The mansion tax

One of the principles of a fair and sensible tax system, says Philip Collins [in The Times], should be to avoid taxing effort and work, and to target "idle wealth", notably property, instead. Yet currently 44% of tax receipts comes from income tax, while a "meagre" 5% is from land and buildings. This is why the Lib Dems' proposed mansion tax is such a good idea. Council tax in its current form is crazily outdated: tax bands are still based on 1991 house prices, and all properties valued above £320,000 in that year now fall in the highest tax band. So in some areas, a £10m mansion will pay the same tax as a one-bed council flat. A graded levy, proportional to the value of the property, would redress that absurd imbalance. It would be easier to collect ("unlike income, property is visible and that makes the tax harder to evade"). It would flatten out the volatility of the housing market. It might even help narrow the gaping north-south divide: 60% of the entire property tax bill would be paid by just four London boroughs. A graded tax on property would make far more economic sense than our present system, and would be much "fairer than taxing hard work". (The Week, 9 April 2011)

There is little ‘work’ done within the present artificial economy. Little is done that an individual would be prepared to pay for with his own money; it is extremely difficult to get anyone to do anything useful for one in a useful way, i.e. so that one’s freedom to do other things is increased, and not decreased by supervising unreliable people and dealing with the problems they create.

‘Work’ which is paid for, directly or indirectly, by taxation (freedom of action which has been confiscated from individuals) is a different matter altogether and should be given another name, such as oppression. Teachers, doctors and social workers do not work, they impose on people what other people wish to impose upon them, and should be recognised as oppressors.

In Philip Collins’s preferred world, oppression, i.e. reducing the freedom of others, is to be recognised as virtuous, so that its perpetrators should retain untaxed any rewards in the way of freedom for themselves which they derive from it.

On the other hand, those who have accumulated freedom in the form of capital assets which might facilitate their being able to ‘work’ meaningfully (i.e. independently of the collective), should have their freedom constantly eroded in order to increase the resources available to reward agents of the collective, who devote their lives to the reduction of freedom.

The ‘fair’ economy should be devoted to the continuous reduction of freedom; this is its only raison d’être, and ‘effort’ which is applied to oppression is ‘virtuous’.

The disappointing ‘genius factory’

In the Sunday Telegraph magazine, Seven, there is a review of a book called The Genius Factory by David Plotz.

Scouting around for a hero to save the human race, few of us would immediately target the world of optometry. But, in 1980, Robert Graham, a millionaire who’d made a fortune from shatterproof spectacle lenses, announced a new project doing just that. His Repository for Germinal Choice would produce a master race of inspirational leaders by matching up high-IQ women with the sperm of Nobel Prize winners and other “geniuses”. (Seven magazine, 3 April 2011, article ‘Whatever happened to the babies bred to be geniuses’ by Lucinda Everett.)

I would not have thought that Nobel Prize winners would provide a particularly suitable population from which to produce either inspirational leaders or exceptionally high IQs. They have above-average IQs to be sure, but also personalities that lead to socially recognised success in their lifetime, which requires an ability to work within the career frameworks and socially acceptable ways of thinking of their time.

“If you compare them [the people born as a result of these matches] with a random sample of Americans of the same age, they’re slightly better, but nothing astounding,” says David Plotz, author of The Genius Factory, a book about Graham’s experiment. (Ibid.)

‘Some haven’t made anything of themselves’, says David Plotz. That is scarcely surprising. Personally, I have encountered every opposition throughout my life so as to make it as difficult as possible for me to do anything that might appear out of the ordinary.

Nevertheless, I have given quite enough evidence of ability in at least some areas to justify support to do more, but I have not received it.

We invite Doron Blake (named in this article), and any other product of this scheme, or anyone who thinks they may have a higher IQ than they might appear to have, to consider coming to join us, the high-IQ ghetto of Great Britain, and join in our cooperative efforts to build up our independent university, with several departments supported by a business empire, until such time as it is able to get sufficiently substantial support to dispense with supporting business activities.

Perhaps Robert Graham would like to come himself, or at least contribute support from a distance.

How not to improve prospects for the able

Ministers want to end the head-start given to rich children, whose parents land them great internships and jobs ‘by having a word down the tennis club with people that matter’, a coalition source said. ... [Mr Clegg said] ‘A country that is socially mobile bases opportunity on your ability and drive, not on who your father’s friends are.’ (Daily Mail 5 April 2011.)

