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| GOP Not Dead Yet | Democratic Message Out This Week |
"The Fact Is, It Is Tax"
by Christopher Chantrill
June 11, 2006 at 6:05 pm
YEARS AGO, back in the 1960s, veteran British journalist William Rees-Mogg had lunch with a young Irish businessman, Tony O’Reilly.
The young lad was selling Irish butter at the time and he managed to persuade the cranky journalist that Ireland made the finest butter in the world
coming fresh from cows that had personally kissed the Blarney stone, that Ireland had just entered on an economic renaissance that would spread far beyond the dairy industry, and that one of the leaders of the renaissance would be my young interlocutor, Tony O’Reilly.
Well, today Anthony O’Reilly is Ireland’s first billionaire. His Ireland has a per-capita income higher that Britain.
O’Reilly’s view is that the main reason for the Irish economic “miracle” has been the low level of corporate tax in Ireland... He comments that the Irish miracle is not “because the pubs are great, the golf is great and the climate is, well . . . the fact is, its tax.”
Do you mind if I repeat that last bit?
The fact is, it is tax.
Thank you. Let us continue.
Obviously, a 30 per cent [corporate] tax rate [in Britain] is less attractive to international business than 12.5 per cent [in Ireland]. London has therefore become less attractive than Dublin. Like water running downhill, companies will move from London to Dublin, or to other low-tax countries.
Like e-Stonia, for instance. Yes. As the Democrats here in the United States vote against the Death Tax and sensible reductions in taxes on capital other countries are taking unilateral action. They are lowering their tax rates because they know that the marginal tax rate is important for economic growth and international competitiveness.
Did I mention that marginal economics was invented 135 years ago simultaneously in Britain and Germany? Did I mention that you very seldom get the feeling that many politicians understand this little bit of science 135 years later? You think that maybe we have a problem?
The latest information is that the outflow of international companies from Britain is accelerating. There are at least 40 major companies in the pipeline to move; the sums involved run into hundreds of billions of pounds... They are looking at Holland, Ireland... Estonia even.
In the United States corporate income tax is higher even than in Britain... I wonder what Hank Paulson thinks about that.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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