Yesterday when I was walking through town I saw a woman wearing a t-shirt that read "Taxation without Representation." At first I wondered how this shirt made from an American Tea Party rally to Hohoe Ghana. You see a lot of North American t-shirts here (the little boy next door wears a Montreal Canadians t-shirt and one of the first days we were here there was someone wearing a Saunders farm t-shirt -- a long way to go for a haunted maze!) and I know that at least part of the reason that shirts like this are for sale here is that many of those clothes that we donate to various charities are then sold by the pound to buyers in the developing world. They then take the best, press them and sell them in little stalls all around the country.
The more I thought about this Tea Party message though, the more I wondered about larger economic questions. A lot of the time, walking around Ghana feels like the Tea Party theory put into practice. They want to reduce the taxes paid to the state and let capitalism thrive. Ghana, if nothing else, is unfettered capitalism with very little government regulation or interference. You can sell things virtually anywhere. There are little store fronts along most road-sides. If you can afford to buy or rent one of these you can roll out your blanket and hawk your watches and phones on the corner in the shade of a tree. If you can't find even a sliver of space you can put your goods in a basin on your head and walk through town selling to whoever is buying. Water, batik fabric, plantain chips, among many other things are all sold in this fashion.
And there is no tax charged on any of these transactions. The country has something called a VAT (value added tax) but you only pay this at the upscale shops (where the vast majority of people never shop). Of all the things I've purchased here (a lot of Coke and Fanice, but also tailored clothing, jewlery and various and sundty nick nacks, I have paid exactly no tax).
This is obviously a problem for the government. As the Tea Party points out: it's hard for them to interfere in your affairs if they do not have a suffient source of revenue. And you see this lack of interference everywhere you turn. The roads are lousy with potholes and there appears to be no planning in towns like Hohoe -- build what you want wherever you want. There is also no system of government public transportation: instead of a municipal bus system you get private taxis that run up and down the streets that you can jump into and get wherever you want to for 70 peswas and trotros if you want to get from town to town. They are relatively inexpensive -- imagine bus fare that is 35 cents in town or 5 bucks from Ottawa to Montreal -- but you also have to wonder about how safe any of these vehicles are. A trotro can seat 12-15 and taxis can fit as many as you can jam in (a friend here in town was telling us about a trip she took on the weekend; they started off with four in the sedan and before long they 9, including a mother and baby in the front seat and a man riding in the trunk). But it is all ok because someone is providing a service and you are paying for said service.
The road to the house we're staying in is probably the best example. Any vehicle trying to get to the homebase has to drive a fair ways out of the way on bumpy roads to get here. There is a more direct road, but it is only accessible right now by foot. Before we got here the bridge had been washed out. The bridge has since been replaced but not the fill that connects the road on either side. I was asking one of the staff here about that. He told me that people in the community didn't want to wait for the government to come and fix the bridge so they pooled their resources and got the bridge built. Now they are raising more money, but they don't yet have enough to finish the road. That might come next month or later. In the end, it will probably be faster than waiting for the government.
I am reminded of an episode of This American Life we listened to a while back. They talked about some town in the States that had pretty much done away with property taxes (or at least any increases in property taxes). They started turning out all the street lights, because they no longer had the funds to pay for it. If you wanted the streetlights on your block to be turned on, you could go down to city hall and pay something like $250 and they would turn them back on. One city counsellor (who was opposed to this new system) talked to one man and said, "You know, if you just paid an extra $100 on your property taxes we could turn the lights on all around the city and you would still be $150 ahead." The individual felt this was better, even if he was paying more.
I don't know whether it's ideology that drives thinking like that or something else, but I wouuld very much like to see the Tea Partier whose t-shirt migrated to Ghana spend a month here and tell me that a policy of no taxes leads to better society because I just don't see it.
“I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.” -- Oliver Wenell Holmes Jr.
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