A few more responses on the taxation issue

April 16, 2010

Since a few people have told me they appreciated the stuff I’ve been posting on taxation and theft here, I thought I’d post just a bit more from the Facebook discussion--the text below was in reply to a section of a large rebuttal someone wrote up there, but it should basically make sense on its own.  Also, since it’s that time of the year again, and the Tea Partiers were out in force yesterday, I recall my first little essay on this whole business, which I wrote last Tax Day, and you can find here.

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You then make a statement that my problem is that I “blur the concepts of necessary taxes and redistributive taxes....Taxes for the common defense fall in the first category, taxes for the redistributive principle fall in the second.”  Yes, it is precisely my point to blur these categories.  Why are taxes paid for defense necessary?  Well, they’re not absolutely necessary, but we generally think that they’re important for the preservation of society.  In an economy characterized by dangerous inequality and serious poverty, one might argue that redistributive taxes are just as necessary for the preservation of society.  Moreover, many taxes are “redistributive” in the sense of benefiting some more than others, including taxes for the “common” defense, as I argued in the original post and in my comments after the first post.

Then you extol the virtues of voluntary giving.  Great--let’s have more of that.  If the Church can motivate people to give voluntarily, and care for the poor, then let it do so, and the government will have no reason to get involved.  I remember reading about some 19th-century Scotch Presbyterian who organized such an effective and generous church system of poor relief that the local government was able to vastly scale back their welfare program.  But if the Church is failing, she can hardly complain when other institutions try to pick up the slack.  A couple quibbles with what you said in this paragraph, “None of these services were based on an enforced-tax or upon a social principle of wealth distribution”--neither of those is strictly true; in many nations in Christendom at various times, the tithe was enforced, whether or not it should’ve been; second, in the early Church, church charity was based upon “a social principle of wealth distribution”--many of the Church Fathers called explicitly for the rich to sell all their excess and give the proceeds to the Church for it to distribute equitably, Acts 4 style.  Also, you say, “Nor did the apostles, church fathers, or any others enforce any such standard, but leave it with the conscience.”  Well, it depends what you mean by that; the Church Fathers may have “left it with the conscience” but they raked consciences over the coals regularly on this subject, so you can’t quite characterize it as a hands-off approach.

At this point you move on to make some (to put it charitably) rather ignorant and snarky comments about Popes Pius XI and John Paul II.  If you don’t agree with them, fine, but I think you need to respect them, and the great body of teaching they represent.  I don’t know enough about Pius XI to defend him specifically (but I doubt you know enough about him to attack him specifically) but John Paul II was, by all counts, a very holy man and a noble leader, who devoted himself to the good of the Church, so far as he understood it, and the cause of the oppressed.  The Catholic Church in the past few decades has put Protestants (especially conservative ones) to shame when it comes to defending the cause of the poor, and sacrificing much for them, so let’s not throw around charges of “hypocrisy.” 

Your reading of Pius XI’s quote here was particularly odd.  Pius said, “[the state] does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and rushing to its own destruction.”  You seem to have a problem with the last clause, somehow reading it as if Pius was against “material things.”  What Pius says here seems self-evidently true--that the private possession of goods, in itself a good thing, will, if unrestrained, cause intolerable evils and eventually its own destruction.  Wasn’t it the Apostle James who said “The love of money is the root of all evil”?  Private property is a dangerous thing, because private owners can easily fall into selfishness and greed, and, unless restrained by laws, destroy others in their greed.  There’s no opposition to material things here, just the cold hard truth about human nature.

Then you tell me all this stuff from Richard Bonney’s book.  I appreciate all the extra information, but I’m not sure exactly which parts are relevant to the matter at hand.  Yes, taxes are higher now than historically; yes, Rome had a very oppressive tax system, particularly oppressive because it disproportionately afflicted the poor--it was if anything a reverse redistribution at times, as some of your own citations show.  Indeed, you cite Basil the Great calling for the poor to be exempted from taxes--this sounds like what conservatives would decry as a redistributive system--everyone receiving the benefits of government, though only some people pay for them!  

This line jumped out at me: “In the past, as Brad points out, other Christians have failed to realize the full Biblical principle of private property”--OK, so here we have at least a concession that our modern teaching on this matter is not the Early Church’s teaching.  Good.  I do not think that we have to adopt the Early Church’s teaching on this matter wholesale; but my point is that we must acknowledge that some of our claims on this subject (e.g., redistribution=theft) run contrary to their attitudes, and that should cause us to be rather more modest in our claims.

