Illegitimi nil carborundum!
Conversation with Jimmy centred around properly utilising tax exemptions and allowances, then turned to past interactions with the tax authority. Curiously, he compares HMRC debt collection strategy to the ‘early stages of human evolution’
Jimmy’s big on opinions and, in his opinion, it’s his opinion that matters! I asked, he vented, here’s the story:
Details of how early humans caught animals for food are speculation. Handcrafted spears, and arrows for hunting, were invented around 500 thousand years ago, but humans have been eating meat for around 2 million years..
So, what happened in the other 75% of our existence?
Harvard evolutionary biologist, Daniel Lieberman, postulates that early humans used ‘persistence hunting’, a technique still used today by, among others, the San people of South Africa
The chase begins when San hunters select and separate from the herd a large Kudu bull
A single San hunter spooks and pursues the prey, which charges ahead in fear. Early doors, the hunter can’t catch the bounding beast
Yet the hunter knows he can use the animal’s weaknesses to his advantage. His heavy antlers slow him down
The Kudu must stop to catch its breath, and the hunter begins closing in, not to catch it, but to run it to exhaustion
After relentless pursuit, the Kudu is finally ready to give up, collapsing in surrender with barely a struggle
Jimmy believes victims of HMRC’s ‘Loan Charge’ and ‘IR35’ may recognise strategic parallels between early human evolution and man’s quest for food, and how the tax authority relentlessly pursues its ‘customers’
As he says, tax is part of any society, and we should embrace it, not fight it, but the system must adequately differentiate between those who owe tax and won’t pay, and those who simply can’t..
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Toodle Pip
