My Insights article, Low Tax Fantasy, on 27 July rebutted the claims that New Zealand was a low-tax country by global standards and that tax is love.

The article struck a chord with a number of readers, one of whom said it reminded her of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets about love.

With apologies to that most sage of bards, here is an unfaithful rendition of the sonnet she had in mind.


Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Tax is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds, 

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken,

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Tax is not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Tax alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov’d,

I never writ, and no man was ever taxed.