Fascinating little piece here about Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell) and the taxman.

Go read to get the details of what was done. But this raise, to me, two interesting points.

There is, as background, the fact that artists often find income arriving in lumps. An author might have only one or two really successful books in a lifetime (as with Orwell) or a musician only one or two hits. Under the system then the income from such would be counted as arriving in one year (and taxed at 80-90% or so) when it should perhaps be more spread over 5 or even 10 years. The current system is that one can elect to spread such large payments over three years.

There is also the point that the article doesn’t make abundantly clear. The valuation of the estate. The Revenue was keen to establish the potential value of such things as the film rights. On those the (very high at the time) death duties would be levied. If they had said they were worth, say, 10 thousand, then (if the duty was 90% which it might have been) then the estate would have to pay 9 thousand in tax. But they would have to pay this before they received money for such rights, before they had even sold them. So it could be entirely possible that the estate would be both extremely wealthy as per the taxman’s valuation and bankrupt as per paying more in tax than was actually in the estate.

Yes, of course, I do think it fun that it is possible to use Orwell, a writer that all three of us admire, to point up what happens when Chris and Owen encourage confiscatory inheritance taxes.

Now if we were to have 100% inheritance taxation of course this worry would go away. But so would the justification for copyright protection after the artist’s death as well. There is no reason why the State should be able to charge a fee for the printing of Orwell’s works if the original justification, that allowing such rights to be passed along (to encourage artistic endeavour) were not there.
This would mean that copyright expired on the death of the author (in itself no bad thing actually, perhaps even shorter fixed year terms would be better,) but it would rather change the background of the whole endeavour.

But the two major points I want to raise. Do you think this was tax avoidance or tax evasion? Morally justified or not?

The second is, well, looking for some medical knowledge out there. Blair died of TB in 1949. When did we actually start to have effective treatments for it? in the 50s? 60s? Was he, like Freddie Mercury and his AIDs, just that few years to early? If he had survived another two or three years would he have lived another 20?

(Wikipedia tells me that effective treatment was available. "It was not until 1946 with the development of the antibiotic streptomycin that treatment rather than prevention became a possibility." Did he get it?)