Taxation of shares
If you sell your shares for more than their value at the time you received them (i.e. you make a profit) then you will be liable for capital gains tax - but only if the profit exceeds your annual allowance (£11,100, in tax year 2015-16). This is unrelated to how you came by the shares in the first place. (Note that there are certain exemptions to this, which includes some employer share schemes.)
If land is worth something, it's because someone wants to buy it and make it productive. If it isn't worth much, the property taxes are low.  I favor wilderness protection, but I do not see that as contrary to my insistence that the fairest form of taxation is the property tax. The question seems to be from the point of view actual sales and not its impact on one's taxation. In case you just want to sell, why brokers will respond differently each times. Either there may be issues with ownership and/or the company whose shares it is? In case you feel that the issues lies with brok The idea is it concurrently drives prices down, due to labour costs. Society will have to be generally less materialistic, and those in production will probably require different taxation to keep capital and labour fairly even, but yes, it's going to happen one way or another, The link provided by DumbCoder (below) is only relevant to UK resident investors and does not apply if you live in Malaysia.  I noticed that in a much older question you asked a similar question about taxes on US stocks, so I'll try and answer both situations here. The answer is almost the same for any country you decide to invest in.  As a foreign investor, the country from which you purchase stock cannot charge you tax on either income or capital gains. Taxation is based on residency, so even when you purchase foreign stock its the tax laws of Malaysia (as your country of residence) that matter. At the time of writing, Malaysia does not levy any capital gains tax and there is no income tax charged on dividends so you won't have to declare or pay any tax on your stocks regardless of where you buy them from. The only exception to this is Dividend Withholding Tax, which is a special tax taken by the government of the country you bought the stock from before it is paid to your account. You do not need to declare this tax as it his already been taken by the time you receive your dividend. The rate of DWT that will be withheld is unique to each country.  The UK does not have any withholding tax so you will always receive the full dividend on UK stocks.  The withholding tax rate for the US is 30%.  Other countries vary. For most countries that do charge a withholding tax, it is possible to have this reduced to 15% if there is a double taxation treaty in place between the two countries and all of the following are true: Note: Although the taxation rules of both countries are similar, I am a resident of Singapore not Malaysia so I can't speak from first hand experience, but current Malaysia tax rates are easy to find online. The rest of this information is common to any non-US/UK resident investor (as long as you're not a US person). A purchase of a stock is not a taxable event. No 1099 to worry about.  Welcome to Money.SE Found a great article (with bibliography) that covers taxation on investment activity by non resident aliens - even covers the special 15% tax on dividends for Canadian residents. It's (dividend tax rate) generally 30% for other NRAs  (your 2nd question). And it confirmed my suspicion that there are no capital gains taxes for NRAs. (1st Q) Source: http://invest-faq.com/articles/tax-non-us-nat.html Fidelity has a good explanation of Restricted Stock Awards: For grants that pay in actual shares, the employee’s tax holding period begins at the time of vesting, and the employee’s tax basis is equal to the amount paid for the stock plus the amount included as ordinary compensation income. Upon a later sale of the shares, assuming the employee holds the shares as a capital asset, the employee would recognize capital gain income or loss; whether such capital gain would be a short- or long-term gain would depend on the time between the beginning of the holding period at vesting and the date of the subsequent sale. Consult your tax adviser regarding the income tax consequences to you. So, you would count from vesting for long-term capital gains purposes.  Also note the point to include the amount of income you were considered to have earned as a result of the original vesting [market value then - amount you paid].  (And of course, you reported that as income in 2015/2016, right?) So if you had 300 shares of Stock ABC granted you in 2014 for a price of $5/share, and in 2015 100 of those shares vested at FMV $8/share, and in 2016 100 of those shares vested, current FMV $10/share, you had $300 in income in 2015 and $500 of income in 2016 from this.   Then in 2017 you sold 200 shares for $15/share: All else being equal I wouldn't object to zero capital gains tax. Except not all else is equal. The differential between earned income and capital gains is enormous. This is more than enough to drive huge sums of money out of incomes and into capital gains. Private equity funds provides the simplest and most legal means of accomplishing this. There are more legally questionable methods, though not challenged at this time, involving carried interest.  Let's say an employer has $1 they can choose to pay an employee or divert it into capital gains. If the effective tax rate that employee pays is 40% that leaves 60 cents going to that employee and doesn't even count the other cost of that employee through unemployment insurance, etc. If they divert it then at the top rate it becomes 85%. So, even without other cost considerations that becomes a 25% surcharge on treating it as wages. More than enough incentive freezing out wages as much as possible in favor of capital gains. Which is occurring on a large scale.   So let's get back to the issues faced by granny selling her house. You say it's unfair for granny to pay 35% as opposed to 15% on the capital gains. Yet is it any more unfair than granny paying 35% on her earned income all those years she paid for the house? Wouldn't she be much better off if all those years she paid less on her earned income, at the expense of paying more on her capital gains, all with essentially the same overall federal tax receipts? So in essence you are arguing that she should be screwed less on her one time capital gains in favor of screwing her many many times that amount over the years leading up to that sale. Ouch.  So let's look at the difference between capital gains and income at the investor level. You have a wage earner that gets out of bed every morning and works at the beckoning of someone else daily. We'll suppose they are it the 35% tax bracket, under $400k. Is it more fair to charge them 35% than it it the person who invested their money and gets their paycheck while watching I Love Lucy reruns? I know it's almost never that easy but really, if working 40 or 80 or even 100 hours per week doesn't deserve the same break how do you justify it for the person who simply purchased their future income? Labor is after all hired to help produce capital goods. How is their contribution to those capital goods not part and parcel to the capital gains?  Even with these issues I still wouldn't have such a problem if markets, including wage and capital ratios, acted independently of these effective tax rates. But that notion is absurd, even if doing so require some illegal maneuvers. Which in many cases do not.   So yeah, I find your argument to be specious and quiet arbitrary at every level.