A bit later, you point out that “Nowhere in Chrysostom’s explanation of taxation is any theory about the State providing for the poor to accomplish wealth redistribution or equity, or any other socialist idea.”  To be sure.  Chrysostom wanted the Church to handle all that redistribution--he was thoroughly socialist, actually, but he wanted an ecclesial, not a state socialism.  What I want people to realize though is that the reason no one back then envisioned the state involved in redistribution was because the state had not yet been Christianized.  When the State did increasingly get in the business of supporting the poor, taxing the rich, providing free education and healthcare, etc., the people who were the driving forces behind this were Christians, trying to fulfill gospel mandates in the political sphere.  A pre-Christian state would not be likely to think of redistributing to the poor; for a Christian state, such began to seem like a mandate.  I don’t mean to say that this was the right conclusion to reach--that these socializing Christians had the right idea, but it’s important for us to understand the genealogy of this development.  That’s why, for instance, I cite Martin Bucer, who encouraged aggressive intervention by the civil authorities to protect the poor and control the rich.  But you just breezed over Bucer, surprising, since as a Protestant, he would seem to be the most significant figure to you.

Now, you say some things about Aquinas.  For one, you say that Aquinas is a shaky source because he used Aristotle.  Ah!  But do you not realize that his use of Aristotle in his teaching on property is to moderate the radical stance of the early Church Fathers?  In other words, he uses Aristotle to establish a much more pro-private-property stance than that of the earlier tradition.  So it doesn’t work for you to say, “Oh, we can’t trust his negative attitude toward private property, since he was using Aristotle.”  Now, to be sure, Finnis attempts to make explicit what is merely implicit in Aquinas--or perhaps, to construct an argument out of building blocks that are in Aquinas, and we cannot be sure how much Aquinas would agree with his claims for redistributive taxation (for Aquinas, the Church would’ve been the most natural institution to be handling such things, not the state).  My point though is that the building blocks are there in Aquinas--Finnis isn’t just cooking things up out of thin air; and we as modern Christians need to reckon with Aquinas’s tremendously influential teaching here.

I’m impressed that you consulted Finnis’s book for your rebuttal, and would admire your thoroughness, but I think you were not sufficiently attentive on the subject of superflua.  It is a bit more complicated than this.  I’m running out of time right now, so I will just post the notes and quotes I had taken a few weeks ago on this section of Finnis:

There is a threefold distinction in Thomas between “(a) resources one needs for the very survival of oneself and one’s dependants, (b) resources one needs in order to fulfil one’s responsibilities for the support and education of one’s relatives and household, for maintaining one’s business or profession or other vocation, for launching one’s children in such ways of life, for paying one’s debts, and other such genuine responsibilities, and (c) resources which are left over {superflua} after one has made reasonable provision for both type (a) ‘absolute necessity’ and type (b) ‘relative necessity {necessitas conditionata}.  Then Aquinas’ theorem is twofold: (I) everything one has is ‘held as common (or in common)’ in the sense that it is morally available, as a matter of right and justice, to anyone who needs it to survive; (2) one’s superflua are all ‘held as common’, in the sense that one has a duty of justice to dispose of them for the benefit of the poor.”

I: those in life-threatening need can take whatever will relieve that need, and “this entitlement overrides anyone else’s otherwise legitimate title or property right.” II: Furthermore, if I am aware of someone in such strict need [go take a look at II-II q. 71 a. Ic], and there is no other who is available to provide it, I have a “duty of strict justice (not merely ‘charity’)” to help them, not merely out of my superflua, but out of what I use for relative necessity....when no one is in extreme necessity, property-owners may keep their property “just as far as their type (b) need to maintain themselves (with their dependants) in the form of life which they have reasonably adopted.”  All superflua should then be made available to those who lack the resources for their type b) needs.  “The poor have a natural right that the whole of this residuum be distributed in their favour.”  

In other words, your claim that Aquinas says that we are only responsible to give what is left over after we have tended to all reasonable needs and responsibilities is oversimplistic--that is only true if you know of no one in extreme necessity, and quite possibly that is true for most of us (though in an era of globalization, the question can be asked how far our responsibility extends to global neighbors).  Plus, I do not, I’m afraid, share your rosy reading of Christian America: “Now, that rather sounds to me like how most Christians today live – we pay for our expenses, and tithe, and give of what was left over to the church, to family, to friends, to mission work, and other things. Most people do not have much, if any, ‘superflua’ in this sense. After all, if you’re saving up for a house to provide for your family, that clearly falls under the necessities of life. If you’re saving up for a new car because the one you have is suffering, that’s clearly providing for your family, and in my case, providing for my livelihood since I drive to the businesses I meet with.”  My experience of Christian America (and I do not in any way exclude myself from this indictment) is that we convince ourselves that we “need” any number of little luxuries--a new article of clothing every couple weeks, several cups of coffee a day, an iPhone, a flat-screen TV, a rather large house, a rather nice car, a generous supply of junk food, etc.--and then, if all that is covered, we might reach into our pockets and call ourselves generous.  This is not an easy teaching, and I don’t pretend that it is; it’s given me a great deal of pause and hard thinking over the past few months.  

