Why people would hate a property tax

My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory chancellors and would give the same advice to governments of any stripe. Wikipedia calls him a prize-winning economist and that’s right, but he has a gadfly instinct and a remorselessly rational intellect that takes him into the deeps: into first principles, logical consequences and the reductiones ad absurdum of some of our trains of argument. He writes a substack (timleunig.substack.com) and it was his recent summary there of proposals he wrote as chief economist for the Onward thinktank that caught my eye.

The proposals are for a radical reform of property taxation. They prompt this column. Because I’m not sure he’s right. Leunig says this: ‘Council tax and stamp duty are terrible taxes.