This is certainly not a socially mobile country. Opportunity is not based on ‘ability and drive’ except inversely. In my experience, opportunity is rigorously denied to ability and drive.

One rationalisation that is made use of, in the process of blocking the really able, is blaming parents for pushing the person of ability in some way, as happened to me.

Although my parents were in no position to provide me with contacts, it was the ‘Old Boys’ Network’ that gave me any chances I have ever had in attempting to recover from my ruined ‘education’. The ‘family connections’ involved were not my own, but those of other people, and so they were not very stable or wholehearted, but I would have been even worse off without them.

The Old Boys’ Network might have been more useful to me if not so intimately intertwined with the Old Girls’ Network, which was extremely active in opposing me. In this sense feminism has been a bad thing, and has made it harder for people like me to rise from humble backgrounds - and probably even from wealthy backgrounds. There are now many more statusful and influential women who, in my experience, energetically oppose the rise of a woman with drive and ability.

I have clawed my way up painfully with all gratitude to capitalism (starting with no money) and to the Old Boys’ Network, although it largely turned against me - on account of my drive and ability, perhaps; I might have done better if I had had less of both, to judge from the academically statusful people who blocked my path. The school and university system provided me with nothing but opposition.

[Mr Clegg and Mr Duncan Smith] insisted the strategy is not ‘social engineering’ but about ‘creating a level playing field’. ‘We want a society in which success is based on what you know, not who you know or which family you were born into,’ they said. (Ibid.)

If you want a level playing field, eliminate state education and state-funded universities which stack the odds too heavily against drive and ability.

Your ability to rise should depend on what you know? But one is only supposed to ‘know’ things in which one has a socially recognised ‘qualification’, and it is easy to prevent a person from getting those. And even if what one knows is recognised, what actually matters (or what ought to matter from the point of view of making useful contributions) is whether one is able, or motivated, to do anything with it.

More rewards for the unforethoughtful

A new non-means-tested pension scheme, to start about 2015, is supposed to provide support greater than the current basic state pension and the current means-tested supplement combined, but it will not be available to existing pensioners.

A new flat-rate pension is expected to be worth at least £155 a week, it emerged last night. Ministers will next week press ahead with proposals for the most radical reform of the state pension system since its inception. The new system ... will provide a guaranteed level of support greater than the amount people currently get through the basic state pension and means-tested pension credit. Women, who often do not receive a full state pension as a result of taking time out of work to look after children, will be the biggest winners as a result of the flat-rate payment. But it will only be available to people reaching the state pension age from now, rather than existing pensioners. (Daily Mail, 1 April 2011.)

All existing pensioners must have fulfilled the requirement of making qualifying contributions every year without fail for a large number of years. They have demonstrated conscientiousness and forethought, which are correlated with high IQ. So they are certainly not the sort of people who should be rewarded (according to the modern ideology). This would be against the rule of modern society, which is that resources are to be taken away from sections of the population with above average IQs and bestowed upon a population with a lower average IQ.

The population which is to benefit from a non-means-tested flat-rate pension will, apparently, include many who fail to make the presently-required number of payments, including women who take time off work to have children and do not make voluntary payments to fill the gap. This seems to be a less highly selected population than those who have demonstrated conscientiousness, and could include individuals with a wide range of IQs.

All current pensioners receiving the full basic pension were so conscientious that they never missed out on a qualifying year. They will continue to receive only the basic pension, thus staying well below the poverty line, unless they are eligible for the means-tested supplement, and are prepared to submit themselves to the process of applying for it.

‘The question of ethics with regard to pension policy is one of the issues on which Oxford Forum could be producing fundamental critical analyses if it were provided with adequate funding. We appeal for such funding to enable us to write and publish on this and similar issues, which are currently only discussed in the context of pro-collectivist arguments.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

State pension: 65% below the poverty line

From time to time someone complains that the state pension, together with the means-tested part, is becoming less and less adequate to cover the most obvious, basic costs of keeping physically alive.

A pension of £10,000 a year will barely cover the basics such as food, fuel and utility bills. It is below the minimum income standard set by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which estimates somebody needs at least £14,400 a year to escape poverty....The full basic state pension is £97.65 a week [i.e. £5078 per annum]. (Daily Mail, 30 March 2011.)