Taxation and Theft Supplement: More about the OT Economic Laws

Since daring to post that taxation and theft essay on Facebook, I’ve been snowed under responding to comments and objections there, so instead of posting a bit on Just War theory, as I was hoping to, I will just offer instead one of the more substantive clarifications I posted in the taxation and theft discussion:

One thing worth dealing with properly here and now is the issue of the OT laws. For the sake of conciseness, I offered in my initial post a rather brief appeal to the matter of the OT laws, a matter which I’ve been studying for a long time (largely in order to get a handle on these very issues). Two main lines of objection have been raised. The first is that the Old Testament laws never authorize a centralized government authority to tax money from one group of people, pool it, and then hand it out to another group of people. I substantially agree with this objection (though I shall offer something of an exception in a moment). My point was not to say that the OT laws authorized this. 

Indeed, I made a point of saying this: “Of course, we cannot make simple one-to-one applications from the OT laws to welfare laws today; far from it.” Many pertinent facts are quite different--for one, we're now living in the New Covenant! My appeal to the Old Testament laws is to establish a more basic point--that it can be just for law to “require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough,” as I put it in the initial post. They generally do not accomplish this goal by taxation (again, with it seems to me, one exception), but indeed, it seems they are more radical, more “intrusive” upon property owners than mere taxation. Let me spell out the most relevant laws to make sure this is clear. Dt. 15:1-18 requires that in the Sabbath year, debts be released. This means that if I’ve loaned you money, money that is “rightfully” mine, that you ought to pay back, I am required by law to let you keep it after a certain amount of time (worse, the law goes on to say that I’d better not hesitate to lend to you on that account!). This is, it seems to my mind, at least as intrusive as taxation. In the Jubilee year, all property was to be returned to the original owner (Lev. 25:8-22); this is to prevent any Israelites from becoming permanently landless and thus chronically impoverished. Now, this is not a straightforward rich/poor redistribution; in fact, it is something rather more radical. It’s a mechanism for preventing, as much as possible, such a distinction from arising, in any long-term form. No matter how bad things got for someone, he could always be assured that he’d be alright, because he could get his property back, and his debts cancelled, at the expense of those who had amassed a lot of property and wealth. Such legally-mandated equitable (not egalitarian) distribution seems to be a much more radical imposition than mere taxation. Now we move on to the more directly relevant laws: we have laws like the gleaning laws (Lev. 19:9-10; Dt. 24:19-22) and the requirement that all the produce of the land in Sabbath year be shared (Lev. 25:1-7). In other words, a portion of what you produced, on your property, was, by legal mandate, to be free for the taking of anyone who required it (though they, in their turn, weren’t to abuse this right--Dt. 23:24-25). Not a terribly huge portion, because, on account of the debt release and Jubilee laws, poverty should not have been a terribly big problem. Now, these laws are still different in form from redistributive taxation--which would be leaving the corners of the field for the local magistrate to come reap (or handing over a share of your reapings), and for him to then distribute to the local needy--but they are essentially the same in effect, and in the underlying principles. Indeed, one could say that the OT law is in some ways more instrusive than taxation, because although a lot of us resent paying taxes, I think we would resent it rather more if the law gave the poor to come into our field, or our store, or our office, and take enough for their sustenance that day. That said, I prefer the minimum of gov’t involvement that the gleaning approach offers. 

Finally, we have one law, the triennial tithe, that seems like straightforwardly redistributive taxation (this is the one exception I mentioned). Deuteronomy 14:28-29: “At the end of every three years you shall bring out all the tithe of your produce in the same year and lay it up within your towns. And the Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance with you, and the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, who are within your towns, shall come and eat and be filled.” Again, it is a very modest tax by our standards, because, on account of the laws to prevent poverty in the first place, it didn’t need to be very large. But it was a tax all the same. 

