Echelon Magazine - June 2023

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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.

Echelon Magazine Description:

Intelligent Storytelling

The one thing that will define the Echelon magazine will be the quality of the storytelling. Echelon,published monthly, will cover in depth Sri Lanka’s most successful businesses, examine their winning strategiesand profile their leaders in immersive stories. Great stories are also never limited to words, and our approach includes rich photography, bold graphics and leading edge design which together will make for a compelling read.

But business doesn’t start and end in a boardroom;it extends to the golf club greens, to international travel and to pursuits that blurthe lines between commercial venture and sheer passion. The Echelon team will present the best in business and lifestyle coverage that will appeal to an exclusive and affluent readership: an otherwise hard to reach demographic.

Content will be developed by one of the most experienced and proven teams of editors, financial journalists, photographers and designers in the country.This team has already raised the bar for powerful and expertly crafted business news. Shamindra Kulamannage, will lead the editorial team.

The reputation of Echelon is being built on the separation between editorial and advertising. However we are also looking for the most creative and impactful new formats that can be applied in our magazines, iPad app as well as website to help our clients reach our audience. We are flexible and creative and we will have a solution for every single advertiser who wants to reach our audience.

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