The fact that a means-tested supplement to the pension is available will never be any good to me, or to anyone who is here now, because we would not apply for a means-tested benefit even if we became eligible for it. One simply would never have anything to do with what could only be got by exposing oneself to scrutiny and ‘assessment’.

Throughout the four decades when I paid in voluntary contributions for myself, and encouraged everyone here to do the same, I did so because the eventual pension would be ‘as of right’ and not to any extent means-tested, even if what was paid out ‘as of right’ was at the whim of the government.

I see also from today's Mail that pensioners with savings who go into ‘care homes’ will find themselves paying more, to subsidise those who do not have to pay fees because they do not have savings. That is better, at any rate, than making all pensioners, whether they are in ‘care homes’ or not, pay a tax to the government to subsidise those who go into these ‘homes’, as was at one time suggested.

Making people pay for living in these prison-homes is all right if that is really what they choose for themselves, i.e. provided they cannot be forced to go into a state (or private) death camp against their will, but can be left alone to starve to death at home if they prefer. Unfortunately, I believe this is not the case, and pensioners can easily be ‘sectioned’, or the current equivalent thereof, by a couple of authorised medical sadists (doctors). Even if not legally coerced in this way, I doubt whether many in ‘care homes’ could be said to have chosen what they are being forced to undergo.

Jefferson on debt

Thomas Jefferson (one of the Founding Fathers of the United States) said, in effect, that the first duty of a government was not to let the country get into debt.

I ... place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. (Letter to William Plumer, 1816)

Realistically, one might go further and say that the first duty of a government is to ensure that the country is as rich as possible and also always increasingly so, and that its defences against invasion by other countries are as strong as possible. This will prevent it from being at the mercy of other countries in various ways.

For a time Britain and America were able to improve their position, partly as a result of being relatively difficult to invade. So long as a country is building up its capital it is having to be realistic. But when sufficient margin of advantage has been built up, this gives it the freedom to abandon realism and reduce its resources by setting up social game plans which do not need to have any relation to reality.

For a century now a game plan about social engineering and ‘education’ has been operative and has contributed significantly to the destruction of this country’s resources. Now the country is bankrupt but this does not mean that there is a return to realistic considerations. Defence is the first thing to be axed so that the ‘essential’ games, such as education, medicine, general interference and ‘aid’ to poorer countries, can continue to be played.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Apocalypse Now

Apparently, if meltdown cannot be averted at one of the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan, radioactive material will spew up into the atmosphere and could be carried 200 miles by winds.

This is what happens when the scientific resources which arose from a small ‘pampered’ upper class with a higher than average IQ have become available for the use of massive populations with an egalitarian ideology.

The scientific advances in question were made largely as a result of a few members of the pampered upper class having the freedom to do research which they did not have to justify to anyone else until they had done it.

The ‘privileged’ populations to which they belonged, and their influence on the running of the affairs of their countries, have been continuously, and by now drastically, reduced.

‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ was the cry as the Welfare State came on in Britain. Since then the population of the world has vastly increased, countries are run by more or less democratically elected leaders and not by hereditary aristocracies. Many of these countries, using ‘public’ money, can afford to make use of scientific advances to provide what their enormous populations now need (or consider themselves to need) in ever more dangerous ways.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments

Robbing Jeremy to subsidise Wayne

The transfer of resources from populations with higher IQs to those with lower IQs continues. Herewith two examples:

(1) £900 of higher university fees (paid by those who are not ‘poor’ enough) to go to subsidise the ‘poorest’ university students. A population with higher IQs on average will pay more so that a population with lower IQs on average will pay less.

(2) Pensioners receiving Pension Credit (i.e. the means-tested part of the state pension which you get if you have very little capital, whether saved or inherited) to get £120 per annum reduction in their energy bills, the cost of this being borne by other customers of the companies, including (of course) pensioners who do not receive Pension Credit. Again, a population with a higher average IQ will pay more so that a population with a lower average IQ will pay less.

Latest in the destruction of liberty

copy of a letter to a philosopher

There go on being terrible developments which directly damage us, or show underlying attitudes which are hostile to us, but I can squeeze out very little comment – and that in a way that can be, and is, ignored.

