Comment on the post about VAT below

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Disqus is not allowing me to comment for some reason, so I am commenting on the post below like this:

Until now European businesses selling to digital goods and services to European consumers have charged VAT based on where their business is located. The lowest rates have been  in Luxembourg, so that’s where Google, Amazon, Apple and other large American companies have their European headquarters. It’s been a perfectly legal strategy to pay less taxes, but the rules have been changed so that VAT must be charged based on where the consumer of the service/goods is located. This is to ensure that companies like Amazon actually pay the same level of tax as local firms in the countries where they sell their goods . Seems reasonable.

They forgot VAT in the TPP “trade” agreement!

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“Most significantly, the TPP does not address a massive cost to U.S. goods and services that has a chokehold on our export levels: foreign Value-Added Tax (VAT) schemes. The United States is one of only a handful of nations worldwide that does not charge a VAT on incoming manufactures and services. But 10 of the 11 TPP member states do, which means that, even with tariff-free access, high barriers remain [The Hill, “Whoops! We forgot to include the VAT in the TPP”]. “Every time a trade agreement reduced tariffs it was undercut by our trading partners’ raising their VATs to compensate for tariff cuts.” (United States, U.S. Business & Industry Council)

Note to the US Business & Industry Council: VAT applies to everything, domestic and foreign, not just American imports and is charged according to the rate paid in the customer’s country. If you raise the rate you affect sales for domestic firms as well as foreign ones. No evidence is provided that VAT has been changed to compensate for tariff cuts. It might have been, but in any case I have had personal experience of American protectionism in the past (viz. counter-vailing duties on steel and electrical goods, to name but two), so the US itself has a history of protectionism that no on wants to talk about. I suspect that since VAT already stands at between 17 and 27% in Europe (Hungary 27%, UK 20%) there is little scope for raising the rate without damaging economic health. This is probably a non-issue, but it does point up the insularity of some US business groups and their ignorance of the rational tax called VAT.

Fact over myth

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The Italian philologist, Lorenzo Valla, studied the Latin document “The Donation of Constantine”, which purported to the legitimize the land grab of the Western Roman Empire by the Catholic Church. Using historical, linguistic and philological evidence in 1440, he pronounced it a fake. He found that words and constructions in the document could not possibly have been used by anyone in the time of Emperor Constantine at the beginning on the 4th Century. Words like “feudum”, for instance appeared in the document, a word invented in the 7th Century.  He was “skeptical, empirical, he drew a hypothesis, he was rational, he used abstract reasoning and textual phenomena as evidence…..He  was the founder of stemmatic philology”. 

Using similar techniques, Erasmus demonstrated that the concept of the Trinity did not appear in bibles before the 11th Century, while Joseph Sealiger reconstructed all the ancient Egyptian dynasties back to 5285 b.c, thus predating the Bible’s chronology for the creation of the Earth by 1,300 years. (A light editing of part of an article by Michael Schermer in “Scientific American”).

These are early examples of the scientific method and clashes with “belief” of tens of thousands of religious people of many faiths, who believe in the words of simple herdsmen and agrarians to be the word of God, interpreting the world around them to the best of their ability and imagination.  

Epicureanism, on the other hand, is based upon science, upon fact examined, pored over and gradually accepted after thorough testing. It is the faith for rational human beings, who prefer fact over myth.

By whom would you like to be taught?

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There is a debate going on about the preferred qualifications of teachers.  Should the primary qualification be a Master’s Degree, or even a PhD, or should teachers be identified for their experience, skills of communication, love of their subject and enthusiasm?

It must be natural for head teachers to treat a further degree as a pre-requisite. To get an MA, and especially a PhD, takes hard work and determination, and there is a presumption that, after all that labour, the candidate must be very familiar with the subject. On the other hand, if someone loves teaching, challenges the children and makes the process fun, then which type of teacher will the children remember, and which subject are they likely to pursue later on?  Of course the two types of teacher can be rolled into a single person – academically qualified as well as inspirational.  That’s great, but not very common, I suspect.  

Epicurus wants us to takes pleasure out of life, learn how to learn, and learn throughout our lives. By whom would you like to be taught?