Letter in the Telegraph:
Robin Hood was anti-tax
SIR – Bill Nighy (Comment, February 10) supports a “Robin Hood tax” on financial transactions. Transaction taxes are almost always paid, in the end, by consumers – not, as their advocates suppose, by the professionals in the markets.
Robin Hood is supposed to have made a career out of liberating taxes unjustly levied by the Sheriff of Nottingham and returning them to the poor they had been extorted from. To invoke his memory for a plan to tax the public more heavily in order to give politicians more to spray around the world is a little odd.
Tim Worstall
Messines, Portugal
Apologies, that last crack nicked from someone in the comments here: Brian maybe?
If you mean:
“You seem to be forgetting what Robin Hood actually did. He took money which King John and his agents had extorted from his subjects, and returned it to them. The so-called Robin Hood Tax is simply a way taking yet more money from the productive sector for the state to tip into its bottomless pit of vote-grabbing redistribution and waste.”
then your apology is accepted, for it was I (in the comments there, not here).
If not, please forgive my presumption.
You’re still discussing something other than the point.
Fail.
A kind though, Tim, but I wouldn’t have called it a little odd.
I’d more likely have called it .
(expletive deleted)
“You’re still discussing something other than the point. ”
Surely the point is to derail attempts to present this tax as something beneficial (as Robin Hood is perceived to be), rather than as just another grab at legitimately created wealth (which is what it is).
T4Y: at the moment, you appear to think that ‘the point’ is that anyone who opposes this idea is a right-wing imbecile. You’ll find numerous arguments against it here and elsewhere, so I rather thin it is you who is avoiding the point, by trying to level charges of irrelevance at everyone else.
I liked the letter next to yours:
Bulk-buying for girlfriends
SIR – As part of its marketing strategy, my local Tesco is offering “three for £10” on Valentine’s cards.
Unless the store is frequented by certain high-profile philandering sports stars, I struggle to see the attraction of this.
Keith Edwards
Tattersall, Lincolnshire
They say that over 3,000 trillion dollars a year is traded on the markets, and that margins are 10% or more. I told them to close the website and open a trading desk. Mind you they also said that despite these massive margins, the tax will simply be absorbed without customers paying more because “competition is too tight”. I’m starting to understand why the campaign is supported by professional rent-seekers and actors rather than high-profile financiers.