A politician by the name of Gauke, who holds the gloriously British title of Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, tells us that it is “immoral” to pay tradesmen and domestic help in cash.

This perhaps ignores the fact that small cash payments usually have more to do with evading pointless paperwork than with evading taxes.

Mr Gauke should know this. Unusually among British politicians, he has some practical experience relevant to his portfolio: he was a tax lawyer in private life. Somehow we doubt his clients paid him substantial fees in order to ensure they paid as much tax as possible.

However, he proved his legal expertise when he claimed the Stamp Duty on buying a second home as a Parliamentary expense. That he got away with it qualifies him to advise on the law – but not to lecture us on morality.

The authors of this blog were raised in the Anglo-Saxon Protestant tradition which teaches that paying taxes is a both a legal and a moral obligation. For conscience’ sake, pay all taxes to whom taxes are due, Saint Paul told the Romans – even when the one to whom taxes were due at the time was the emperor Nero. Strange historical fact: some taxes, like the early Crusade levies were effectively voluntary – people paid freely because they felt it was their duty.

Yet that sense of duty is being strained by our greedy, arbitrary, oppressive, intrusive, incomprehensible, bureaucratic, and needlessly complex tax system. At what point does revenue collection become a protection racket?

We are told we should pay taxes “for schools and hospitals” – but only a fraction of tax revenues go to worthwhile services. Far more goes to the politicians, the bureaucrats, the eurocrats, and the quangocrats, their salaries and their pensions, their vanity projects, their mismanaged contracts, their counter-productive wars, their friends in the banks and big business, and, of course, paying Mr Gauke’s tax for him.

Any tax men reading this – there is ample reason to fear Big Brother in this respect – need not get excited: for our part, we are sticking with Saint Paul and paying what we must. We pay for the same reason we might pay protection money to a gangster: it is less hassle. Still we suggest that a tax system that has to rely on fear rather than conscience and duty is a far greater immorality than our poorest citizens being given tiny sums in cash.  

Fifty years ago yesterday, Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. For most of us, that seems a very long time ago, another era, but, in another sense, it seems not long enough, because it still feels as if the “Space Age” has only just begun.

By way of comparison, it was almost exactly fifty years from the first manned flight under power by the Wright Brothers to the introduction of commercial passenger jet services – a remarkably short period of time. Gagarin’s achievement followed within another decade, and within another decade of that men were on the Moon.

There have been other achievements since then, but nothing so spectacular, and if you compare the First Fifty Years of Space Travel with the First Fifty Years of Air Travel, it can look as if human progress is running out of energy.

The reason for this is that the huge sums of money needed for space travel mean that it has been, for the most part, a government monopoly. The development of the aeroplane, on the other hand, was a triumph of private enterprise – sometimes helped by government, sometimes hindered.

For example, it was immense government funding in World War One that enabled private manufacturers, like Sir Tommy Sopwith, to make enormous improvements in aeroplane technology at a time when the whole sector was only just into the second decade of its existence. It was also government taxation that forced Sopwith out of business once the war was over.

Space travel is now moribund because that it what always happens to nationalised industries. The current Administration in the United States has none of the passion for space that motivated some of its predecessors. NASA is near the bottom of the list of priorities at a time of tight budgets. Most other countries share those priorities.

The only hope for space travel, as for so many other things, is if the private sector is allowed to fill the gaps being left by the public sector.

There are plenty of commercial opportunities. Satellite technology is well established. Space tourism is now a fact. The exploitation of mineral reserves elsewhere in the solar system may soon become a necessity. Zero gravity offers some intriguing possibilities for technology. Space based solar power avoids many of the drawbacks of its terrestrial equivalents. The spin-off technologies from space exploration have impacted on every aspect of our lives already.

The Universe awaits us – if we want it.

The British tax system is now so complex that even the tax men do not understand it.

We always suspected it, but it is now official. HM Revenue and Customs has miscalculated the tax paid by almost six million people – about 10% of the population of the UK.

UK Treasury Building, London

It is difficult to say which is the more disgraceful: is it the fact that 4,300,000 have been forced to pay the government more than was due; or is it the fact that another 1,400,000 who assumed in good faith they had settled with the tax man for the year will suddenly face additional demands for money?

The average additional demand will be for £1,500 (about $2,250) – quite a lot of money for most people, especially those on a fixed budget in difficult times.

Viewed objectively, the most disgraceful aspect of all in this particular case is that most victims are indeed on a fixed budget, because it relates to PAYE, “Pay As You Earn”, the income tax levied on employees, who are usually on fixed salaries.

Viewed more subjectively, since PAYE is designed as a tax on employees, this particular blunder is less likely to impact directly on most entrepreneurs. However, it does beg an important question: if the tax man can make such a gigantic error in the relatively simple calculation of the taxes on fixed incomes, how many more mistakes are being made in the far more complicated calculation of taxes on entrepreneurs?

Most of us have our horror stories. Some are due to straightforward bureaucratic incompetence, but – to be fair even to the tax man – in many cases it is unfair to blame a poorly educated bureaucrat for failing to understand a system so complex that it baffles some of the sharpest minds in the land.

Everyone agrees that the system is bad, but every attempt at reform has made it more complex and therefore worse. The only solution is to junk the whole thing and start again – with a Flat Rate Tax. Some consider Flat Rate Taxes inegalitarian and therefore “unfair”. Perhaps – but surely not as unfair as a system that overcharges some, springs sudden additional demands on others, and has just been particularly hard on some of our poorest fellow subjects.

Moreover, here is a tax calculation everyone can understand:

Simple = Fair
Fair = Efficient