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The UK government has been watching Jamie Oliver’s TV shows and now wants to implement his plans for a new tax on sugar. The Commons‘ Health Committee has reported its overwhelming support for the idea at the end of November. Other than arguments that such taxes are “good per se“ because they will decrease obesity, most serious justifications invoke the idea that the tax would be a just way of raising extra money for the health service tasked with treating the consequences of obesity. Unfortunately, neither goal would likely be achieved through a sugar tax.

At the beginning of October, England became the last constituent part of the United Kingdom to introduce a compulsory charge for plastic shopping bags (to be paid by the shopper), after similar taxes had been introduced in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in previous years. The relevant ministry insists that it is not a tax since “the money from the charge does not go to the government“.

We show that
A) it actually is a tax, in spite of government protestations,
B) its complexity is costly misdirected, and
C) instead of improving the environment, the tax may actually worsen it.

A successful integration of asylum migrants arriving in Europe will largely depend on their success on the European labour arket. In a new Policy Paper we investigate the labour market barriers faced by asylum migrants in Germany, France and the UK. We recommend a full elimination of barriers explicitly created against labour market entry of asylum migrants, and removal of labour market regulations which hit asylum migrants especially hard.

Strange behaviours are often caused by strange taxes or subsidies. The strange behaviour of Volkswagen believing it could cheat and not get found out was motivated partly by the strange tax/subsidy policies in Europe which subsidised diesel at the cost of petrol cars.

In an alarming trend, individuals, companies and institutions that have committed no crime are increasingly finding themselves subject to public witch-hunts on ill-defined ‘ethics’ charges. The practice is gaining traction in several countries, though it remains unclear who has the authority to rule what behaviour is ethical and what is not.

Two routes exist in theory towards making people behave more environmentally: through taxation, and through better defining and upholding of property rights. Empirical evidence suggests that at least in the EU, environmental taxation does not seem to work. Greater reliance on property rights should be the guiding principle during any environmental negotiations.

An essential component of a free society is independent press. It plays a central role in preventing both state actors and private interest groups from pursuing their own interests through state power too aggressively. Journalists independent from political and economic power work effectively through two main channels: detecting and uncovering actual offenses, and safeguarding against further offenses. Interestingly, free press does not have to be crowded out by state-run pseudo-tax paid channels.

The best way how rich countries can help the poorer ones has always been to teach them how to fish. Not giving them fish. And certainly not taking fish away from them.
Yet this is what the EU has been doing since the 1970s, and in September it has renewed three multi-year greatly underpriced leases of fishing grounds off Africa, to the detriment of poor African fishermen and for the benefit of rich European ones.
This is wrong and there are better alternatives.

“Fair tax(es)” is a beautiful idea everybody wants to subscribe to. Including, of course, modern EU politicians. Their idea of “fair tax”, however, differs very much from the way in which people understood the concept in the past.
It is no longer about making sure the tax is fair to the taxpayer. It is much more about making sure that the taxpayer pays “her fair share”, meaning “enough”.
This is a dangerous development.