Occasional Tales

Hand over the condiments and you won’t get hurt. Much. I think it was in The Scholars (儒林外史) that I first encountered the word gabelle , which is the name of the French salt tax. People were forced to buy salt each week. There was a salt tax in China and the British used it in India during the Raj for want of anything other means of acquiring revenue from the impoverished populace. The British planted a hedge around the area that was being taxed to prevent salt smuggling with the rate of taxation being nearly 25%. In fact, the word “salary” is derived from the Latin sal “salt”. Tax is a word with thoroughly bad connotations. History is littered with taxes people have hated as governments have sought to squeeze money out of us. Although taxation would seem to be a necessary evil so that the government can pay for the services which the populace demands, it’s hard to get any sense that the money is being put to good use. Perhaps it is, but we’re more likely to read stories about anothe...

Perhaps not these days. The first part of today’s dilemma is about Adam Smith who discovered that money makes the world go round. If he’d been a wit, he would then have said that food makes David Hume go round. Basically, it can all be summed up in the sentence, “Greed is good.” Self-interest is the basis for social co-operation, which is very true in China since you soon come to realise that when Chinese people claim they want to be your friend, they really mean that there’s something they want from you – probably free English lessons. The first dilemma is whether people should sell their good for just enough to make an honest living or screw the punters for as much as they can get out of them. Business seems to work on the second principle. My Dad has been after a Sony Blu-ray player. The Sony shop had it for one price; a second shop had it for another, higher price; a third had it for a lower price than either of the other two. The question I asked was how they could possibly sell i...