Harry Potter and the Welfare State

In the feverish run-up to the May general elections in the United Kingdom, J.K. Rowling, billionaire author of the Harry Potter series, has published a truly wonderful op-ed in the Times of London about her experience as a struggling single mother and the support she received from the state. The sentiment is particularly relevant in the US today, on Tax Day, when everyone seems to think they pay the government too much.

Rowling, with her massive fortune, pays far more in taxes living in the UK than she would if she decamped to, say, Monaco. But she didn’t, and won’t. To wit:

I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism.

Food for thought for all those hard-working rich people thinking of “going Galt.”