If you go to a financial adviser to chat about investments, here’s how your first meeting will probably go: They will ask you about your attitude to risk. How much money are you prepared to lose?

This week I saw something I haven’t in a while: a brochure from Strutt & Parker advertising a price reduction on a rather charming Notting Hill house. It is now a mere £4,750,000 ($6 million) — down around 6% from its original listing price.

The UK has a complicated, punitive, badly constructed, and all-around dysfunctional tax system.