Freedom should mean more pounds in OUR pockets

Thursday February 28, 2008

Cutting taxes gives people greater freedom to make their own decisions, argues Matthew Elliott

Freedom is not simply an abstract concept. Whilst the philosophy behind the word is undoubtedly rich and detailed, that is not its most important facet. The true importance of freedom is firmly planted in gritty reality. What we can buy from our shops to drink, eat or smoke; where and when we can consume our purchases; what we can say and who to. In short – how life can be lived.

Financial matters are essential to day-to-day life. If you are free to eat a chocolate bar, that is all well and good, but if you do not have the money in your pocket to buy it then that freedom remains hypothetical. It is welcome, and better than being banned from buying chocolate bars, but still a hypothetical pleasure at best.

Therein lies taxation’s initial and most obvious impact on our freedom – in hoovering up 42% of our national wealth every year, the state hobbles the freedom of taxpayers. Every year, each of us is denied the opportunity to use our freedom to purchase, save or invest on innumerable occasions due to the simple fact that we do not have the money to do so any money – it has been taken by the taxman, and with it goes another slice of our freedom.

Often this is a side-effect of taxes levied simply in order to raise money for the Treasury’s coffers. When challenged on the topic the Chancellor would simply shrug his shoulders, perhaps even apologise for the inconvenience, but explain that he simply had to raise taxes to fund his spending plans.

Pernicious

More recently, though, the limiting impact of taxation on personal freedom has been much more deliberate and much more pernicious. Tax, opponents of individual freedom have realised, is a tool. If you can’t (yet) take away someone’s freedom to drink, smoke or eat what he wishes, then taxing the activity is the next best thing. On commodities such as cigarettes, alcohol, petrol – and soon on “unhealthy” foods, if we are not careful – there is a hefty tax designed to limit people’s freedom to buy them.

Read any article by proponents of Green politics and you will find that taxation is as essential a weapon in their arsenal as it was for the anti-smoking campaigners before them. Tax has moved on from being an accidental inhibitor of freedom to being an aggressively used tool – a deliberate roadblock laid down in the individual’s way.

But the collection of tax is only one side of the coin. Where does the money go after it is collected? Huge amounts of money are wasted, of course. When you put Ministers with little or no management experience in charge of gigantic, unwieldy service organisations or put large budgets in the control of unaccountable suits that is almost inevitable.

Billions

Even after waste, the billions of pounds left over form the lifeblood of the agencies and quangos that invade our freedom, they are used to pay for the thousands of heckling adverts that tell us what to do and what not to do, and they are the muscle behind the Government speeches about new bans, restrictions and limitations that are churned out week by week.

In an innocent world, low taxes would be good for freedom simply because the more of your own money you are allowed to keep, the more free you are to live your life as you wish. In a political world increasingly interested in control, prohibition and talking down to the general populace, taxation has become a deliberately used accessory to limit people’s freedom.

By releasing to civil society areas of public service currently run wastefully and poorly by the state, we can save money and improve essential services. By cutting taxes we can free people to live as they wish, free everyone to make their own decisions and free ourselves from the bossy adverts and patronising public officials paid for, so offensively, with our own hard-earned money.

Matthew Elliott is director of the TaxPayers Alliance