I am surprised no more attention has been given to Martin Vander Weyer’s suggestion in The Spectator two weeks ago that a mansion tax should be levied on those buyers who pay no other UK tax. Why has it taken so long for anyone to raise this idea? Where tax paid against income should be set against tax paid on property?
Let’s consider this question in psychological terms. Assume that you are eager to buy a particular house but someone else decides he wants to live there too. He is twice as rich as you are and so comfortably outbids you. Whatever the other person’s moral worth, you know two things. He has become rich under roughly the same system as you. And he has, in the process, paid more tax than you.
Now consider another scenario. This time you are outbid by a mysterious Russian who somehow bribed an official in some remote oblast to sell him a smelting works for 200,000 packets of Kent cigarettes and a Cadillac Escalade.
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