The problem with inheritance tax

Lots of people will tell you that inheritance tax is unfair. Well, you know what I feel about fairness. I understand the social significance of inheritance taxes, and although it can be hard to shake those misguided feelings of injustice, I'm broadly happy that we have such a tax to prevent cross-generational retrenchment of capital.

No, the problem with IHT isn't that we have it. The problem with IHT is this. If you don't get it, you need to understand that each of the links on that page goes to a subsection with hundreds, if not thousands of pages. You also not to understand that the only reason the document is available is the Freedom of Information Act. And that parts of these pages are redacted under exemptions to that act. And that telephoning the HMRC IHT helpline almost inevitably results in the advice: "tell us everything, we'll tell you what to pay". And that the only real, meaningful alternative is to pay a lawyer hundreds of pounds an hour to advise you.

Like so many other areas of tax law (and law generally), this has become an arena for a cat-and-mouse game played between government specialists and their opposite numbers in the avoidance profession. The only people who really benefit from all this are those who make a profession out of understanding and administering it; the rest of us just have to foot the cost of dealing with all the complexity.

Complexity is not inherently a bad thing. In some arenas, complexity is the necessary corollary of power. Human beings are considerably more complex than single-celled organisms, and consequently have much greater control over their environment. As science and technology have progressed, they too have become more complex; many people find this threatening, given our ever greater reliance on them to provide for our basic needs. But rigorous intellectual practice has a solution to this problem: abstraction. As one builds larger and larger structures, one introduces abstractions that allow one to ignore the inner workings of something when it isn't relevant to the task in hand. Providing that one understands the basic concepts of an abstracted computer interface (currently windows, buttons, folders, files etc), there is no need for most people to get involved with the world of program flow and machine-code instructions, let alone transistors and electrons. One can operate enormously powerful tools without needing to know how they work.

So there is a place for complexity that is well-abstracted and delivers practical benefit. How does our tax system fare on this basis? Well, from where I'm standing, it fails both tests.

There are few effective abstractions in IHT law. Instead, there is a tangled web of individual rules, provisions and exemptions with only loose principles holding the whole thing together. There are few areas that can be understood on their own - each set of rules is heavily interdependent with numerous others, making it hard to gain even a high-level picture without understanding the whole thing.

As for utility... well there's perhaps more of a case to be made there. There is clearly a social function to at least some of the special provisions: agricultural relief, charitable donations etc. But it's also clear that many of the most tortuous changes to the law, particularly as concerns trusts and offshore assets, have been responses to avoidance strategies. The mess is a product of the organic piecemeal growth of our legal system to cope with things that weren't previously envisaged. There is no inherent benefit to much of it; we just can't countenance the upheaval of rewriting it all from scratch.

It is a truism in software development that when a program grows organically in this way, it will eventually need to be refactored: carefully unpicked and put back together again with the introduction of meaningful abstractions to make it comprehensible. If this doesn't happen, the cost of maintaining it becomes prohibitive and it eventually collapses under the weight of its own informational complexity. This process is often unpopular. It tends to remove strange quirks upon which users of the software have come to rely, replacing them with new, more logical constructs. Sometimes it removes large chunks of functionality that are commercially unviable or otherwise undesirable. Reworking any system with a long history and many users inevitably meets with resistance. It's hard to think of many things with a longer history and an impact on more people than our legal system; rewriting chunks of it would anger many people with a vested interest in it continuing to operate as it does now. But at some point it will be unavoidable, because the cost of administering it will be greater than the value it brings. Personally, I think we're probably very close (if not beyond) that line already. And the longer we leave it, the more painful the process will be.

The Drugs Debate

There's been a fair amount of comment recently on the subject of the "War on Drugs". Things heated up earlier this year when the Global Commission on Drug Policy, an organisation with some very heavyweight members published a damning report that suggested the war had already been lost, and that moves in the direction of decriminalisation or legalisation were the only rational way forward. Since then responses have fallen broadly into two camps:

1. There is no war on drugs. It's all a lie, we're actually far too tolerant on drugs. See e.g. this paper. Explanations range from incompetence through politically-motivated equivocation to outright conspiracy, if you listen to the Lunatic Jesus Fringe (man, these people scare me). The solution for these people is to just fight harder. Corporal/capital punishment for serious drug offences is a suggestion that seems to crop up a lot.
2. Decriminalisation is the best way to fight drug usage. These people accept the Global Commission's position and believe that the war on drugs is enormously counter-productive. If you want to deal with drug usage we need to take it out of the hands of criminals and apply greater regulation. Unlike their opponents, these people tend to come from all sides of the political spectrum: Conservative, Liberal and Left(ish).
   

