame.
And so, one of our economic models is clearly early Islam.
And the other is another anomalous situation, Hong Kong immediately after the war.
And again, there are so many what-ifs from history that you mentioned the story about how the governor of Hong Kong was imprisoned by the Japanese...
And then within moments of being released from the Japanese POW camp, he goes back to Hong Kong and says, right, we're a British colony again.
He just did it before the Chinese can move in there.
So Hong Kong would not be this free trade entrepot had it not been for that one man.
And then you've got this other hero.
We did have a podcast once dedicated to him.
John Cooperthwaite, or Cowperthwaite, we don't know how to pronounce it.
I think it is actually Cowperthwaite.
Treasury Secretary was he, I think, something like that?
He was Deputy Secretary of the Treasury for ten years, and then he became Treasury Secretary.
And he was so funny.
Because, you know, he was brought up on Adam Smith, studied Adam Smith at St Andrews, and he said he slept with a copy of Wealth of Nations by his bed, which he may have done.
But, you know, all the...
And he's sent out with the British Civil Service in the 1940s to get the colony back on its feet.
He's got a population of 600,000 people at this stage.
It's just had five years of Japanese...
He's talking to a fly, not to me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Martial law.
And, you know, we don't know how poor Hong Kong was, but it was probably on a level with most of Africa or large parts of Africa, maybe not all of it.
And his first job is to get the colony back on its feet.
And he was very observant.
He just walked around and he could just see everyone doing a perfectly good job by themselves.
And so he thought, I don't really need to do anything.
And it was an observation he was glad to make because he was such a big believer in Smith.
But meanwhile, the West is pursuing Keynesian policy.
Keynes was not writing with our situation in mind.
Was his line about that.
And, you know, you read the transcripts of him arguing in the...
Wherever it was they argue.
They're so funny, some of the things he says.
But he...
You know, it went from shantytown to futuristic city-state in about a generation and a half.
And even in the 1950s, you know, there were loads of...
There was a flood of people escaping the war in China and...
The embargoes were placed on trade with China, and it just killed Hong Kong's trade.
But a flood of immigrants coming from China, and they bought their cloth-making skills with them, and so it started exporting, imported all those talents and became a huge centre of the cloth industry, to the point at which Britain and America, two of its largest export partners, They impose tariffs on cotton.
So Hong Kong starts doing artificial fabrics.
Yes.
So whatever was thrown at it, it just found a solution by itself.
Which is counterintuitive for most economists, for example, most experts in government, because they would say, well, it seems to me that the Hong Kong cloth industry has been completely buggered by external matters altogether.
Therefore, we must intervene to...
Well, they probably provide subsidies or something like that.
Yeah, and it just creates...
I mean, and he was brilliant.
And, you know, this...
In 1950, I think per capita GDP in Hong Kong was about $300.
But we don't know that for sure, because one of Cal Perthwaite's things is he stopped people during the Office of National Statistics.
He banned national statistics because people only use them as an excuse to meddle in the economy.
So don't even give them the oxygen.
But anyways, the OECD reckons it was about $300.
Dollars.
And the United Kingdom at the time was about $1,500.
So, you know, five times as big.
And by the 1990s, Hong Kong per capita GDP has exceeded the United Kingdom.
And today, it's 40% higher per capita.
And it's gone, it just completely left the United Kingdom in its wake.
Its population went from 600,000 to like 8 or 9 million.
And tax never exceeded 14% of GDP. So we're back at that 10-15% figure that we were at in 1900 in the United Kingdom.
The ancient tithe.
The tithe was always supposed to be the 10th.
10%.
And it's thought...
And the first tithe, ancient Mesopotamia.
Ezretu, this first tithe was called.
And it's thought it was 10% because we have 10 fingers on our hands.
It's a sort of natural number.
It's an easy...
It's the natural tax rate.
Yeah.
Yeah, so...
But Hong Kong was so successful, Singapore looked at it and went, wow, look how well Hong Kong does.
We'll have some of that.
We'll have some of that.
Copied it, and then South Korea copied it, Taiwan copied it, China started to copy it with things like Shenzhen, you know, capitalism with Chinese characteristics and the famous speech, and Japan copied it to an extent.
No income tax except for the very rich.
No income tax.
And 40% of Hong Kong tax revenue came from land value tax, which we barely have any land value tax in the UK. Should we?
Yeah, of course we should.
And we should tax land, not labour.
And we have council tax, but it's a minuscule portion of overall government revenue.
Right.
And yeah, and it was just so incredibly successful and everyone copied it.
And the public services, again counter-intuitively in Hong Kong, are fantastic.
Best education in the world, top of their healthcare, I think it's like third best educated people in the world, top of Bloomberg's healthcare index, and it's got the best public transport in the world, 99.4% on time rate.
Hong Kong schooling is bloody expensive, but presumably that's the...
Well, people can pay for it because they all earn more money.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Is there no public schools there?
I don't know.
I do know that my eldest, he's basically going to send my granddaughter back to England to educate her privately because it's like 100 grand a year or something or more for schooling.
Okay, well that's a lot of money, but then it's a rich country.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure.
