A neat coincidence

“If they are making money in UK, then they should pay UK tax.” (comment on a newspaper article)

“Should pay” is one thing, “Can actually be made to pay” is another. The rights and wrongs of it are something else again, because whether people ought to pay tax depends, surely, on how the money is “made”? It is immoral and harmful to for the state take money from the wages of labour, which has become the principal source of public revenue.

The only taxes that people can be made to pay are those that fall on fixed property eg land. All the others can be and are avoided and evaded.

By a strange and neat coincidence, the only tax that the state has a moral right to charge is one on the rental value of land. Or perhaps it is not a coincidence, since it suggests that the world is better ordered than is generally realised.