Somos nós que o fazemos a nós próprios

Luís Salgado de Matos no Público

"A República e as Finanças: Lemos no Público de quarta-feira passada: «A ideia do (Ministro das Finanças) é 'abrandar' as regras do sigilo bancário e tornar públicas as declarações de rendimentos dos contribuintes». Esta publicitação daria a Portugal um regime único no mundo.

Parece que qualquer cidadão passará a ter o direito de estudar a declaração de IRS do leitor. A proposta, que será apreciada pelo Conselho de Ministros, tem o louvável objectivo de diminuir a fraude fiscal. A proposta é boa?

Em muitos países não há sigilo fiscal para a Administração Pública ou para instrutores de processo penal: obtêm a informação fiscal relevante sem autorização de um juiz de direito. Mas essa informação fica em sigilo e só pode ser publicitada para efeitos de acusação em processo administrativo ou penal.

Em nenhum país, porém, o fim do sigilo fiscal significou a publicidade das declarações do imposto pessoal de rendimento/...)"

Comentários:

Imaginem uma empresa a comunicar aos seus clientes que: vamos tornar públicos os vossos/nossos extractos de facturação.

A origem de todos os problemas é que os indivíduos reagem naturalmente à cobrança coerciva de mais de 50% dos seus rendimentos. Podem dizer que essa cobrança somos nós que a decidimos fazer a "nós próprios" e que tudo o que for necessário para a sua efectiva cobrança, fomos "nós" que o decidimos.

Mesmo que tal raciocínio tivesse algum fundo de razão, teríamos de lembrar da máquina de discriminação em que a social-democracia se tornou, porque, não só os impostos são cobrados proporcionalmente aos rendimentos e despesa efectuada como a progressividade e outros mecanismos (como os plafonds máximos do subsídio de desemprego, por exemplo) tornam possível que a maioria perpetue a transferência de rendimento a seu próprio favor - e nessa descriminação incluimos não só em abstracto e como figuração do argumento - os 51% de população que impõe a redistribuição aos restantes 49%, mas também toda a classe de pessoas que não paga impostos e sim vive exclusivamente deles e reflecte o seu interesse por via democrática e tudo fazendo para que o sistema político à esquerda e direita proteja o seu Status Quo- os funcionários públicos.

Sobre o que fazemos a "nós próprios":

"The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all regard it as a necessary means for achieving the goals of mankind, a means to be ranged against the "private sector" and often winning in this competition of resources.

With the rise of democracy, the identification of the State with society has been redoubled, until it is common to hear sentiments expressed which violate virtually every tenet of reason and common sense such as, "we are the government."

The useful collective term "we" has enabled an ideological camouflage to be thrown over the reality of political life. If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned.

If the government has incurred a huge public debt which must be paid by taxing one group for the benefit of another, this reality of burden is obscured by saying that "we owe it to ourselves"; if the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred.

Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have "committed suicide," since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part. One would not think it necessary to belabor this point, and yet the overwhelming bulk of the people hold this fallacy to a greater or lesser degree.

We must, therefore, emphasize that "we" are not the government; the government is not "us." The government does not in any accurate sense "represent" the majority of the people.[1]

[1] We cannot, in this chapter, develop the many problems and fallacies of "democracy." Suffice it to say here that an individual's true agent or "representative" is always subject to that individual's orders, can be dismissed at any time and cannot act contrary to the interests or wishes of his principal. Clearly, the "representative" in a democracy can never fulfill such agency functions, the only ones consonant with a libertarian society.

Social democrats often retort that democracy—majority choice of rulers—logically implies that the majority must leave certain freedoms to the minority, for the minority might one day become the majority. Apart from other flaws, this argument obviously does not hold where the minority cannot become the majority, for example, when the minority is of a different racial or ethnic group from the majority.

Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1942), p. 198. :

The friction or antagonism between the private and the public sphere was intensified from the first by the fact that . . . the State has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the service of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind."

Em THE ANATOMY OF THE STATE, Murray N. Rothbard