And the people are so motivated.
Now we come...
Because they're not getting bailed out all the time, they're just motivated.
Now we come to the crux of the matter, Dom, which is we've got...
History tells us so much about tax, so many things that are supportive to your and my personal politics, our kind of classical liberal, libertarian instincts.
You've got the fourth caliph, Ali, whatever.
You've got Ibn Khaldun, so from the Islamic world you have that example.
You have the shining example of Hong Kong and Singapore, and you also have these warnings from history, the decline of the Roman Empire, which we haven't even touched on, but I think it wasn't that...
I don't even cover it.
Don't even cover it, but I imagine that taxation had something to do with that.
Yeah, I mean, heavily, heavily taxed.
That's one of the reasons many of the former Roman Empire welcomed the Islamic conquerors.
It was just the relief from Roman taxes.
So...
Anyone but a fool would realise that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favour of low tax.
So why are we in a situation today where we've got this election coming up, possibly in the past by the time this podcast goes out, That everyone's competing on how they can spunk more of your taxpayers' money up against the wall on pointless, vanity projects?
It's the perversion of democracy and it's just the flaw in the system.
The electoral system that we have incentivises politicians to promise stuff in order to get elected.
And the promises they make have to be...
Kept.
And so that just creates burden after burden.
And those burdens go on forever.
And once you've got something in place, it's very hard to get rid of.
You know we only finished paying off our World War I debt in 2015.
Did we?
A hundred years later.
Who did we owe it to?
The Americans.
Oh, yeah.
They were bastards, weren't they?
Yeah, they were.
But, you know, and similarly, World War II debt was only paid off.
Well, they really screwed us.
They gave the Germans and the Japanese an easy ride, and we were...
That was one of the really interesting things about World War II, and why it so hurt the English, the British, because after most wars...
You can tax the conquered people.
You get reparations, you can plunder, and then you can tax.
And so, you know, that way, that was why it was actually in the interest of rulers in olden times to go conquering places because it was a source of revenue.
But World War II was like the first great war where the winning side didn't get the booty after the event.
We must have got some reparations from Germany.
But, you know, we didn't get...
The huge amounts that perhaps you should get.
And I'm not sure I quite mean that, but you know what I mean.
And the huge amounts that you might have expected.
And so that's probably as much as anything why Germany and...
Japan won the peace, if you like, in a way that we didn't.
But yeah, so, but we're coming back to politicians today.
So they take on these obligations and these promises have to be kept.
And that just, you know, debt is how a lot of it will be paid for as well as taxes.
But debt is not only is it a tax on the future, it's taxation without representation.
Because my kids are going to be paying for stuff and their kids are going to be paying for stuff that's being promised now that they've got no say in.
They don't even have the meaningless vote.
So it's quite bad, but the system perpetrates it.
Now, Lawson was the last Chancellor who made it his mission to get rid of taxes.
And his thing was, with each budget, I'm going to get rid of a tax.
And so taxes in the UK shrunk as a result.
But under Gordon Brown, the tax code trebled.
And then George Osborne came to power promising to simplify and it doubled again under George Osborne.
He's such a wanker, isn't he?
I mean, on so many levels.
He is.
And he set up the Office of Tax Simplification and the tax code doubled.
Now, it's...
It's just a lot easier to add to stuff than it is to take it away.
And I've got this idea, the main theory of the book, you know, I used to think that all society's ills stem from our flawed system of money.
And if we can fix money, then everything else will fall into place.
And that's slowly starting to happen with things like Bitcoin and so on.
But closely related to this, if you think of zombie films, there's always this trope of the zero patient.
And, you know, the hero of the zombie film has got to get to the zero patient.
That's the place where the virus started.
And if he can get to the zero patient and kill the zero patient, then he'll save the world.
Or maybe not kill the zero patient, maybe the zero patient's got the antidote.
You know, one way or the other, the zero patient is the way that the hero saves the world.
And my theory is, is that in a society, our system of tax is the zero patient.
So if you fix the tax system, everything else will start to fix itself from there.
And, you know, our tax system is terrible.
It's inconsistent.
Like I say, UK, 10 million words, our tax code is.
To put that number in perspective, 10 million words, what does that mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
That's 14 times the length of the Bible.
That is how long our tax code is.
It is more words than most people read in their entire lifetime.
And most of those words, if you think how big the Bible is, they're taxed 14 times the length.
And no wonder it's such a mess.
And the longer it is, the more loopholes there are.
And one group has the resources to exploit the loopholes and the rest of us don't.
And so the thing creates, it's inherently inequitable.
Hong Kong's tax code, 1.5% the length of ours.
One and a half.
It's like 70 times shorter.
And, you know, it functioned beautifully.
And so, like, yeah, we've got this general election now.
Not one person is going, I'm going to fix the tax code.
That is what we're going to do.
We're going to fix the tax code.
And we're going to fix taxes.
And we're going to make them lower and simpler and more consistent.
Not one person is talking about it.
And all the people who might have said such things have been marginalised.
People like Steve Baker.
Yeah.
