Let the Billionaires Bugger Off. I’ll Pay the Taxi.
Let the Billionaires Bugger Off. I’ll Pay the Taxi.And don't let the door hit you on the way out... unless you pay your economic rent.
The rich threaten to leave whenever a Budget nears. Fred Harrison says call the bluff. The evidence mostly backs him. The Budget is on 28 October. Chancellor John Healey is working within a manifesto that rules out higher rates of income tax, employee National Insurance and VAT. So the pressure falls on capital, property and savings. Capital gains tax is the obvious target. The higher rate is 24 per cent. Income tax at the top is 40. The right says the rich will decamp to Monaco and leave the Treasury poorer. The left says tax them hard and they’ll cope. I asked Fred which is true. His answer: neither. Both camps avoid the real problem because it suits neither side. Tax the economic rent, and it doesn’t matter. Bugger off or stay, who cares? There are plenty more entrepreneurs ready to start new businesses. 
The exodus is realFred doesn’t deny it. Nor should anyone. The number of taxpayers telling HMRC they are leaving rose by almost a third in the latest tax year, according to accountants UHY Hacker Young. Henley & Partners estimated a net loss of 16,500 UK millionaires in 2025, the largest outflow of any country it tracks. That follows 10,800 in 2024 and 4,200 in 2023. Treat the Henley numbers with care or even derision. The firm sells residence and citizenship by investment, and its figures are modelled estimates, not a census. The direction is clear all the same. Non-dom status ended in April 2025. Inheritance tax now reaches worldwide assets after ten years of residence, down from fifteen. A council tax surcharge of £2,500 to £7,500 a year lands on homes worth over £2 million from April 2028. What happens when they goFred’s prediction is that very little breaks. Prime London property gets cheaper. Enterprising people stay and fill the gap. Part of that has already happened. Knight Frank reports that prime central London prices fell 3.3 per cent in the year to August and sit 23 per cent below their level eleven years ago. Savills puts the loss since the 2014 peak at about a quarter. Agents blame the end of non-dom status, higher stamp duty and fear of a wealth tax. What about the wider economy? The best evidence I found is a 2024 NBER paper by Katrine Jakobsen, Henrik Kleven, Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais and Mathilde Muñoz. They used Swedish and Danish records. Wealth taxes do push some rich people out. But the flows are tiny. Annual net migration of the wealthy was below 0.01 per cent. A one point rise in the effective wealth tax on the top 2 per cent cut total employment by about 0.03 per cent. A study of UK non-doms, cited in the same paper, also found small emigration responses to tax changes. Fred is right on scale. The economy copes. The tax that can’t moveThe exit threat works on taxes that travel with a person: income, gains on shares, wealth held as financial assets. It doesn’t work on land. A freehold in Mayfair can’t board a plane. Capital gains tax shows the weakness. Fewer than 1 per cent of payers produced 45 per cent of a record £24.2 billion in 2024-25. A tax that leans on a few thousand mobile people is a tax their advisers can talk down at will. HMRC said pre-Budget speculation was one reason for the jump, and accountants at Crowe described rumours of rate rises driving people to sell and pay early. Now look at what doesn’t move. The ONS valued UK land at £7.0 trillion in 2021, the largest asset on the national balance sheet. It can’t emigrate. It doesn’t hire an adviser to relocate to Dubai. And its value rises when roads, rail, schools and neighbours make a place worth more. That uplift is what Fred means by economic rent. It is income from owning something scarce that you didn’t make. It is not what a landlord earns by building or renovating. It is the rise in the value of the site itself. Smith saw it in 1776Fred’s central claim, set out in his book with Mason Gaffney, The Corruption of Economics, is that every tax comes out of rent in the end. It’s a strong claim, and I won’t pretend Adam Smith said it in those words. But Smith got close to the logic. Ground rents and the ordinary rent of land, he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, are “perhaps the species of revenue which can best bear to have a peculiar tax imposed upon them.” He argued that a tax on ground rents would fall on the owner, who could not pass it to the occupier. He also warned that a direct tax on wages would, in the long run, damage rents and push up the price of manufactured goods by more than the same sum raised from rent and consumption. His reasoning is that every tax on work or trade shrinks what people have left to spend on a place to live, so the cost ends up in land values anyway. Collect the rent directly, and you skip the detour, and the distortion and crippling deadweight cost that comes with it. The Nordic testFred argues that Britain’s problem isn’t that we tax too much. It’s how we collect. So test it against countries that tax more. On preliminary OECD figures for 2024, the UK collected 34.4 per cent of GDP in tax. Finland collected 42.2, Sweden 41.4 and Norway 40.2. Denmark, the highest in the OECD, collected 45.2. The gap is six to eleven points of GDP. The World Happiness Report 2026 put Finland first for the ninth year running. Iceland was second and Denmark third. Sweden came fifth and Norway sixth. The UK was 29th. High taxes don’t buy happiness. The report points to social support, trust in institutions, freedom and low corruption. But the fear that a bigger tax take makes a country miserable. Fred wouldn’t say why Nordic voters pay without a riot. He’s saving it for his next book. My guess is trust. People pay when they believe the money buys teachers and nurses. They resist when they suspect it feeds asset prices. Both camps defend the systemFred’s political point is sharp. The right needs the exit threat to keep tax off capital. The left needs capital as the villain to keep the story about class war. Neither wants a conversation about monopoly and economic rent, because it points to real free markets, individual liberty and the community collecting the rent that it creates. Not the government the left wants or the rich that the right wants. The right defends the threat. The left defends the target. Neither asks whether the tax base is wrong. Is it moral to take rent?I put the question to Fred at the end because I’ve asked it of myself. I’ve built things on land that rose in value, and the charities I set up have received some of that rise. I wrote about this twenty years ago. Fred’s answer was that nobody escapes it. We live in a system that pays rent to anyone who owns land, whether a pensioner with a terrace or a billionaire with a portfolio. The worst corruption in the economy is lawful. He added that the system bribes us with capital gains so that we won’t change it. A landlord who builds or renovates earns a return on work and capital. A landlord who collects the rise in site value is collecting what the community made. One person, two incomes. Until the law separates them, the decent landlord and the extractive one look identical to the taxman. What to do with the threatTake it at face value. Tax what can’t move. Stop arguing about whether the rich are good or bad and ask a plainer question: how do we pay for the teachers, nurses and police that voters say they want, with the least damage to work and investment? If any billionaire still wants to leave, I’ll pay the taxi fare. Leave a comment below. Once the rent on your penthouse in Chelsea goes to the public, you’re welcome to visit, tax-free on everything else. Where do you stand? Is it moral to profit from the rising value of land or other monopolies, intellectual property, or government licenses you didn’t create? Tell me in the comments. You're currently a free subscriber to Peter Smith Rewilding. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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