Now, all this with regard to the first objection. The second objection claims that, while all these laws are in the Torah, they are not really laws...not in the sense we are discussing, anyway, because no one would’ve enforced them. They are, we are supposed to believe, more like “Thou shalt not covet,” moral principles that God lays down. Now, so far as I have been able to determine--at least, so far as it has ever been explained to me--this interpretation relies on a single, simple criterion for determining this sweeping and remarkable judgment: it never says how they might have been enforced, ergo, they obviously weren’t to be enforced--that means you couldn’t make someone give land back at the Jubilee, or stop someone from trying to wring debt payments out of someone after the Sabbath year, or stop someone from charging their brother interest, etc. Now, to be frank, this sort of hermeneutic seems an awful lot like those people who insist that, in order to take the Bible seriously, they have to read every prophecy “literally,” so that they insist, for instance, that clearly Isaiah’s prophecies against Babylon haven’t been fulfilled, because the moon hasn’t yet turned to blood; obviously, Babylon is going to be rebuilt, and then destroyed once again, complete with celestial fireworks, in fulfillment of the prophecy. Now, when someone gets a hermeneutical principle that enshrined in their head, to the exclusion of all other considerations, it’s hard to argue. But let me make a stab at it in this case.

First of all, that objection seems to display an ignorance of how legal science works. I am not a law expert, and I hope someone who is can help clear this up for us, but my understanding is that even modern law codes, which are extremely systematic, thorough, and all-pervading, do not prescribe precisely what the punishments are to be for every offense, particularly for civil, rather than criminal prosecutions (and almost all OT prosecutions were of the former kind). That’s why you sometimes get these judges handing down these absurd rulings, like the old lady who gets $5 million for burning herself on a McDonald’s coffee--the law leaves the determination of the penalty up to the court. Now, how much more should this be the case for a law code in the ancient world, when law codes were never as systematic, precise, and all-pervading! Particularly when, as was especially the case in ancient Israel, the structures for enforcing justice were highly localized and decentralized. The Torah was to be for the whole nation, but there wasn’t a Supreme Court responsible for enforcing it; rather, the Torah states what should and shouldn’t be done, and, though in quite a number of cases it spells out precisely what ought to be done to those who violate its commands, in other cases, it leaves this underdetermined, or entirely undetermined, since no doubt in many cases, the local court would want to be able to exercise its discretion in resolving the problem as seemed to suit the particular circumstances. 

As it is, it seems clear, from the form in which the Torah law-codes have come to us, that they were never intended to be exhaustive, but rather, a large number of representative examples of what was and wasn’t to be done in various situations, and what sorts of punishments were to be imposed on offenders. It never presents itself as trying to give all of the relevant facts. 

Now, I know the die-hards aren’t buying it yet. So I will attempt to show a) that many laws that it would seem would have been enforced do not have an enforcement mentioned; and that b) some laws that don’t have an enforcement mention were, indisputably, enforced. 

So then, let’s look at the first set of laws in Ex. 21-23. We begin with a long series of laws in what’s called the casuistic form, which is basically, “If anyone does this, this shall happen to him.” This form generally tells us the penalty as part of telling us the law. Not always, though. For example, 21:2: “When you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh he shall go out free, for nothing.” Ok, but what if I don’t want to let him? What if I refuse to let him go free? It doesn’t say. Does that mean there could have been no enforcement? What about the law in the same form, near the end of this section, “If you lend money to any of my people with you who is poor, you shall not be like a moneylender to him, and you shall not exact interest from him?” Is this drastic imposition upon the “free market” to be enforced? The laws then turn to the apodeictic form--”You shall, you shall not”--this form often does not include any word as to enforcement. “You shall not revile God, nor curse a ruler of your people” (22:28); “You shall not spread a false report, or bear false witness in a lawsuit” (23:1-2); “You shall not oppress a sojourner” (23:9)--none of these would have been enforced? 

How ‘bout Leviticus? Right after the gleaning laws, which we are told would not have been enforced, because no enforcement is mentioned, we have “You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another....You shall not oppress your neighbor or rob him....You shall do no injustice in court....You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people.” (Lev. 19:11-16) None of these would’ve been enforced? What about Dt. 19:14: “You shall not move your neighbor’s landmark, which the men of old have set, in the inheritance that you will hold in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess”? I could go on, but I’ll stop.

