Curiously, as a man of the thirteenth century, I “believe” in the price mechanism. (You know: wheat crop fails, price goes up; too much wheat, price goes down.) As a visitor to the twenty-first, I believe it is no longer working. Nearly one full century into the experiment of unlinking money from things, and linking it to “policy” instead, not one person is left on the whole planet with the fondest idea how our system works.
Some years ago I assembled a little team to study what had gone into the price of a loaf of bread. We had to give up. It was too complicated. Bread was officially “untaxed” in the jurisdiction; yet about the only thing we could establish with any confidence, after looking through the production process, was that more than half the price was cumulative direct and indirect taxes.
David Warren, “Deflationary asides”, Essays in Idleness, 2015-01-27.
July 29, 2016
QotD: Prices and taxes
Comments Off on QotD: Prices and taxes
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
