Maurice Saatchi discusses the publishing of ‘The Road from Serfdom’, a policy paper to coincide with the CPS’s Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty and the think tank’s 40th anniversary on Wednesday 18th June. The paper proposes that corporation tax be abolished for small companies. And that capital gains tax be abolished for investors in small companies.
To read the full article, please visit the Daily Telegraph website.
“I once asked Margaret Thatcher whether she knew the share of the top five banks in all UK financial transactions – mortgages, bank accounts, loans, credit cards and so on. She said she didn’t know. When I explained it was 80 per cent, she replied, eyes blazing: “That’s impossible!”
By impossible, she did not mean not true – she meant intolerable. Because Mrs Thatcher knew that Big Companies pose as great a threat to freedom as Big Government. She understood that competition is the reason why capitalism works. Take it away and you remove the keystone of the arch, the base of the pyramid. You are left only with the unintended consequence of globalisation: cartelisation, or the creation of global cartels in which there is a huge imbalance of power between the individual customer and the giant corporation. Plus a sense of powerlessness and unfairness that results from a world of global corporations whose governance (and maybe taxes) are beyond the reach of national governments.
Recent polls by the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) confirm the point – people distrust Big Companies as much as they distrust Big Government, a sorry outcome for all believers in free-market capitalism.
That is why we are publishing on Wednesday The Road from Serfdom, a policy paper to coincide with the CPS’s Margaret Thatcher Conference on Liberty and the think tank’s 40th anniversary. The paper proposes that corporation tax be abolished for small companies. And that capital gains tax be abolished for investors in small companies.
It’s worth remembering here that the average UK company has five employees. The Policy, as I call it, would therefore abolish corporation tax for 90 per cent of UK companies, reduce the deficit faster than predicted by the Office for Budget Responsibility, expand employment faster than it predicts, increase competition, challenge cartel capitalism and let millions of people grow tall.
These individuals will enjoy the opportunity to say: “I am the captain of my ship.” It will mean more money for them – and the first step on “the road from serfdom”.”
To read the full article, please visit the Daily Telegraph website.
Date Added: Sunday 15th June 2014