Steve Baker is, I've been following his Twitter feed, tweeting out kind of Keynesian, fluffy...
He has to, and I actually asked him, I wrote an article for Unheard the day before yesterday, and I'm quite friendly with Steve.
Yeah.
And I sent him a message saying, would you retweet my Unheard article?
Because, you know, it's a good endorsement for you.
He said, I can't.
That's it.
They have such a tight control.
You know, the silence of the Rhys-Mogg.
Yeah.
It's extraordinary.
Yeah, the silence of the Rhys-Mogg.
And even...
I've noticed this with Gove.
It's not like...
Michael Gove is exceptionally well-read.
He's perfectly alive to all the kind of things we've been saying.
But does he ever talk about it?
No, he doesn't.
He's switched off that part of his brain.
They're scared, but they don't...
Like, if you said, I'm going to reform the tax system, I'm going to slash it, I'm going to make it simpler, I'm going to make it fairer, I don't think you would find any opposition to that.
No, you wouldn't, particularly not from the working classes who are courting at the moment.
I mean, you just think of how complicated your tax form is.
And most people don't know because they just pay income tax and their company deducts the money and that's it.
But, you know, you're a freelancer, you have your own company, you start to realise how...
You know, what a mess the thing is.
And, you know, there are bits of it that are simple and work well.
But, you know, the biggest injustice of all is that we tax labour so heavily and we do not tax land.
And so you've got this completely distorted economy as a result, which is totally geared in favour of owning assets.
And it's like, if you think you're a young person starting out with nothing, the only thing you've got is your labour.
And yet we tax it heavily and constantly.
And the more you earn, the more you get taxed.
And it just makes, it's inevitable that the system is completely skewed against the worker.
And what politician is talking about this imbalance?
You know, why is our society geared around the ownership of assets so badly?
And you look at landowners.
When I say taxing land, I'm not talking about taxing farmers.
Everyone gets worried about poor farmers.
You know, farmland has very little value.
I'm talking about prime city centre land.
Now, the...
I'm not talking about taxing the house.
I'm talking about taxing the land in its unimproved state, which is quite easy to assess.
And I'm not going to go into too much detail here.
And it's prime city centre real estate.
It solves so many problems.
It solves all the taxing of the intangible economy.
Google and Starbucks putting its IP in Holland and all that crap that goes on.
That's fine.
You don't have to pay tax on your income.
You don't have to pay tax on it.
You just pay tax on the land that you use.
If you want exclusive rights to a plot of land and you want government to protect your title to that land, then you pay a fee to the community.
And it goes all the way back to the physiocrats of the 17th century who believed that the land in its unimproved state belonged to everyone.
Because there's two types of wealth.
You have the wealth that...
A human being is created as a result of his own endeavour, and you have the wealth that nature gave to us.
And the wealth that nature gave to us belongs to everyone, and the wealth that you make by building this fantastic house on the land, that's yours to keep.
So it's all about taxing the unimproved thing.
But who's talking about that?
Nobody.
You know, their mansion tax was sort of land value tax in a bastardised form.
And you should have land value tax replace other taxes.
What's going to happen inevitably is they're going to give it to us in some bastardised form in addition to other taxes.
It should replace other taxes.
That's the key thing about it.
But no politician is talking about this, about serious tax reform.
And if we want to make this country better, that is what we need.
Serious tax reform.
And I'm going to give you a little carrot, Daniel, a little carrot of hope at the end of this interview now.
Which is, I went and did a talk at the IEA, Institute of Economic Affairs, about a month ago.
And Mark Littlewood there interviewed me, and there was, I don't know, 30, 40 people in the audience, 50 maybe.
And it was just like a great hour.
Mark Littlewood loves this book.
And everyone at the IEA is all over it.
And they just bought three boxes of this book and then made me sign it to every single cabinet minister.
Did they?
And they gave the book to each cabinet minister as their Christmas present.
So I've gone for Sajid from Dominic Frisbee, for Jacob from Dominic Frisbee, for Boris from Dominic Frisbee.
So, you know, judging by what's going on in this election at the moment, none of them have read it.
But they've all been given this book and they sent me the thank you note from Sajid Javid saying thanks for the book.
Liz Truss loves it.
Of course she does.
She's all over it.
She's read the book and she gave me a really nice quote for the back cover.
So a copy of this book is in the hands of those people that can actually affect some kind of change.
Please, Lord, let some of them read it, go, I say this is rather a good book.
Have you read this, Sajid?
But he's like the one we really want to read.
I don't know if he's the genuine article or if he just talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.
I rather suspect he talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.
But we'll see.
But if those guys can get it and they get the point that if we're to save this country, we need to start with our system of tax, then maybe.
Maybe.
I think that's a natural ending, Dom.
Thank you very much.
That was really good.
And you're so good, we're going to have to have you back on again.
Anytime.
Very soon.
Anytime.
Because we haven't even talked about Bitcoin or gold or...
All fantastic subject.
What's the book called, James?
It's called...
Daylight Robbery.
Daylight Robbery.
How tax shaped our past and will change our future by Dominic Frisby.
Well done.
Well done.
Really good work.
Congrats.
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