More than one bound
Sir: Ferdinand Mount castigates me (Poli- tics, 14 March) for being an 'in-one-bound- she-was-free' merchant. Would that were! I fear the road ahead is stony, full of necessary and painful reforms — of our Welfare State, our housing laws, our tax system, and much else. Cuts in basic taxation and large cuts in the top income tax rates are necessary and overdue re- forms, held up repeatedly by one difficulty or another; this was the year when they could have been delivered. Unfortunately it is presumably election year and political judgments have of course been uppermost; but on economic grounds we cannot afford to be complacent any longer about the role of incentives in reviving Britain. High tax-rates have done too much damage, to employed and unemployed, for that to be defensible.
Patrick Minford
Eleanor Rathbone Building, The University of Liverpool, PO Box 147, Liverpool
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