What about b)? Do we have proof that laws for which no enforcement was mentioned were in fact enforced. Sure we do. We know that by the time of Christ, laws regarding the Sabbath day were being quite rigorously enforced, for instance, even though the Torah, so far as I know, never says what you’re supposed to do with someone if they do not keep the Sabbath holy. Ah, but these were Pharisees. Ok, what about Nehemiah? I quote from Nehemiah chapter 5 (thanks to my Dad, who suggested peeking around in Nehemiah for some guidance): 

“Now there arose a great outcry of the people and of their wives against their Jewish brothers. For there were those who said, "With our sons and our daughters, we are many. So let us get grain, that we may eat and keep alive." There were also those who said, "We are mortgaging our fields, our vineyards, and our houses to get grain because of the famine." And there were those who said, "We have borrowed money for the king’s tax on our fields and our vineyards. Now our flesh is as the flesh of our brothers, our children are as their children. Yet we are forcing our sons and our daughters to be slaves, and some of our daughters have already been enslaved, but it is not in our power to help it, for other men have our fields and our vineyards."  I was very angry when I heard their outcry and these words. I took counsel with myself, and I brought charges against the nobles and the officials. I said to them, "You are exacting interest, each from his brother." And I held a great assembly against them and said to them, "We, as far as we are able, have bought back our Jewish brothers who have been sold to the nations, but you even sell your brothers that they may be sold to us!" They were silent and could not find a word to say. So I said, "The thing that you are doing is not good. Ought you not to walk in the fear of our God to prevent the taunts of the nations our enemies? Moreover, I and my brothers and my servants are lending them money and grain. Let us abandon this exacting of interest. Return to them this very day their fields, their vineyards, their olive orchards, and their houses, and the percentage of money, grain, wine, and oil that you have been exacting from them." Then they said, "We will restore these and require nothing from them. We will do as you say." And I called the priests and made them swear to do as they had promised. I also shook out the fold of my garment and said, "So may God shake out every man from his house and from his labor who does not keep this promise. So may he be shaken out and emptied."

Here we have a clear account of Nehemiah bringing charges against wealthy men for violations of the usury laws and, it appears, debt-slavery laws, even though, in the Torah, we have no mention of anyone enforcing these. 

All of this does not prove that the gleaning laws or the triennial tithe, for instance, would have also been enforceable in court, but it means that there is no prima facie reason to suppose that they weren’t, and, once we look at the context and the larger goals of the law, it seems to me fairly convincing that they were. 

However, I wonder if the whole question about whether the gleaning law would've been "enforced," for instance, is not a bit beside the point.  The key question, as I have tried to insist, is whether "theft" is strictly speaking, the proper accusation, and if so, why.  That all seems to depend on the question: "who has a right to the property?" Now, suppose that I have been entrusted with a number of gifts, that I am supposed to hand out to my siblings.  I keep them for myself instead.  So my siblings go into my room and take them.  Now, this was perhaps a breach of some kind of charity or etiquette, but was it “stealing”?  It doesn’t seem like it.  What if my parents ordered me to hand over the gifts to them, and then distributed them to my siblings?  Would that be stealing?  Or, to try an analogy more alien to our experience--suppose my father goes away, and leaves me with orders to care for my younger brother, who is sick and unable to earn his keep, and therefore will depend on my income for sustenance.  If I refuse to give him any money for food, is it “stealing” for him to take some from me?  Is it stealing if he appeals to a friend who has been appointed mediator between us, who then requires me to supply him what he needs?  Both the brother or the mediator could do all kinds of things wrong in the way they take the money, but I don’t know if they would be “stealing” by taking it.  All this then comes back to a question, raised in a discussion on here last fall, as to whether the requirements to share these resources with those in need of them are duties of charity or duties of justice.  I’m contending, as seems to me clear from the OT and from historic Christian teaching, that they are duties of justice.  Which means that, if the law is requiring me to fulfill these duties via taxation, it might be doing a lot of things wrong, but it’s not “stealing.”  So the OT laws, in this discussion, serve to show that I really do legally owe it to my poor brother to make sufficient provision for his needs, and thus these are duties of justice, however they may have been enforced in the OT.  Of course, a tension for me is that I have unanswered questions about the nature of the distinction between charity and justice.  So any contributions on that front would be most welcome.

Is Redistributive Taxation Really "Theft"? (Pt. 2)

April 9, 2010

(See the first part in the previous post)

...Third, and most significantly in my mind, this narrative requires that we can legitimately regard the money that has been taken from us as “our money”--as in the Margaret Thatcher quote, “you run out of other people’s money.”  Now, I have already pointed out one sense in which this is oversimplistic--simply by being members of a society, some of our resources have to be pooled, and the decision over how to use them will not belong to us alone.  Nevertheless, it could still be argued that there are some uses of money by a society that are inherently unjust, that simply no society has any business using its members’ money for.  This, perhaps, is how to take statements like Wilson’s: with the implied distinction that while there are certain uses to which our government may justly put our tax money, uses that we should accept even when we think they are ill-managed, there are others which it cannot.  In the latter cases, since it is levying money from us for unjust purposes, one could make the case that it is unjust in levying the money, and thus the money still justly belongs to us.  To take what justly belongs to another is “theft” or “robbery” and so, in such cases, perhaps the accusation holds.  

