My latest purchase is an English jug produced in 1847 commemorating the repeal of the iniquitous Corn Laws, reminding us that the struggle against an overmighty state is nothing new.
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Our bread untaxed, our commerce freeDecember 13th, 2022 |
 8 comments to Our bread untaxed, our commerce free |
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It wasn’t terribly long ago that the US finally got rid of a telephone usage tax that was implemented to pay for the Spanish-American War of 1898.
Of course, the bill they passed to repeal the tax had all kinds of pork and provisions that had nothing to do with repealing said tax, but that’s just par for the course in the US.
The one good thing the Confederate Constitution had in it was a provision that each bill could only be on one topic and not have things like attaching non-related spending and riders.
There was a dark side to this – the Income Tax returned in the 1840s to pay for Free Trade, however the Income Tax really was meant to be temporary, it was down to about 1% or 2% in 1874 – if Gladstone had won the election the Income Tax would have been gone, Disraeli also promised to get rid of the Income Tax, but he was a liar. He also promised to get rid of the Licensing Laws (that had been introduced, like the 1870 Education Act, to appease the growing interventionist wing of the Liberal Party), but Disraeli did do that either.
In Ireland Free Trade with the world brought little relief (most of Europe was in a terrible mess in the late 1840s due to failed harvests – there were revolts as far away as Sicily) – the American “Indian Corn” that Sir Robert Peel brought in was rejected (due to its strange colour), and the Poor Law tax (introduced in Ireland in the early 1830s – just as the system of government schools was) became crushing in the late 1840s – with areas of Ireland that had not gone bankrupt forced, by the act the Russell government brought in, to pay for areas of Ireland where the Poor Law Unions had gone bankrupt – thus dragging down all of Ireland.
The higher the Poor Law Tax got, the worse the economy became, and so the Poor Law Tax got pushed even higher. A vicious circle – that led to a third of the population of Ireland either dying or fleeing the country.
To the deluded (or worse) people who write the history textbooks this policy of crushing taxation and endless government interventions under the de facto rule of Sir Charles Trevelyan (who later created the British Civil Service) in Ireland, is called a “laissez faire” policy.
As for food imports – they became a big thing in the island of Britain in the late 19th century (not the 1840s – the idea that “Ireland starved to feed England” is a myth, there were beef exports from Ireland but they were not a major factor), which led to an agricultural depression.
However, British farming adapted to free trade and competition – and was prosperous again in the early 1900s. Then came World War One – and the endless mess after World War One.
Related and possibly more important was the reduction in import duties on goods, including tea, under the revision of the Navigation Acts in the early 1770s. For decades the high duties imposed by the Navigation Acts had bred extremely lucrative opportunities for smugglers and organized crime gangs in Rhode Island, Newport, Boston. Eventually the British government realized – in an early and atypical appreciation of the Laffer Curve – that their interests would be served by lowering those customs duties and driving the American crime gangs out of business. When the gangs in Boston realized what the lower duties meant, the newly cheap tea went into the harbour – an event known as the Boston Tea Party, and quite wrongly associated with a rise in taxes levied by Britain. Quite the reverse was the case. Suggesting a) Laffer Curve was common sense in the 18th century; and b) organized crime is as American as apple pie.
@Michael Taylor
I am intrigued, do you have any sources or evidence for the motivation of the tea dumping?
“It wasn’t terribly long ago that the US finally got rid of a telephone usage tax that was implemented to pay for the Spanish-American War of 1898.”
The Brits still haven’t got rid of a television tax that was implemented to…hang on, does anyone know why it was implemented?
Am I to come to the conclusion that the repeal of the Corn Laws in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-seven may not have justified the commissioning and manufacturing of a commemorative pitcher? That the best use of the pitcher was to pour cream into the coffee or tea one drank to stay awake and alert for the continuing fight against both one’s enemies and (ostensible) friends?
How many legal and political victories are not quite the triumphs we want them to be? How many are celebrated longer than they should, to the point that we think we have won, allowing defeat to be snatched from the jaws of victory?
It may be the most sensible and intelligent response to have a celebration, serving up a good soup, main course and dessert afterwards, accompanied by good coffee or tea – and celebrate the food and drink more than the victory. Then one can be described as vigilant, and a tad dour.
Oh yes, nice pitcher. Nice picture of said pitcher. Was it used? The condition suggests otherwise.
Michael Taylor (December 13, 2022 at 11:28 am), it’s true that the British government arranged that the taxed tea should be cheaper than the untaxed, but I suggest that, given the powerful political passions already raised, you can at most say that, in the alliance the tea tax created between the colonial merchants and the radicals, the merchants were not without a financial motive in opposing the East India Company’s monopoly of this cheaper tea.
Similarly, the British government’s decision to tax the East India Company tea less, so it would undersell the tea the Americans had been getting from the Dutch, was by no means solely motivated by Laffer curve thoughts. Tempting the Americans to drink the tea (and thus implicitly accept the taxation principle) was more important than making money from the tax, and insofar as that mattered, it was not so much the Laffer curve as the consent curve that the UK parliament understood: the British exchequer would receive more from a low tax that Americans peacefully paid than from a high tax that they obstreperously refused to pay.