First Twitter instances of
Uber app working (licensed chauffeur unmarked black cars, February 15th, 2012),
Beck Taxi app in the Apple App Store (May 10th, 2012),
and UberX (anyone with a car and what we now mean when we say Uber, September 8th, 2014)
in Toronto:
![At this point, all the pieces were in place: tight-money policies (which benefited creditors and
the wealthy) could be justified as “harsh medicine” to clear up price-signals so the market could
return to a healthy state of long-run balance. In describing how all this came about, Skidelsky
is providing us with a worthy extension of a history Karl Polanyi first began to map out in the
1940s: the story of how supposedly self-regulating national markets were the product of careful
social engineering. Part of that involved creating government policies self-consciously designed
to inspire resentment of “big government.” Skidelsky writes:
A crucial innovation was income tax, first levied in 1814, and renewed by [Prime
Minister Robert] Peel in 1842. By 1911–14, this had become the principal source of
government revenue. Income tax had the double benefit of giving the British state
a secure revenue base, and aligning voters’ interests with cheap government, since
6
only direct taxpayers had the vote…. “Fiscal probity,” under Gladstone, “became the
new morality.”
In fact, there’s absolutely no reason a modern state should fund itself primarily by appropriating a proportion of each citizen’s earnings. There are plenty of other ways to go about it.
Many—such as land, wealth, commercial, or consumer taxes (any of which can be made more
or less progressive)—are considerably more efficient, since creating a bureaucratic apparatus capable of monitoring citizens’ personal affairs to the degree required by an income tax system is
itself enormously expensive. But this misses the real point: income tax is supposed to be intrusive
and exasperating. It is meant to feel at least a little bit unfair. Like so much of classical liberalism
(and contemporary neoliberalism), it is an ingenious political sleight of hand—an expansion of
the bureaucratic state that also allows its leaders to pretend to advocate for small government.
The one major exception to this pattern wa…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:iz56io3ox4l7xslbswdz2p6u/bafkreic46x2weuouqsg6hmnv2csfvk24a6jyqn64za7lam2sji3yvkjzem)
