Why is the right not making the moral case for lower taxes?

There was an article recently in the increasingly woke but still useful New Scientist which attempted to gauge the degree to which luck was responsible for who we are and, hence, an individual’s life circumstances. I think it came in third place after genes and the environment – which are also both down to luck, really, I suppose. The thesis seemed to be we pay too little attention to the role of luck when considering why one man is a millionaire and the other is a lavatory attendant or a book reviewer.

I would beg to differ. Ascribing luck to one’s unfortunate position in life is very prevalent indeed and is as left-wing an argument as blaming the class system or the colour of one’s skin (although with slightly less justification). Anything which devolves responsibility from the individual to something else – especially, perhaps, blind fate – is necessarily a left-wing argument, as it eschews any notion of bad life choices, a lack of diligence, inherent stupidity, wickedness, idleness, failed education, torpor, a dearth of imagination and so on. Blaming fate is a convenient way of exculpating oneself. Of course luck can play a part in the eventual destination of a human being, but it is only part – a small part – of the story, I think.

I mention this because we have been hearing a lot about luck just recently. To hear the complaints from the left – and especially the third-sector left – about Kwasi Kwarteng’s interesting mini-Budget, you would assume that life really is simply a lottery and hard work or intelligence or both play no part whatsoever in where people end up. It is necessary to cleave to this patent falsehood if you are going to attack the morality, or the lack of it, behind Mr Kwarteng’s Budget. The poor are poor because of bad luck, the rich are rich because they lucked out – and there’s the end of the story. Hence it is immoral to hand money back to people who have already experienced unrelieved good fortune. It should go to those who have been unlucky through absolutely no fault of their own.

This refusal to judge, the reluctance to accept that people may be rich because they have worked hard or had the nous to come up with a very good idea, is obviously damaging to society because it instils in the population the belief that hard work or being clever is pointless, so one may as well lounge around all day doing bugger all – a belief entrenched still further by our welfare system. The state, in its munificence, is there to level out the differences in luck by imposing high tax rates on people who have luck in order to sponsor people who are without it. That is the thesis – and it does not strike me as being either honest or advantageous to society.

But then the role of the left has been to induce a sense of victimhood in client groups so that they will vote an amenable way in general elections, i.e. for those parties which assuage them in their spurious sense of injustice. The fact that successive Tory cabinets have been thronged by those from ‘disadvantaged’ backgrounds (unlike Labour) does not matter, because it’s all a matter of luck.

That is one of the non-sequitur arguments levelled against the morality of that Budget. The other is that it is somehow morally wrong for there to be tax cuts in which high earners recoup more money than those who are ‘at the bottom of the pile’. To be able to argue this – as Labour has done, repeatedly – you need to have a complete lack of understanding about how percentages work, for a start. You also need to be forgetful of history in suggesting that a top rate of taxation at 40 per cent is somehow wicked, when that was precisely the top rate of taxation under Labour – during a time, I might add, of an economic crisis arguably worse than the one we are in today.

And yet the somewhat questionable moral arguments from the left are scarcely challenged at all – even by Truss and Kwarteng themselves, who have simply reiterated that the removal of the 45 per cent tax band is a practical solution to the problem of generating growth in our beleaguered economy. I have heard it said, time and time again, that the rich should not be getting the greatest share of the ‘pie’. This ‘pie’ seems, in the minds of those who deploy the metaphor, a pie of heavenly provenance handed down to us by the Gods, or once again, by fate.

There is a perfectly good moral case to be advanced which suggests that it is only right that those at the top of the income tree get more of this ‘pie’ because they made the bloody pie in the first place. The top 10 per cent of earners in our country provide about 60 per cent of our income tax revenues. The money, then, is not the government’s, but ours and it is therefore entirely just that when tax cuts are made by governments which are mistrustful of taxation, those who pay the most should get the most back. But I have not heard this argument made at all by the right – perhaps they think it is simply tacit and does not need to spelled out. And yet it should be spelled out. The notion of reward is important. Reward for doing the right thing, reward for virtue.

This brings me to my only quibble with the Budget – that the government should have taken more people out of the lowest band altogether and perhaps dropped the 40 per cent rate to 38 per cent. Free up the middle income earners to invest, to innovate, to start their own businesses and reap the rewards of those businesses by paying less tax. There are still plenty of people in this country who would relish the chance to make their own luck.