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The second, far more vocal group do not concede there is any problem to be addressed. These are the many doctors and small business owners who stoutly defend their right to pay less tax than a person of equivalent income, as a matter of principle.

It’s tempting to write this off as the usual special pleading. But the squall would not have reached the intensity it has were it not infused with a hefty amount of genuine outrage.

For many, it is the insult to their class identity as professionals or small businesses owners that most offends: the suggestion that, by taking advantage of a legal tax preference, they were “tax cheats” (though in fact no one in the government has suggested any such thing), certainly, but also the insult of being compared with mere employees.

Any attempt, thus, to compare what they pay in tax with what a salaried employee would pay will inevitably elicit a long list of all the ways in which the two are not comparable: the benefits that are not available to them, from maternity leave to pensions to employment insurance, or the hardships and uncertainties that an employee will never have to face.

Whether the differences are quite as stark as all that is not the issue. It is the assumption that they are entitled to be compensated by the tax system for the vagaries of their chosen careers that marks what can only be described as an alternative worldview: a vision of how economies work and what a tax system is for, quite at odds with the conventional one.