In fact, Aquinas says as much: “If princes exact from their subjects that which is due to them according to justice for the preservation of the common good, this is not robbery even if they employ violence in doing so.  But if princes extort by violence something which is not due to them, they commit robbery just as much as the bandit does.” (ST II-II Q. 66 a. 8 ad 3; notice, by the way, that Aquinas uses the word “robbery” rather than “theft”--this points to another sense in which our modern critics have been careless, though I had not mentioned it so as not to seem petty: “theft” properly speaking refers to property taken in secret; “robbery” to property taken openly and by force.)

So the question here is whether there is any justice in taxation for things like welfare, healthcare, social security, etc.  Of course, these are all somewhat distinct phenomena, and so we might have to have an argument about justice in each case.  But I’ll try to simplify the matter into the single question: is it ever legitimate for laws to require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough?

Now, interestingly enough, on this point, the general consensus of the Christian tradition seems to be resoundingly “yes”!  Pope John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens says, speaking of society’s obligations to workers, says, “The obligation to provide unemployment benefits, that is to say, the duty to make suitable grants indispensable for the subsistence of unemployed workers and their families, is a duty spring from the fundamental principle of the moral order in this sphere, namely the principle of the common use of goods or, to put it in another and still simpler way, the right to life and subsistence” (par. 18; I will come back to this “principle of the common use of goods” in a bit).  

Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno states, “Yet when the State brings private ownership into harmony with the needs of the common good, it does not commit a hostile act against private owners but rather does them a friendly service; for it thereby effectively prevents the private possession of goods, which the Author of nature in His most wise providence ordained for the support of human life, from causing intolerable evils and thus rushing to its own destruction; it does not destroy private possessions, but safeguards them; and it does not weaken private property rights, but strengthens them” (par. 49).  

Martin Bucer, in his De Regno Christi, among many other suggested economic regulations, went so far as to say that the king ought to take land from the wealthy wool farmers and give it to subsistence farmers, that all might be able to provide for themselves and that the land might be better managed and populated.  

Thomas Aquinas, as I have recently posted about, argued that, as property was given first and foremost for common use, and only secondarily for private possession, insomuch as that served common use, it was a duty of justice that the property of those with surplus be used to meet the needs of those who were lacking.  Indeed, for Aquinas this meant that the man in great and pressing need could take from the one with surplus without it being considered theft.  (In case we should think Aquinas a radical in this, we should note with relief that he hesitated to go so far as the Church Fathers and say that the man with surplus who held onto his surplus was guilty of theft or robbery.)  Aquinas does not specifically treat of redistributive taxation, but renowned Aquinas scholar John Finnis connects the dots for us:

“He teaches that rulers have a responsibility to provide, for each of their subjects, whatever they would otherwise lack to sustain them in their respective conditions and status in life. [II-II q. 77 a.4c]  More clearly, he goes along with Aristotle’s clear and repeated teaching that it is appropriate for the state’s rulers and laws to make provision for the fair distribution of goods for use in consumption, so that that use be truly ‘common’. [I-II q. 10 a. 1 ad 1, q. 105 a. 2c and ad 3)  In Aquinas’ own theory this amounts to saying that the distribution by owners of their superflua is an appropriate subject for legislation to avoid backsliding, arbitrariness, and inequity.  So payment of taxes imposed for redistributive purposes will be a primary way in which owners discharge their duty of distribution.”  

(By the way, I think Finnis’s points here help to preempt any “Robin Hood” objections, along the lines of “Well, if Aquinas is right, then why can’t just anybody take from the rich to give to the poor?”  God calls different people to different responsibilities, and if you aren’t a total anarchist, you believe that he calls some people to positions of governance, responsible for overseeing justice and the common good.  These people may have a responsibility to ensure the common use of resources that any old private citizen does not have.)

The principle of the priority of common use articulated by Aquinas became a standard of Catholic moral theology, and, so far as I can tell, was long shared by most of Protestant moral theology (though I will defer to the expertise of others here); it is this to which John Paul II and Pius XI are appealing.  The idea is that since God only ordained private property in order to serve the common good, it naturally follows that someone cannot legitimately cling to their private property to the detriment of the common good, but should let the governors of society put it to use where it is most needed (e.g., giving it to someone who cannot afford healthcare).  There is no injustice in this reallocation; on the contrary, there is injustice when some members of their society cling to resources that others may be desperately in need of.  

