Echelon Magazine - June 2023

In this issue

Wood for the Trees: income taxes and civil disobedience
Of course, we are all against corrupt governments, coddled and ineffectual bureaucracies and sinister business interests. Then why pay taxes to support this system? Most may envy Thoreau for his frugal and toiling, tranquil and deeply satisfying lifestyle in the great woods on Walden’s shores, nod our heads off to his critique of big, corrupt government and business interests, and applaud him for spending a night in jail for not paying his taxes. His arguments On the Duty of Civil Disobedience resonate with us today, in an age and continent far removed from his own. However, he also believed in paying taxes (yes, really!) and waxed eloquently about commercial railroad companies and commerce and industry. He called the hypocrisy of officials employed by the state, suggesting there was no point noisily protesting corruption without vacating their jobs positions. Private citizens opposing taxes, Thoreau argues, are dutybound to express disobedience, but only by giving themselves up to be jailed. Wood for the trees, we say, and that brings us to Bellwether, our long-suffering columnist. We hope you enjoy the Bellwether column in this edition. While he does make a valid point about the dangers of progressive taxation, missing the nuances could lead to misleading conclusions. We quote Hayek, a venerated economist in our pantheon. He begins an impressive laborious censure of progressive taxation in his treatise The Constitution of Liberty with these words: Individual taxes, and especially the income tax, may be graduated for a good reason—that is, to compensate for the tendency of many indirect taxes to place a proportionally heavier burden on the smaller incomes, (and that) is the only valid argument in favour of progression. It applies, however, only to particular taxes as part of a given tax structure and cannot extend to the tax system as a whole.