(1) Pharmacies: if you go to buy a non-prescription medication you are questioned about who it is for and whether they are taking any other medication. If you go again in a few days’ time to buy more, you are refused. The concept of keeping a stock of basic things so it can be used when necessary is not acceptable, nor is building it up if it has been depleted. Hence the cost of living rises to include going abroad to replenish stocks.

(2) 37% of 16-year-olds cannot obtain a C grade GCSE in maths and English. We know that GCSEs have been massively dumbed down, so is that not evidence that the average IQ of the population has been successfully shifted downwards? No, it is justification for prolonging the school-prison day. 10 hours is suggested, and prison on Saturday mornings as well. And, of course, for those with high IQs, as well as those with low IQs.

Quite horrific. From the time I was 14 onwards, I regarded the school day as a bad experience to be recovered from when I got home in order, just possibly, to do something I could get something out of. With a 10-hour day there would be no possibility even of a glimpse of freedom in the evening.

(3) An onslaught on inheritance tax is anticipated, taking considerations of ‘fairness’ into account. I know it is considered ‘unfair’ that anyone should have anything they can leave to their offspring. But it fact it is ‘unfair’ that those with the greatest assets and probably the highest average IQ should not be able to leave these in entirety to their offspring, who are likely to have the greatest need for protection from the state educational system, and will be most disadvantaged by being exposed to it.

The relevant departments of my unfunded independent university are effectively censored and suppressed. They have been prevented for decades from publishing analyses of the complex issues involved, while misleading and tendentious representations of them have continued to flood out from socially recognised sources. I hereby apply for financial support on a scale at least adequate for one active and fully financed university research department, to all universities, and to corporations or individuals who consider themselves to be in a position to give support to socially recognised academic establishments.

Blank slates with 'interests'

copy of a letter to a voluntary worker

There are fundamental ways in which the modern ideology is against us; in its hatred of capitalism and its hatred of IQ. These are not so independent as they may appear to be and, as I think, arise from the same underlying hatred of centralised psychology.

In a letter to a potential supporter, which is already on my blog, I said that the forces which destroyed my education and my life were the same forces that are destroying civilisation.

The antagonism to exceptional ability is not expressed overtly. However, in fact everything is geared against it.

Consider the extraordinary, old-fashioned attitude expressed by the Reverend Mother who nearly managed to give me a chance in life by letting me take the School Certificate exam at 13. She was about 40 years older than me, so had lived a substantial part of her life in the pre-1945 world.

She was prepared to accept that there was such a thing as innate ability and to draw conclusions about how it would develop at later ages.

So in her testimonial to Oxford she said that she recommended me unreservedly. I was more than merely talented, she said, and certain to contribute significantly to the intellectual life of my time.

I was surprised at her being willing to express such certainty. However good I was at taking exams at an early age, how could you draw conclusions from that about what I would do as an adult? And, after all, I had no particular intention of contributing to anything; I thought that all I wanted to do was to do some research in some science or other, and probably write some books, the latter seeming to be a natural thing to do, although at that time there was nothing in particular that I wanted to express.

But, if you are prepared to trust your perceptions, maybe you can predict quite accurately how a certain type of personality will relate to its social environment in later life.

Attitudes quite different from the Reverend Mother’s were expressed by everyone else, both at the same time and earlier.

My father, fobbing me off from finding out how to take degrees in science subjects, and expressing no doubt the received wisdom of the local educational establishment, would say that I couldn’t tell from what interested me now what I would want to do later. Only the passage of many years could reveal this. Perhaps I would not want to do anything academic at all, or perhaps I would want to write books about the architecture of ancient Greece. So meanwhile I should not do what I thought I wanted to do immediately.

The modern attitude is that there are no individual characteristics, so nothing one does can be regarded as evidence that one might do much more if provided with opportunity. Also there is no longer any respect for the underlying common factor, which used to be called the ‘g’ factor, and which was recognised as the predominant factor in performance in any field.

Nowadays a fictitious factor of ‘interest’ is supposed to be all-important. So nothing I have ever done has to be regarded as justifying giving me opportunity to go ahead in any field on a more adequate scale than the best I ever had in the past, or on any scale at all.

However, as one observes people’s reactions in practice, it seems that any evidence of ability which one gives or has ever given is, subconsciously or otherwise, recognised as a threat that one might do something really significant if not bound hand and foot with barbed wire. So it is a justification for choking off every penny of support from every quarter.