Of course, I do not pretend that the Christian tradition has been unanimous on this point, any more than it has been unanimous on any other point.  Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, and Anthony Rosmini’s 1840s treatise Society and Its Purposes, for example, seem to regard such reallocations as matters of charity, not justice, and hence not the government’s business (see my previous post).  However, the grounds upon which both of them put forth their philosophies of property and politics are essentially Lockean, leading many subsequent Catholic thinkers to doubt them on these points.  

The crucial standard for us, of course, is the Bible.  For my part, at least, it is hard to see how the Old Testament laws did not require that resources be taken from those who have surplus to help supply the needs of those who, for whatever reason, do not have enough.  I have recently posted about this, of course, but so this post will be complete in itself, I will briefly reiterate some of the same points.  The gleaning laws seem like they would meet the modern conservative definition of “theft”--private property owners being required by law to let others have part of their resources.  The triennial tithe, and the requirement that the produce of the sabbath year be shared with all, seem like the same sort of thing.  The Jubilee law states that land must be taken from the current owner and given to the original owner.  And I could go on.

Of course, we cannot make simple one-to-one applications from the OT laws to welfare laws today; far from it.  Gleaning may not prove to be a legitimate basis for Social Security, for instance.  Indeed, some may even argue that none of these OT laws could be used in any such way because these weren’t really “laws,” simply moral decrees, binding on the individual conscience, but no more.  I confess that after six months researching this issue, that argument doesn’t make any sense to me, but I know it has been made.  So, I don’t mean to say, “Ah look!  The Old Testament requires us to impose Obamacare and all the rest”; but I do mean to say that one has to reckon with such texts, and with the strong consensus testimony of the Christian moral tradition, before one could begin to make an accusation like “Taxation for these purposes is theft.”  Such an accusation does not have any prima facie plausibility or force, as most of those making it seem to blithely assume; it may have some force after careful and patient argument, but not otherwise.  

And of course, this does not mean that there may not be many other grounds for objecting to much of this legislation, including Obamacare.  One might say, for instance, that it is inefficient, or ill-conceived, that it will not succeed in helping the common good, but will make problems worse, that certain particulars of it are unjust, that there was a failure of due process of law, etc.  But to say that it is straightforwardly “theft” is to declare any supporter of it, including many a Christian brother, an accomplice to a crime.  As a practical matter, this is hardly going to be helpful in moving the discussion forward, and, in any case, it seems that we ought to think twice before leveling such an accusation.  In light of the points I’ve raised here, it seems that we need to ask ourselves, are we OK with saying that Aquinas and Bucer advocated theft?  What about Moses?  If what we are now facing is something quite different from what Aquinas, Bucer, and Moses advocated, we need to spell out rather precisely what the difference and what the problem is, instead of simply assuming that, because some resources are being redistributed, they’re being stolen.

Is Redistributive Taxation Really "Theft"? (Pt. 1)

Way back near the beginning of this school year, I remember Prof. Northcott recounting to our class a recent debate in Durham, NC, that he’d been invited to participate in, a debate with Calvin Beisner, whom he aptly termed “a cornucopian dominionist.”  With humored incredulity, he shared with us the astonishing fact that Beisner thought it was “theft” for the government to take people’s money through taxes and distribute them to others through programs like Social Security or the debated healthcare initiative.  Could we believe he said such a thing? he asked.  I timidly answered that almost everyone I’d grown up around would’ve employed that rhetoric.  And I’ve been thinking about it ever since--is this really a rational criticism?  If it is rational, it certainly isn’t self-evident.  And not being self-evident, and being a rather harsh and provocative accusation, it seems that, if there’s any weight to it, it ought to be carefully argued, not casually thrown around without a shred of argumentation, as it often has been, particularly during the healthcare debate and in its aftermath.

The “taxation is theft” claim is of course a commonplace, and I’m sure you have all heard it in many settings, but I’ll mention briefly here two examples of it that I happened to come across and bookmark when I was thinking about writing this essay.

On Lewrockwell.com, you can find an interview with Shawn Ritenour, a Christian Libertarian who has written yet another “Look!  The Bible is a manifesto for free market economics!” book, called God, Socialism, and the Free Market.

