Colloquialisms like ‘every pound that avoids tax is another taken from the workers pocket’ echo their sanctimonious tone across the walls of Westminster, as economic policy suffers from the epidemic of raging politicisation.
The ease with which these phrases roll off shadowy tongues of those on the opposition’s benches is an affront to the democratic process. They hope our sentiments will be corrupted by convenience; banking on the people yielding to simplicity over an inopportune truth.
Long since has the populist’s toolbox had a slot for the use of proverbial and reductive language in the name of satisfying political ends, typically, expanding electoral appeal. Long since has our diminishing appetite for difficult political conversations strengthened this tool.
My issue does not lie with tax avoidance or tax-paying. It lies instead with the degradation of the nuance, intricacy and integrity that approaching political issues requires.
Naturally, the calculated catchphrases of politicians are more appealing than an expert dissection of the nature of political problems, and their sprawling implications for historic treatises, and political stability.
But once we surrender to this expediency, we lower the barriers for successful populism, and further separate the individual from politics. Leaders, in realising that electability is barely defined by competence or a capacity to reason, have no interest in refining those capacities. The result is a pit of useless policy in a façade of democratic respect. The result is the insubstantial promise of ‘sun-lit uplands’. The result is an unconsidered Brexit deal.
Instead I propose that avoiding taxes is justifiable.
Tax avoidance, we are told, is really the avoidance of a social obligation. Complying with social obligations is a virtue, and hence, to not do so displays some vice.
Peculiarly, this moral attitude persists through even the most witheringly furious political attitudes towards the organization tasked with spending that tax revenue. There is a raging irony in condemning efforts to avoid taxes, while simultaneously abhorring the government’s use of those taxes.
It's akin to unwavering loyalty to the coffee shop which periodically spits on your shortbread while spilling your coffee suspiciously frequently. More accurately, perhaps, with the hidden race towards libertarianism, unwavering loyalty to the casino which seizes one’s chips just to throw them unapologetically towards the house favourite. Perplexing and inconstant at best, a display of impotent intellect at worst.
Epitomizing this narrative, is the lumbago-ridden-jellyfish who uses the opposition’s side of the dispatch box as a virtue signalling podium. His first question to the PM: a challenge of the government’s uninterest in reforming the IR35 tax policy loophole. The next, a just challenge of the Tory party’s fiscal incompetence, to the extent of ‘spunking’ $37Bn on tory donors, and challenging their grounds to govern. There is an ease with which we can predict Starmer’s questions, which speak to his monotonous essence, but it also speaks to his inability to reason.
However, a compelling case for tax avoidance can scarcely be found in the identification of inconsistent behaviour and peculiar attitudes. It lies most strongly in an argument for the necessity of withholding tax contributions to a government which can no longer be entrusted with the public finances.
So, to paraphrase our lumbago-ridden-jellyfish’s, words: ‘You have no legitimate grounds to govern, let alone to remove the wealth, and in effect the freedom of the great people of our great, great nation. Your policies are almost inconceivably terrible, contrary to our natural sense of justice, and irreparably fused with external and unaccountable interests. Your conduct in office is antithetical to the standards expected of those in public life. And yet, despite all of this, I will push zealously for the repair of tax loopholes, in effect paving new fiscal pipelines to the treasury accounts. I will therefore, in essence, push for more money for you to spend illegitimately, terribly, in a manner contrary to our sense of natural justice, unaccountably and all while you party on the edge of abhorrent and detestable behaviour.’
Ah, thank you Starmer, our voice of reason. It seems that the jellyfish is growing a brain and backbone.
The social contract is predicated on the necessity of government. Even for those philosophers which tend towards the primitive and collective human state as peaceful rather than violent, and perhaps even desirable, identify the net-benefit of the introduction of a central authority. The two extremes here are Hobbes and Rosseau. The former posits that the government will arise out of dramatic necessity, to save us from the depths of mutual destruction. While the latter argues that a government is needed to abolish the ‘rule of the fittest’ – which is neither moral nor legitimate – that follows from the state of nature. Reasoning here is not significant – the conclusion is that the acceptance of government is a constant.
The insurance of legitimate and continued consent and structurally irretrievable consent are incompatible. Therefore, a termination clause, so to speak, exists in this social contract, as it does in contemporary commercial, marital, or financial contracts. Primarily, this acts as a check on whatever organization transitions into government. An antidote to the poison of the ambition, ruthlessness, and hubris that are almost conditional of success in politics, which, when unchecked, results in despotism.
Further, the civil state serves the function of protecting individual rights, whether ‘natural’, or conditional for social flourishing. In this way, the civil state must respect the individual right to vocalise discontent and to self-determine one’s life.
It is for these reasons, that rebellion is broadly respected as the people’s right in response to the existence of illegitimate and unaccountable power. This sentence, in essence, is the termination clause.
Tax avoidance, even the liberal voice would accept, is incomparable to rebellion. Both in scale and consequence. Perhaps then, withholding obligated financial contributions to an illegitimate government is perfectly righteous, and moreover embedded, in the doctrine’s acceptance of a more extreme reactionary process.
Furthermore, it could be propositioned that withholding tax contributions is in fact comparable in consequence to rebellion. The very fibres of government- from the payroll, to renting government ministries, to funding enforcement agencies - are reliant on taxation. Consequently, the destabilization of the very foundations of government follows from mass tax avoidance. When all else fails in attempting to repair the separation of legitimate will and the substance of governance, tax avoidance serves the rightful function of grinding government action to a halt.
Whether or not this argument stands scrutiny is not the point here. The point is to attempt to defend rationally and constructively a practice which, in contemporary politics, is deemed broadly as indefensible. The point is to engage in a difficult, both academically and socially, conversation, and the point is to do this without resorting to reductive colloquialisms that degrade all too often political discourse.
Avoid taxes, or don’t. Deem it detestable or demanded. But do this in a well-reasoned fashion and do not allow the weight of your wallet, let alone your most heart-felt beliefs to be shaped by self-interested politicians.
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