Since the “Orange Revolution,” the state has been waging war against the single tax. Both Tymoshenko and Yanukovych attempted to abolish it, and now the united Donetsk team has taken up the cause with renewed determination. I can identify three reasons for this restlessness.
The first is the simplest and most obvious. “What’s this—you paid me, and that’s it? What if I need money again tomorrow or something else?” The client of the state must be available for robbery at any time of year and any time of day. What matters to the state is not so much the taxpayers’ money as their dependence.
The second reason is, so to speak, a matter of the present. Enterprises (along with the little people who work there) are the main subject of redistribution in the Ukrainian version of feudalism. In the classical medieval version, it is land with the peasantry; in ours, it is enterprises. Enterprises pass “under the hand” of one kakistocrat or another as a result of palace intrigue and shifts in power; enterprises are seized by “raiders,” and so on, and so forth. Admittedly, the situation differs from the Middle Ages, and this must be noted. Unlike territory, which has, so to speak, a limited supply, the supply of enterprises is inexhaustible. They can be seized from each other, endlessly destroyed and ruined as “legal entities.” This happens because enterprises are created not only by kakistocrats but also by the little people themselves. They grow them, tend to them and cherish them until the moment those enterprises begin to generate profit. At that point, kakistocrats’ people usually appear, offering “cooperation”—that is, vassal dependence. Of course, I am greatly simplifying; often such ingenuity is displayed in this endeavor that, had it been applied to peaceful purposes, we would already be living under capitalism. In any case, a healthy enterprise enters the cycle, becomes a source of income for the feudal lord, and an object for attacks and trades among kakistocrats.
Generally speaking, what matters for our topic is this—in order for the process of redistribution of enterprises to function normally, they must initially fall within certain common regulatory frameworks. “Single taxpayers” fall outside these frameworks. They are like free cities in the Middle Ages. They seem to pay the lord, but you can’t take them by force. It is telling that in the Donetsk reform program, the single tax is called a “preferential” one. Indeed, from the lord’s point of view, the townspeople are insolent, unscrupulous recipients of preferences.
When Kuchma introduced the single tax, the kakistocrats viewed it as a concession for the little people—roughly like replacing corvée with quitrent. However, the state’s “economic” activity led to the impoverishment of the country. After all, the cycle of enterprises does not pass without consequence. Although legal entities can, it would seem, appear and disappear painlessly, from an economic perspective, the activity of forcibly redistributing enterprises destroys national wealth. The reason is obvious—changes in the status and activity of enterprises occur not for economic reasons (that is, not depending on the quality of the enterprise’s activity), but for political reasons. In this case, the resources of society are simply wasted. At the same time, the impoverishment is barely noticeable, like, for example, environmental pollution.
Now the impoverishment has led to the fact that the little people are extremely reluctant to resume the process of the enterprise cycle. Let us note that the Donetsk people most likely realize that in reality the “state” about which they are so concerned will suffer losses from the abolition of the single tax. However, this does not matter, since the task is not to increase the revenues of the “state.”
The third reason is a matter of the future. A “single taxpayer” can always say to the state, “I pay you. What more do you want?” Such behavior is unacceptable, and here is why. The so-called single tax is an extremely dangerous precedent. The single tax is, in essence, a per capita direct tax—that is, a prototype of maximally simple and transparent relations between a person and the state. The practice of the single tax shows that all the hysterical bustle that the state creates around “entrepreneurial activity” and “filling the budget” is devoid of its own content. Direct taxes accomplish these same tasks without any bustle and the complex machinery of indirect taxes and the accompanying “controlling” activity. Therefore, a direct tax allows questions to be posed to the state. You need a budget? But for what? Why so much? And how and where will you spend all of this? The longer a direct single tax had existed, the faster people would awaken from the spell of “state” bustle and understand how things actually stand. Of course, this cannot be permitted.
The single tax is our last foothold for the growth of civil society. A progressively developing civil society can only emerge among self-sufficient and responsible people. Such a person cannot be “at fault” before the state. A single taxpayer is much less “at fault” than all his other fellow unfortunates. This is precisely why he must be destroyed.