Income tax is a punishment for an individuals ability to make a living. The greater the ability, the harsher the punishment. What a barbarism Those who are unable to make a living are treated by the government generously. The government grants them tax-holidays. Ethically, the money-makers ought to be nationally honoured for their successful money-making efforts. The honour should take the form of cash prizes. The more the money one makes, the fatter should be the cash prizes. Unfortunately, instead of awarding monetary prizes to the money-makers for their exceptional abilities, the government cruelly punishes them for their nation building zeal. They are subjected to heavy taxes. Instead of imposing taxes on the citizens, who are enthusiastically making money, the government should impose taxes on those good-for-nothing citizens, who are unable to make a living for themselves. They are an insult to the nation. They should either be sent to the galleys or forced to wash the Tax Collectors private laundry free of charge. A newspaper has revealed that most of our public representatives do not pay income tax. It is a funny revelation. One cant help asking: But why should our representatives pay income tax? Our representatives run the affairs of the state. Running the affairs of a modern democratic state is a dreadful ordeal. Our representatives have been patriotically going through the torture. Imposing income tax on them means punishing them for the services, which they have been rendering to the state. If we want to collect income tax from them, we must first abolish democracy. We must not add to the dire political repressibilities of our representatives the additional burden of income tax. The income tax might prove to be the last straw and the camel of our democracy might have its backbone broken into bits. The newspaper must know that when a genuine Pakistani embraces politics, he embraces it not for paying income tax but for serving his country. If our income tax laws require our public representatives to pay income tax, the laws are woefully ignorant of the reality of things. We are a democracy. And under a genuine democracy, it is politics which reigns supreme. The bloody income tax and other such nuisances are meaningless irrelevancies. If the country is to flourish, the income tax laws must be thrown at the mercy of our politics. But if we love to ruin the country we can easily do so by throwing our politics at the mercy of our income tax laws. We must not pollute our politics with the income tax rubbish. Every speech which a public representative makes to himself (generally no speaker is listened to by other members in a Pakistani legislature) and every scoop of verbal mud which he fires at his opponents are worth more than all the taxes, which have been collected by all our governments past and present.