Abandoned high streets are a highly visible cost we all pay for allowing our government to not collect Economic Rent. Less visible are the thousands of enterprises absent from areas away from the economic centres. Arbitrary taxation has destroyed not only the enterprises that should be in existence at the margin, but also the commumities and cultures those missing enterprises would have supported. In their place, our government has created rural and urban decay, a sub-class of social outcasts with no share in the value they help create (Economic Rent), an ousted rural population on the move to cities or abroad, poverty and inequality. The cost to the UK of all these ‘deadweight losses’ — which would be completely avoided with AGR (Adam Smith) — is between £0.5 and £1 trillion a year of lost economic activity (Martin Feldstein). Scotland’s share of those losses is between £36 and £72 billion a year. And that is by government CHOICE. And no other factor.
