There is a moral case to be made for low taxation. We used to talk about this a lot as a Party. In our modern phase, it seems we don't - which is a pity.
I've been thinking of it today, as I've been reading Newt Gingrich's To Renew America - the book he wrote in 1994, whilst Speaker of the House - during the heady days of the Republican insurgency, of the Contract with America, before the reassertion of Clinton's Presidential authority and Gingrich's fall. It's a remarkable work of optimism and considerable thought.
Gingrich believes in that moral case, too. Speaking of the US economy, he had this to say:
In 1950, the median household paid 5 percent of its income in federal taxes... [b]y 1990 that figure had risen to 24 percent... Imagine how much better off the average family would be if they could spend... more on their own children, their own education, their own savings. Are we really getting such efficient, effective government providing such vital services that it is better for the government to have the money than it is for the family that earned it?
Reading it, you feel Gingrich's outrage at the diminution of choice and freedom those families suffer at the hands of the greedy government, the frustration families must feel as their incomes are snatched from them and frittered away by inefficient and wasteful bureaucracies "for their own good".
Why do I choose to talk about it today? Well - what do you think the state's take from the median household income is in modern Britain?
Would any of us, even as the wildest joke, suggest that it's as low as 24%, the figure that so outraged Newt?
In Brown's benighted Britain, that case is a moral one indeed.
