Hammond's Amazon Tax Is Idiotic

Tory Chancellor Philip Hammond has talked about introducing a tax on online retailers such as Amazon, in response to the increasing decimation of high street retailers. It is a totally idiotic proposal, but entirely in keeping with the kind of policies that conservatives have pursued over the last 40 years. 

The basis for the tax on online retailers is that, because they do not utilise high street floorspace, they do not have the same overhead costs as high street retailers, and so have an advantage over them. That is the same landlord mentality that says, a mill that has the advantage of utilising a windmill, or a water-mill, on the land, has a competitive advantage, and so its surplus profits can legitimately be siphoned off as rent by the landowner on whose land the windmill or stream are situated. Or in later times, it would be like a government turning to those industrialists who invested in steam engines, and saying to them,

“Now look you fellows, you have a competitive advantage here with this new fangled technology, and it just won't do, so we are going to tax you for having invested in this technology.”

Is it any wonder that Britain has a terrible problem with raising productivity, when at every step over the last 40 years, conservative governments have placed increasing levels of taxation on innovators, and those that invest in productivity raising technologies, in order to provide subsidies to the small, inefficient capitalists that rely on cheap labour, poor conditions, and who continually carp at the disadvantages they face from larger, more efficient and innovating competitors? 

In the 1980's, Thatcher introduced Enterprise Zones, designed to enable all these small inefficient capitals to escape basic regulations, enjoy lower rates and so on, as a means of helping them stay afloat. The low wages they paid to their workers were subsidised by a growing amount of benefits paid to low-paid workers, along with Housing Benefits to cover the rents that those workers now increasingly could not afford to pay. That was paid for by taxing the other firms in the economy that actually were more efficient and able to pay decent wages, and provide more civilised conditions. It held back the growth of the latter in order to subsidise the Tories core supporters and membership base amongst the ranks of the small capitalists. Its that constituency the Tories now seek to protect by their Brexit proposals, and the desire to be able to have a further bonfire of rights, once they have accomplished it. 

In addition to taxing the innovators and investors in real capital, the Tories as well as subsidising their friends amongst the inefficient small capitalists also favoured their other friends amongst the ranks of the speculators and money lenders. At the same time as taxing and hindering technological development, they did all in their power to encourage money to go into unproductive speculation be it speculation that drove up house prices, or that drove up stock and bond markets. They encouraged everything that drains wealth from the economy, and discouraged everything that creates wealth in the economy. 

Hammond's Amazon tax is just the last in a long line of such idiotic policies, whose justification is only that they help the Tories friends amongst the ranks of the speculators, landowners and small capitalists that make up the core of their support. It is economics effectively based upon the same kind of nepotism and corruption as seen in Trump's regime in the US, Erdogan's regime in Turkey, and Putin's regime in Russia, if not so blatantly undertaken.