Knowledge Tax

Just a quick post: an opinion piece which doubles as an update on the book blockade issue, Knowledge Tax. An excerpt:

IN JULY THIS YEAR PRESIDENT MACAPAGAL-Arroyo tried to take credit for settling a problem she had allowed her own people to create. In her State of the Nation Address, Ms Arroyo virtuously declared that she intended to increase taxes on tobacco but the government should not be in the business of taxing minds. She was referring to her administration’s flirting with rogue-state status by violating the Florence Agreement and its accompanying Nairobi protocols.

The Philippines, from the Quirino administration onwards, had pledged to support an international policy promoting the duty-free entry of books. Until, that is, the Department of Finance decided it should put the squeeze on book lovers, in its eyes perhaps a minor source of new revenue, but still, a source to be squeezed like any other.

The DOF didn’t count on opposition being not only loud and sustained and, just as significantly, being broad. There were legal objections: the country had long been dutiful about its international obligations, and it was shocking to see the administration’s domestic contempt for covenants and legality infecting its behavior internationally. There were jurisdictional and policy disputes: the National Book Development Board and Unesco Philippines versus the DOF and the Bureau of Customs. There were public opinion and sectoral concerns that found book lovers and booksellers united in common opposition to the state.

It was public opposition that galled the bureaucrats the most, so the President’s intervention, which was in reality a retreat, was portrayed by her allies as a concession to booksellers. Ms Arroyo glibly declared that no tax would be imposed on knowledge while the bureaucrats offended by her pronouncement grudgingly complied in terms of the booksellers who resumed duty-free imports of books, while continuing their illegal extortion activities with respect to ordinary citizens.

Click here for the whole piece.