I have been off the grid for the first time in years, spending some days in a rural part of Britain without Internet connections. They barely have the wheel. It's life in the raw, and it's a curious experience.

I'm not certain I would entirely recommend it, although lost in the wooded wilderness, I was able to catch up on my reading. The truth is that the net has some of us in its grip. It's like the Hotel California: you can plug in any time you like, but you can rarely plug out.

One major topic deep in the greensward was taxation. Bermuda supposedly not having any was what started it.

Despite the abuse I took for defending a man's right not to be taxed out of existence, the facts of the taxation matter ought not to have been in dispute. It is widely accepted that the higher taxes are raised, the less income they produce, since taxation kills initiative (and, in extreme cases, saps the will to live). Einstein said that income tax was the one thing he couldn't understand.

Drifting along as a guest in a society in which no one, as far as I can see, has a job, and all depend on the State, I pointed out that Bermuda, with a relatively low level of personal and corporate taxation, produces four jobs for every three people - often high-quality jobs at that.

Tax is not the only reason, of course. It helps that the weather is often tolerable, and that Bermuda delivers on the promise it makes to serve its customers with less red tape and unnecessary interference.

Bermudians do pay taxes, I stressed. The payroll tax takes 13.75 percent off the top of their incomes and customs duties take some of what's left. So do a welter of fees, permits and duties, parking tickets, social insurance and all the other little bites that government takes from the working man.

The facts, however, failed to dent the view that the tree-dwellers held, that Bermuda just hands you a bucket of cash and wishes you well. Boy, if only that were true.

Returning not long after that conversation petered out, to what passes for civilisation in an area of Somerset called the Ten Parishes, I reached instinctively for the first newspaper I saw. It happened to be The Guardian, one of the drippiest rags in history. It describes itself as socialist, but offers instead a wishy-washy, supposedly hip kind of smug liberalism.

The front page of that particular newspaper carried an almost full-page report about banana producers paying less tax than do other industries. The villains of the piece, of course, were Bermuda and the Caymans. What swine we are.

The story was not news, and contained, in the first paragraph, the fact that nothing the banana producers were doing was illegal. Some news story. "Companies are efficient" should have been the headline, but that would have sold fewer papers, one supposes, than "Companies cheat taxman", or whatever it actually said.

The story was pointless, but it contained a line that quite surprised me. It was the dismissal, as cheats, of the Irish for having corporation tax at 12.5 percent. Britain's 30 percent, the argument seemed to suggest, was somehow a more beneficial rate for people.

I'm used to the US and its frankly laughable tax code. American politicians argue that since the code cannot be changed, countries that charge lower tax rates are somehow immoral. But this was the Brits, supposedly diametrically opposed on the freedom and individuality scales, behaving in exactly the same half-witted fashion.

The argument adopted by the great powers, "We have a poor tax system, so anyone who doesn't is a crook", holds very little water, if you come to think about it.

So does the preposterous notion put forward by the Grauniad (thus nicknamed for its high rate of errors) that if corporations paid more tax, life would be cheaper for the beleaguered human race. Poppycock! Companies don't pay taxes; people pay taxes. If Bermuda introduced a 50 percent corporation tax, bread would rise from $4 a loaf to $8. Ready for that?

Gas would cost $4 a litre. Companies are merely intermediary arrangements. They favour their shareholders, but ultimately, for the economy to work, they must make a profit commensurate with the risk they take, regardless of the tax rate or their ownership.

Elsewhere in The Guardian, I read that Britain now taxes its average citizens at 50 percent of their income, one way and another. Among the Europeans, only Denmark is higher, at 55 percent, but there, at least, people feel they derive value for money. Socialised medicine that works; pensions that work; government services that work. Britain has none of these, but woe betide the man who suggests that lowering taxation might help. Such an attitude is deeply unacceptable.

In England's green and pleasant land, I was vilified for sticking up for Bermuda and common sense. I pointed out that, contrary to appearances, I was the only taxpayer in the entire forest. That didn't go down well.

I may not have helped my cause by suggesting that they were all victims of Stockholm Syndrome, having paid ridiculously high taxes for so long that they had come to embrace the idea as being good for them.

One hates to write off as irretrievably lost an entire nation of 60 million people, but there can be no hope for this lot. Misery, however, loves company.

Bermuda and those other corners of capitalism whose tax systems are efficient are permanently under threat. If the descendants of Robin Hood had their way, a combination of jealously and greed, launched ridiculously from the "moral high ground", would combine to ensure that the unending pain of taxation be visited upon everyone in the world.