Right now, it would seem that opinion most places outside of the US is generally swinging towards a more evidence-based approach to tackling drug harm. But I was struck today by an article in today's Independent by Suzie Dean. It was notable both for its clear-headedness and the fact that it was a genuine rarity in the current discussion: it actually addressed the moral question of whether drug usage is wrong, rather just how best to stop it.

One thing that saddens me about this whole debate is that it remains couched purely in terms of harm reduction. Drugs can indeed be harmful if misused, as can everything else in life. Cars are dangerous when driven without care; almost every foodstuff is "bad for you" if eaten to excess; even excessive and badly controlled exercise can be damaging to your health. Furthermore, our understanding of habit and addiction has developed enormously over the past decades, and it is clear that there are many socially acceptable activities (sex, internet usage, even working) which can sometimes develop into pathologies that are at least as destructive as the habitual overuse of drugs that do not produce physical dependencies (e.g. MDMA).

We allow all of these things in our society because we judge that the risk of a transition into harm is outweighed by the size of their perceived benefit. Clearly, this calculation consists of two parts:

1. How big is the risk?
2. How big is the benefit?

(1) The Risk

This does get discussed, but without sufficient rigour. What is pathological drug use? Most of the anti-drug commentators talk of socially destructive behaviours that end up in court, lead to violence, neglect etc. etc. I'm going to assume that these are the risks we're concerned about; I don't accept that the chemical alteration of consciousness is *inherently* bad (see (2) below).

To make a meaningful assessment of these we need hard evidence of what percentage of total users of each drug end up exhibiting these behaviours; and we need to find a way of removing the effects of confounding variables such as social class, economic status, prior mental health etc from these figures. I imagine this will be extremely difficult because (a) efforts to record drug usage have generally been hampered by the unwillingness of users to self-incriminate, (b) surveys of drug harm are often highly partisan and conducted without statistical rigour and (c) many of the worst activities are inextricably linked to the current illegal status of the drugs in question. If we want to move this debate forward, there's a big research hole here that needs filling.

From a purely anecdotal point of view, I would note that as an ordinary professional, middle class individual approaching middle age, I have come across a great many people who take drugs, some infrequently, some habitually. With a very small number of exceptions, they all live happy and fulfilled lives, holding down a variety of jobs in fields as diverse as management, finance, academia, and the arts. Whether regular users or not, these individuals have something in common: moderation. They also have another thing in common: they are all people that it was plausible I would meet and engage with, i.e. very few of them are from deeply underprivileged backgrounds. This is a story that I hear again and again, including (by implication) from prohibitionists who wish to undermine their liberal opponents: drug use among comfortably-off middle class people tends to be moderate and without real harm. But surely this implies that the enormously greater prevalence of drug harm among those from poorer backgrounds is not a function of the drugs themselves but their combination with pre-existing social disfunction. And to suggest that this is an argument for prohibition is akin to suggesting that we should ban cars because bored kids on housing estates cause mayhem by joy-riding.

(2) The benefits

This is the topic no-one seems willing to discuss, but it is absolutely central. There appears to be a background assumption that there is something inherently wrong, bad or dirty about altering your consciousness chemically; that there is no conceivable benefit to "getting high" which could justify the risks. And this, frankly, is nonsense. I'd like to make a few brief points:

1. Drugs are enormously varied. There's a world of difference between someone snorting cocaine in a pub toilet and consuming ayahuasca in the context of a ritual for which they have prepared over the course of several days. You cannot describe either benefits or risks without engaging with this diversity.
2. Drug use is a product of an inevitable human desire. I'm sorry to be bald about this, but every human society of which I've ever heard has found some way to alter their consciousness for spiritual or recreational purposes. Most have done so through some form of drug, be it alcohol, tobacco, cannabis or peyote. Those societies that have most successfully engaged with this are those which have developed social norms about the appropriate contexts and quantities for consumption, not those which have attempted to suppress the desire itself.
3. Many drugs have enormous medical potential that is currently being underexploited as a result of the legal situation. THC has numerous well-documented medical applications; MDMA, LSD and Psylocibin have all been used with great success in the treatment of psychological conditions. There's peer-reviewed, published research on all of this, but it's still very limited because the whole field is viewed with deep suspicion.
4. The benefits don't stop at treating pathologies. Mind-altering drugs have been lauded by all sorts of individuals throughout history as a means to personal and spiritual development, if used correctly. In the last century, people as diverse as Aldous Huxley, Steve Jobs and Baron Mayhew have all described psychedelic drug experiences as among the most profound and significant of their entire lives. Among those people that I know personally who have tried such substances, a similar story emerges: this is not always a pointless thrill or a cheap high, it can be a life-changing, profound experience that changes your perspective on the world.

I'm not for a moment trying to pretend that all drugs are always beneficial. Like anything else, they come with their risks and costs (some enormously more so than others). But until we stop framing this debate in terms of a naive assertion that "drugs are bad" and start on a genuine assessment of the risks and benefits of individual drugs, we're never going to get beyond the stage of moralising assertion.

