Dr Eric Crampton: Tax regime makes it too clucking painful to invest in NZ

There’s a very old saying that taxation is the science of plucking the chicken without making it squawk. The earliest form of the saying seems to go back to a 1766 letter from French economist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot to David Hume – though the exact origins are disputed.

Some aphorisms are timeless; this one is as true now as it was in Hume’s day.