19 th April 2005
The Rt Rev James Jones, the Bishop of Liverpool
"To tax and to please " said Edmund Burke "is not given to men'. Two hundred years on in every debate about taxation, there's still an assumption that to pay tax is a pain, rather than a pleasure!
Most of the in our society is about the level of income tax, whether it should be higher or lower. But instead of asking how much tax we pay, there's an even more fundamental question for us all - w hat should we tax?
Our economy is based on using the minimum amount of labour in relation to the amount of raw material. Successful businesses are currently those that are able to drive down their labour costs. But in a world of fast decreasing resources such as trees, oil and water the future depends on conserving them.
Maybe the time has come to shift the burden of tax away from work and onto the original materials used.
Just recently 1300 scientists from nearly one hundred countries have published the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. They argue that we're putting such a strain on the earth that our very survival is in doubt. Or, to put it poetically in the words of Dante, we are humiliating 'the earth, the flower-bed that is our dwelling'
I saw this humiliation for myself. Last year in a small 4-seater plane I flew low over the ravaged forests of Honduras and Nicaragua. Over the past 50 years Central America has lost 80% of its rain-forests.
Gradually shifting taxation on to raw materials would make us more careful about how much timber, water and oil we used.
It would be in keeping with some of the world's most ancient values. In the old Testament, for example, the first act of the Harvest was to tax it and to bring a tithe, a tenth of the produce to God and to the community.
Shifting the tax away from work would also reward the hardworking and the successful business of the future would be those who were able to do more with less.
Our politicians would still have their work cut out to make sure that the system was just, and that we cared for the poor.
Writing in the same century as Edmund Burke, Benjamin Franklin penned the famous line: "In this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes"
wo centuries on you could add - if we don't tax and protect the fruit of God's earth, the planet itself might very well die.