One of my newspaper columns changed how the British government works.
OK, changed in a pretty small way, but change it it did.
Which is a useful answer to the question posed by HM Nazmul Alam in this newspaper.
Why do we write opinion columns, why do we bother? As we say in Britain, today's newspapers are, after all, tomorrow's wrappers for the fish and chips.
We might provide some passing amusement to readers but are we actually important? Do we change the world at all?
So, an example from my own life. My writing life if you prefer.
It's an obvious observation that there are a lot of people demanding that taxes should be higher. Usually, taxes on other people should be higher.
But there are some who insist that the government having more money would make the world a better place. So, I wondered about this. I went to the UK Treasury and asked them whether anybody had made extra, voluntary, tax payments last year because they thought this way.
That no one had asked this before became clear very quickly. For no one knew. Not only that, the Treasury itself thought the idea wholly ridiculous.
It took them a few months to find out, but eventually they were able to tell me that in the tax year 2005, there had been five voluntary donations. Donations -- four of those donating were dead, leaving bequests. From which we can derive that there was one whole person in the country of the 70 million at the time who thought that the government having more money was so important that they voluntarily sent in more tax than they had to pay.
This is not grand evidence of the desire of everyone to pay more tax, of course, despite the very high number of people who demanded that taxes should be higher.
So, I wrote my column, The Times published it in 2006. I thought it was a very good joke, and I cashed my cheque for having written it.
As far as I was concerned, that was that. Well, except for dragging that example out now and again when there was one or another group demanding that they all be taxed more. For there are such groups.
Patriotic Millionaires is one of them. Rich people who demand that they be taxed more because they're rich. To which a perfectly sensible, even sufficient, answer is that you can pay extra tax, go ahead. Isn't it amazing how none of them do?
A number of people have, over the years, repeated my column, including the numbers for different tax years. I've not been keeping track but I think I'm right in saying that never has the number gone beyond a dozen of those voluntary, extra, taxpayers.
So far so, just me and my little joke. But a few weeks back, those Patriotic Millionaires demanded, again, that they be taxed more. The answer from the government was that you can pay extra tax, if you wish, and they referred to the government webpage which explains how to do it. That response, that webpage, stems directly from that column I did two decades ago.
But is it true that writing a newspaper column can indeed change the world?
Obviously, we're not going to bring about peace, love, and understanding for all forever. But it might well be possible to make a little change, here or there.
In my professional work at a think-tank, I've been a part of more substantial changes too. But yes, columns matter. And it's not the ones we think either.
I really was trying to make a joke about the difference between the public calls and the private actions, and I was doing so in order to do nothing more than gain a few pounds sterling to spend on my own desires.
One final thing. A little thing for any journalist out there interested in finance. Repeat the article for Bangladesh. We all know -- and can probably identify -- those who insist that taxes should be higher.
So, go and ask the authorities how many people pay higher than legally demanded taxes. Find out -- how many people made donations to the government last tax year? The article comparing that to how many call for higher taxes will be published. If you really work at it, you can do it anew each year too.
No, I'll not try to charge a royalty on the idea -- I stole it from an American, about the US, in the first place. They've been running an account called “Gifts to the United States” since 1843. It's never received more than a handful of millions of dollars in any one year.
People just don't believe in higher taxes enough to pay them when they don't have to. And that? That's a really useful little lesson from a newspaper column.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
