About 300 years before the birth of Christ, Aristotle wrote that “law is order and good law is good order”. ‘Good law’, according to John Adams, who defined the principle of the ‘rule of law’ in the Massachusetts Constitution in 1780, is a law that serves the greater good. It is not destructive and does not take rights away from individuals.
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Good law is also easy to obey. That is, most people subjected to it obey it willingly, as it accords with the moral compass inherent in all intelligent creatures. With this in mind, and taking into account that the imposition of tax occurs only by means of passing of laws, perhaps it can be said that as long as the imposition of tax is in accordance with the moral compass or conscience of most people and is easy to obey, it is good law.
Conversely, the higher the taxes and the more activities that are taxed, the more the tax law begins to take on the hue of ‘bad law’.
A struggling economy
Drive through some smaller towns in central South Africa, and you will be struck by the high unemployment and the slow death of these once-thriving places. Even in the cities, very few business owners can say that things are not tough at present.
Taxes add to the pressure. They are high – perhaps too high. Those in power seem to think that the generation of money is relatively easy and feel little about burdening businesspeople with compliance and regulatory hurdles. The business owner – and many a manager – first has to feed a paper-hungry monster before tackling the real task of each day: – providing for a family and putting a little capital away, surely the duty of every breadwinner.
What has contributed to the degeneration of smaller towns and the slide of lower middle-class suburbs is lack of opportunity because capital is extremely hard to come by and even harder to hold onto.
One reason for this is that those in the top echelons of power in South Africa appropriate too much capital from those who are not in a position to hire professional expertise to help them hold onto it. These days, it is hard to find a newspaper without some allegation of gross misuse of public funds.
The price of this wastage is being paid by those we see roaming the streets, with hard-luck stories aplenty. It can also be seen in the scarcity of job opportunities – a scarcity so severe that young people live in daily dread of getting the axe.
How to create and maintain capital
What we have in South Africa is a money-hungry top structure that absorbs all it can with impunity, and livelihoods and opportunities suffer as a consequence. Given a lighter yoke, ordinary people would have an opportunity to create and retain capital and maintain a modest home.
And if tax rates were lower, and a better example were set by those in power, more tax would ultimately be gathered – to everyone’s benefit, including those who have buckled and fallen under the pressures of modern life.
