Governments have historically opted to tax what they could, rather than what they should, and it shows. Tax windows, and you’ll get dark houses, as Britain discovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; tax employees, and you’ll head for a jobless economy, as many countries are discovering today. It is happening in part thanks to the twentieth century’s legacy of perverse tax policies, which charge firms for hiring humans (through payroll taxes), subsidise them for buying robots (through tax-deductible capital investments), and levy next to nothing on the use of land and non-renewable
...more