The commoditisation of happiness

We have a society in which people routinely feel undervalued in what they do, condemned to a futile life making money for the few while their own dreams and aspirations wither away. We enrich ourselves and others most effectively when we are allowed and encouraged to grow in an environment designed to foster our own particular talents and individual foibles. Instead of which we are crammed into uniform boxes designed not for the needs of the individual, but the "greater good" of larger organisations, be they corporations or governments. Inevitably the interests of those organisations end up mapping largely to the interests of the few who direct them rather than the many that they employ or notionally "serve", whether as citizens or customers.

Unsurprisingly, this leaves most of us feeling pretty crappy about what we do, and worse, about ourselves. As a society, how do we respond? Well, as a capitalist society, we respond like this: we create think-tanks and bullshit consultancies to sit around stroking beards (and charging money) to work out how we can reinject positivity back into the system as an afterthought. We've optimised for all sorts of other variables, maybe we just need to tune things a bit better for Corporate Social Responsibility, Resilience, or Whatever The Next Pointless Buzzword is. Zizek would have a field day! The capitalist ideology is so completely integrated into our world that we're even using its language and methods to fight against it; by which we inevitably do no more than strengthen it! How can we not see the glaring, bitter irony of labelling as "emancipatory" the idea of selling people tools and systems to help them cope with a work environment that crushes them?

Elizabeth Cotton's approach is no doubt well-meaning - an attempt to minister to the ills of a mentally sick workforce. But appealing to our corporate or political masters to pay for some new benefit, some new healing to soothe the wounds inflicted by the daily debasement of our spirit, is deeply misguided. First of all, it is inevitable that the cost will all too soon be borne by those doing the demanding; that's the way markets work. As an employee you have a cost; and you have a benefit to the company. By and large companies won't do things they don't have to that increase cost unless they also increase output. When they apparently do so in the short term, you can bet it will ultimately be taken away elsewhere. You can legislate to try and set some minima but unless you regulate every detail of workers' compensation and treatment, market forces will eventually even things out again. You can make the state pay, but that's just socialising the emotional costs of our corporate culture onto the taxpayer, which is just as flawed unless you can ensure that the worst offenders pay tax in proportion to the damage they do (hint: you'll fail).

The second, and much more worrying thing about all this is that we are just legitimising the fundamental idiocy. Instead of learning "coping strategies" we should be working to rewrite the entire system so that it doesn't make us sick in the first place. Are our dreams so stunted that we can no longer even imagine a society in which most of us spend most of our time doing things that enrich our lives and those of people around us? Surely that's got to be better than wasting our lives making others rich in exchange for the money to pay for things that help us forget the horror of the bargain we've accepted?

On Fairness

There's something interesting that I've noticed cropping up in a lot of political debates: the notion of "fairness". If you're to the right of centre, "fairness" is paying your way, not taking what you haven't earned; it's a notion of equity founded on the sanctity of private property. If you're on the left, "fairness" is about equality of opportunity, social justice, the absence of "unfairly" huge gaps in prosperity between members of the same society and the redistribution of "unearned" wealth.

Both sides appear to assume that the notion of "fairness" is at least partially self-evident. Perhaps there is room for debate about what is actually fair and what is not, but basically we all know what we mean by the term. Well, I have a response: Bullshit.

There is no such thing as fair or unfair.

The terms are intellectual land-grabs, the appropriation of moral status for a preference about social affairs. They are founded on an absurd myth that it is somehow possible to balance out all of the competing impulses and desires of billions of individuals into a harmonious system that is self-evidently "right". Furthermore, any careful examination of the claims made in the name of fairness inevitably reveal them to be based on some very shakey foundations. I've already questioned the notion of social justice recently. On the other side, many of the highest earners justify their wealth by saying that they "worked for it" "within the rules". Quite apart from the fact that this is often demonstrably false, it begs the question completely: who says the rules are fair in the first place?

"It's not fair", they cry, like petulant children. Translation: "that's not how I thought it was supposed to work, and I don't like it". We need to grow up and get beyond this. There is no magic justification for one social order or another; all that we can do is try different things and see how well they work out for us. If we take away money from rich people and give it to poor people, what happens? Does it make people happier, does it give us a more cohesive, richer culture, ? If it does, who gives a damn if it is labelled "unfair"? Conversely, if it turns out that artificially redistributing wealth by central fiat inevitably creates a downward spiral of disaffection and dependency, maybe we'll just have to accept that there are going to be haves and have-nots, whether or not that seems "fair". The one thing that's certain is that we're never going to find out if the possibility of change is suffocated at every turn by childish tantrums thinly disguised as moral arguments.