Wesley Mouch probably has the most appropriate name in the book Atlas Shrugged, since he’s basically a moocher. He rides other people’s coattails into positions of power and influence, then proceeds to do a terrible job.

For some strange reason the character of Wesley Mouch came to mind as a I read a NZ Herald article wherein Spark (once Telecom) managing director Simon Moutter criticises the Netflix organisation for not collecting GST on its NZ sales.

Mr. Moutter is a fully fledged socialist as demonstrated by his claim that government should be responsible for health and education. He says- “taxes should be as low as possible to stimulate economic growth, but high enough to cover essentials like health, education, defence, welfare for those in need and the maintenance of law and order.”

Moutter discloses that last year Spark set up Lightbox, on a virtually identical business model to Netflix NZ. The thrust of his argument is that as Spark has to collect GST on sales, so should Netflix. Otherwise Lightbox is not competing on a level playing field.

I suggest Mr Moutter should be thinking about expanding his services likes Netflix, and perhaps selling it in overseas countries. Would he therefore want to collect tax for those overseas govts? For what? None of those govts would provide anything to Spark. And unless all GST rates are the same, the same un-level playing field will exist. The deal is really between Spark on the net and its customers on the Net. As it is with Netflix.

Mr. Moutter also says that he merely collects the tax for the NZ government. In other words he just charges the required 15% additionally, and then feeds it directly into the govt coffers.

I think a much more helpful approach would be for Mr Mouch Moutter to call for reductions in taxation, to cease advocating for socialist policies like state controlled education and health, and to lobby for the idea that companies delivering services in competition with similar overseas companies should be exempted from collecting GST.

All problems have a solution, but socialists seldom ever think of the right one. The real issue here is that the much vaunted GST is not necessarily the one size fits all solution that taxation proponents sell it as. Especially now that we have the internet.

Govts of all sizes and shapes across the globe just have to come up with better ways of collecting taxes, and as part of those improvements, realise that people are no longer obliged to continue feeding their insatiable appetite for our earnings. They’ll just have to moderate their spending in line with what is reasonably practical to collect.