Tax breaks vs. revolution in taxation

Sri Lankans, it is fair to say, do not instinctively lay claim to their right to liberty. However, it goes without saying that the pursuit of self-interest is as instinctual with Sri Lankans as it is with anyone anywhere.

Each person by virtue of being a personality, having the power of thinking, knowing and of controlled habit formation, must have some freedom to exercise that power to realise his personality. To be a personality is to exercise that power in the service of ideals. Yet nation-states have encroaching tendencies, and everywhere the struggle is a constant one to secure the sphere of liberty. But when confronted with an encroaching authority, why is it that Sri Lankans do not habitually insist on the inalienable right of each person to become a personality - to exercise justly the rational will and to enjoy the possessions which such an exercise would generate?

It is natural to assume that the pursuit of self-interest and the assertion of rights are perfectly coincident. But when we pursue self-interest we have a malign influence on the sphere of liberty. This can be seen writ large and in perfected form in the way in which our relatively settled habits impel us to approach taxation.

We have been complaining about the laundry list of levies that the state routinely imposes on us in ever-increasing rates. Taxes are anyway repulsive because they encroach on our purchasing power needed to develop our capacities to enjoy the right to pursue for some, material progress, and for others, rational progress of soul or personality through the cultivation of the mind. But defiant self-assertiveness has hardly been typical of our approach to the burden of taxation.

As the natural and free expression of our settled habits, many of us instinctively seek to subvert the burden of taxation. Our subversion takes the form either of greasing the wheels of our political system of patronage and favouritism to obtain the favoured industry status that carries with it tax holidays, duty concessions and other “incentives”, or of greasing the palm of officials to suborn tax avoidance.

In our society, the burden of taxation falls squarely on the shoulder of the unfavoured, the credulous and those who are either disinclined or unable to diversify into disparate industries under a single mercenary conglomerate to maximize tax and other incentives that might be procured from our political system.

Every citizen or enterprise is entitled to expect a just distribution of the burden of taxation. It should make us very angry indeed, when the principles of distributive justice are violated, and we are inflicted with insult and injury. Economic planning cannot shift the burden of taxation away from some without penalizing others. Such planning is, of course, always iniquitous and has no legitimate role to play in governance today except as a cover for bribery and cilentism.

However, our anger at taxation should be even more so, because our form of government is vile. Governments everywhere waste money, but ours is said to be particularly vile because we are routinely governed, not in our interest, but in the interest those who govern us. When a government and the action of its law fail to treat the individual personality as an end in itself, a crime against human nature is perpetrated. Self-love is hideous only if men were nothing but “promiscuous bipeds”. At any rate, no man would give his consent to be taxed in disregard of self-realisation for the sake of others, even if others were those in need of charity. Taxation without consent is robbery sanctioned by the rule of power.

Businesses are justified in complaining about taxes, because taxes obviously lay down conditions adverse to the free and just exercise of their will through the continuous development of their capacities. Yet our businesses would never be at defiance with an encroaching authority, they would rather serve their interest by insinuating themselves into the king’s confidence, so to speak. Self-interest is a controlling force in human conduct, but on its own, it obviously does not impel man to assert his rights.
A leading political scientist in the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities reminds us that the steps leading to the assertion of rights and political change have their compulsion more in the feeling of self-importance than in self-interest.

Interestingly, in illustrating the role which the feelings of self-importance and anger play in political change, the lecture briefly mentions the rage of Achilles, the ultimate arbiter of the Trojan War, the pre-eminent warrior-captain of the Homeric epic, Iliad.
Achilles suffered a private wrong at the hand of his King Agamemnon. Ancient Greeks saw their heroes being ‘godlike in their passionate self-esteem.’ Homer would thus have Achilles raging; refusing to take part in the fighting; and rounding on the king that only a scum who had risen to the surface would deny a hero what is due to him, that a lesser being like Agamemnon – who without the lineage is nobody - should not be in charge of the Greek army.

“Achilles elevated a civil complaint concerning a private wrong to a demand for a change of regime, a revolution in politics. To be sure, not every complaint goes that far. But every complaint goes in that direction, from anger to reason to politics… To complain of an injustice is an implicit claim to rule. It is a demand that rulers adjust their rule to provide for you, and not merely as a personal favour but as one case of a general principle.”

Again, “When you complain, it is not so much that you lack what you want as that you feel slighted or offended in not having what is rightfully yours. Your wants do matter, but mainly because you feel you are entitled to have them satisfied and get angry when they are not. Many times people who seem to us poor do not complain of their wants, because they do not feel entitled to those wants.”

There is indeed a meaningful difference between self-interest and self-importance. When the emphasis is on self-interest, man is a sensible and practical person, amenable to compromise. But he is hardly amenable to compromise when the emphasis is on self-importance. Then he becomes stubborn, quarrelsome and assertive.

The concern for, and loyalty to, the feeling of self-importance that most men experience will never be on a scale as grand as the experience characteristic of tragic heroes like Achilles immortalized in Greek and other poetry of the Western civilization.

However, the concern for the feeling of self-importance and the assertion of one’s rights are obviously inseparable, in life as in art.

It is not that Sri Lankans do not complain. It is just that life here is sluggish and does not embody the intensity of passion that comes from living in light of an ideal. Again, it is not that we do not feel slighted and offended; we are in fact quite easily offended. Oversensitivity and cowardly surges of pent-up emotions are characteristic of us. It is just that self-importance and goodness are inseparable.

Man feels important or proud in the measure he is good in every virtue. An indication of this is the craving of bad men for possessions and positions as a claim for respectability and honour. Although pride without the nobility and goodness of character is an absurdity, yet men who, without virtue, have power and wealth and think themselves superior to others are often thought of as proud men. However, such opinions rise because the vulgar cannot see the difference between loftiness and arrogance – that lofty disdain is a matter of excellence of character and intellect; and arrogant assumption and insolence a tale of depravity, wickedness and over-ambition.

Complaints never progress in the direction of political change, where life is sluggish and intemperate, and men, in their self-assertion, are either humble or cruel and wicked. The American Revolution - or at least the view of it expressed by Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president of the United Sates - is useful here as a powerful reminder of why complaints in Sri Lanka do not produce real change but bring to the surface such psychopathic savages as Prabhakaran and Wijeweera.

“[The American Revolution] is in no sense a rising of the oppressed and downtrodden. It brought no scum to the surface.

The great body of the people were accustomed to privations but they were free from depravity. If they had poverty, it was not of the hopeless kind that afflicts great cities, but the inspiring kind that marks the spirit of the pioneer. The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.”

Our civilization, having made a mockery of the moral personality’s use of the possessive case, has made life largely sluggish, intemperate and vicious; our pursuit of self-interest blackens liberty and we are accustomed to perceiving the price of every soul but the value of none.