This Sunday Bridget Williams Books is holding a panel discussion on the infantile proposition that tax is love. Really? Who fantasises about paying more tax?

Unlike love, tax is force. In 1993, Charles Adams, a US tax lawyer qualified in history and philosophy, published a history of taxation, for good and evil, across civilisations.

As he observed, the essence of a tax is taking money, property, or services by government without paying for it.

Love does not feature in this history, episodes of violent rapacity do.

Evil readily emerges when those in power seek to tax without the general uncoerced consent of those being taxed.

His nuanced conclusion was: “how we tax and spend determines, to a great extent, whether we are prosperous or poor, free or enslaved, and most important, good or evil”.

In short, take great care, particularly about consent.

The title for the panel discussion was inspired by a pre-election article by economist Shamubeel Eaqub. He proposed that tax is love.

At best, a nice thought. Free speech in action.

But what took my eye was his repeated assertion that New Zealanders are not highly taxed.

Really!? General government tax revenues in the year ended March 2017 represented NZ$49,250 per household. This would be the highest figure in New Zealand’s history, inflation adjusted.

Eaqub mainly compared New Zealand with most of the world’s highest-taxed countries – European and Scandinavian countries.

This is akin to comparing myself to 12-year olds, and declaring myself to be tall.

The Heritage Foundation, a US think tank, has compiled ratios of general government tax revenue to GDP for 180 countries. New Zealand’s 32.8% ratio is far above the 180-country median of 23.5%.

On its statistics, 94% of world’s population live in countries with lower tax ratios than New Zealand’s.

If we restrict the comparison to countries with at least 2 million people and GDP per capita of at least US$15,000, only 18 of 62 countries have a higher tax ratio than New Zealand. They comprised Botswana and 17 European/Scandinavian countries.

The population-weighted average country ratio was 23.6% of GDP. Eight-nine percent of the 3.5 billion people in these prosperous 62 countries live in countries with a lower tax ratio than New Zealand.

If tax is love, how many households volunteer more than the required love when paying IRD? I understand that IRD collects the numbers. Think zero.