With the Supreme Court foisted to lift this month the E-VATs TRO, PGMA had left her charm photo-ops to tighten her hold on the implementation of the tax measure. She claimed that the E-VAT is “morally correct.” That in the domain of ethics with undue reference to belief and faith, the congressional ruling cannot be considered fallible, according to her, for it is sure to revitalize the country’s economy and free the poor and the rich, a world apart from each other, from their inconsequence, in order to secure a happy Philippines! What a hogwash.

Just how the travails of finance were incurred need not occupy the proadministration legislators, the foreign debt so valuable to multi-nationals had to be paid, never mind if the loans were wasted by corruption and inefficiency of government itself.

For one, what participation did the masses have when Marcos emptied the treasury? Yes, his minions were equally happy for when they did their lesser evil he closed his eyes. Or the IPPs of former President Fidel Ramos giving millions of pesos to the favored without lifting a finger? Who benefited from the road-users’ tax or the Philhealth of Arroyo? It’s awkward to say that the exploited did. Then they are to be the worst-hit by the E-VAT.

The government cannot be absolved from the ruinous collections of the E-VAT. Had the development funds, foreign and national, been religiously used for their intended purpose and beneficiaries, they could have evolved better communities. But pilferage is all over the administrative machinery that even the President has acknowledged that the systemic corruption is impossible not to taint the employees, more so the officials of government, earning the heartbreaking label, the second most corrupt country in the world. Misdeeds crept into the private sector. Jokingly when Sen. Juan Flavier was asked in one of his many visits at the U.P., how many worked among his personnel at the Health Department during his incumbency, he responded, half of them.

And then taxation will render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and let the subjects suffer in the shackles. They might not have heard of Christ urging government to moderately tax the people.

With the impeachment of PGMA unable to morally move its due course and the CON-ASS cementing the hold of the current Congress to its lucrative nonlegislative returns, her incredibility is irreversible. Now she tells us that the anti-poor E-VAT concoctions, prepared by her men who cannot forgo of self-representation, is “morally correct.” It could not hurt the poor, they say. Yes, It could no longer hurt the poor’s self-respect; they had lost it, anyway, in many years of deprivation.

What for is the state if it could not pull its backside?

An assumption here unanswered by the President is her inability to make visible the programs of her administration benefiting the majority. It’s simply not so, that even men at her employ want the E-VAT be deferred. In a morally-upright act there is no room for that, otherwise, the motive is unsure. The instance of being moral is unchanging: once it is set, it should go for it cannot lament a variable it has discarded. A moral act is above all acts. It’s absolutely the ideally-compromised factor.

It’s indeed difficult for politicians to claim a deed to be moral for they govern by survival, to retain or eliminate the status quo always in their behalf. The power brokers of politics as well see the primordial power as centrist and undiffused to the masses. Also, their basis of action is compulsion: that one enforced by law. Due this the moral congruence of means and end is out of place.

So the claim by PGMA that E-VAT is moral is an outrageous insult to civility.