If flytipping is caused by landfill tax then to stop flytipping we should….

To return, as with the dog to his reworked breakfast, to a favourite point of ours:

Typically, rubbish is collected from a household or business by a legitimate waste management company which charges up to £450 per tonne of commercial, non-recyclable rubbish. They then transport this to a licensed waste site, where they must pay, for every tonne, a £20 to £30 gate fee as well as a £126 landfill tax, which goes to the local council.

…

The ESA said that a crime group could avoid paying £4,368 in taxes and landfill fees by illegally emptying a single, fully loaded 28-tonne lorry.

Flytipping is caused by the landfill tax that is. So, if we wish to reduce flytipping then we should reduce, or abolish, the landfill tax.

We have mentioned this before too. If some government action is causing something bad to happen then the way to stop the bad thing happening is to get government to cease doing that damn’d idiot thing that is causing it.

As with Willy Hutton talking about housing:

Moreover, without turnover there is less geographical mobility and more physical entrapment. An optimal housing market is one offering much more affordable homes than today with prices spread evenly geographically and with lots of turnover.

There is, in fact, no reason at all why prices should equate geographically. But other than that, yes. As we know, that absence of a fluid housing market increases the unemployment level. So, and therefore, we should not be taxing housing turnover with SDLT because housing turnover is, in and of itself, a good thing.

Which leads to another of those things we continually remind of. One of the ways to make the world a better place is to get government to stop doing the damn fool things it currently does. We might even say that we should hope for better government but given reality the correct option is to hope for just less government.

Tim Worstall