The sycophantic interviewer, Kengor, begins: “I like the way you turn the religious left’s thinking on private property on its head. You note that “God prohibits our coveting the property of others.” With that being the case, isn’t it wrong for the government to use the mighty arm of the state to forcibly remove property from one person to give it to another?

Ritenour: I see no other way around that conclusion, especially when we realize that, in our day of mass democracy, the state usually accomplishes policies of wealth redistribution by inciting envy and covetousness among the populace.”

Later, Kengor asks, “On a separate point, near the end of your book, you make a statement that’s especially appropriate right now, given the prevailing view by President Obama and the Democratic Congress. You write, “We simply cannot grow the economy into prosperity by resorting to government spending. It cannot be done.” Are you arguing from a strictly economic standpoint or also biblically?

Ritenour: Both. Forcibly taking money from someone to give to another in an attempt to “grow the economy” is a violation of Christian ethics. It also fails to achieve the explicit goal of its advocates.”

Recently, discussing Obamacare, Douglas Wilson states the accusation still more clearly:

“The Bible says not to steal. I have quoted Margaret Thatcher on this before. As she put it, the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money, and this aphorism highlights two of the problems. But the moral problem is foremost, the part that sees that this racket depends on "other people's money." No benefit can be given to one person without it being first removed from another person. What is the basis of the removal? We threaten that other person with jail time in order to extract a sufficient amount of money from him. It is not a "contribution." In order to defend Obamacare, you have to be in favor of raw extortion at raw levels. This is a moral failure, and the difficulty that many professed Christians have in seeing it as a moral failure represents an even deeper level of moral failure.”

In both cases, of course, the Bible is appealed to, because, of course, the Bible says not to steal.  On this, I think all parties will agree.  But we are not shown enough (nor do I feel like I have ever shown enough) in the Bible to show that this prohibition applies to the question at hand.  Margaret Thatcher may believe it does, but on what basis?

This claim seems to be based on a narrative involving three basic actors: first, “the government,” an independent, power-hungry entity; second, a group of innocent victims who have their money taken from them at gunpoint; third, a group of well-fed beneficiaries, who happily receive the largess of the second group, given to them by the first.  Now, I admit that this sounds like a bit of a caricature, but it really is often stated that simplistically.  Let’s evaluate the basic elements of this narrative.  

First, this narrative depends on the presupposition that we can isolate these actors.  Is that really true?  I don’t think so, for two main reasons: a) the second and third groups are not so easily distinguished; b) the first is not so easily distinguished from the second and third.  Let’s look at a) for a minute.  There are some people who are almost entirely on the receiving end (the third actor) and some people who are almost entirely on the paying end (the second actor), but almost all of us are somewhere in between, both paying in to the government and receiving a number of things back.  This is not a trivial point, because it raises the question, “When do we make the ‘theft‘ accusation?”  Is Social Security theft, because some people get more than they pay in, and others get less?  Is the new healthcare bill theft?  After all, we’re all getting healthcare out of it, even if some people are getting it subsidized at the expense of others.  But regular businesses often sell some people an item at a much lower price than they sell it to others; in this case, we may speak of getting ripped off, but “theft” seems a little strong.  Is it theft when our tax money is used to pay for roads or utilities, or is it simply paying for a service?  Purist libertarians will offer a resounding, “Yes, it is theft.”  For them, it is theft simply by virtue of the fact that it is a compelled transaction, rather than a voluntary one.  This leads us on to consideration of b) .  

In older societies, where the ruler really did stand over against the ruled as an independent actor, ruling perpetually and by divine right, the narrative of the first party extorting from the second to give to the third might have made some sense.  But does that really make sense in a modern representative democracy?  (Now don’t get me wrong; I’d be the first to say that modern representative democracies fail to be truly representative or truly democratic, but that is our own fault.)  In the United States, however huge and bureaucratic the government, however impenetrable it seems and however much inertia it has, in the end it derives its powers from the consent of the governed, and it operates by means of men that we have voted into office, and whose ideas we have shaped by the kind of education and religious values we have promoted.  Like it or not, the people there in Washington are acting in our place, and so we are all responsible for the decisions they make.  We may accuse them of exercising bad stewardship, of betraying our misplaced trust, of acting against the better reason of those who elected them, etc., but to treat them simply as an independent actor preying upon us as independent victims does not seem to me very coherent.  

And this raises a larger point.  While we may think that the current condition of American society is inordinately and dangerously prone to a tyranny of the majority, the fact remains that, unless you are a radical individualist, one must always accept the fact that certain segments of a society will have to make decisions that are binding upon the whole, even if the whole do not agree.  If the shareholders of a corporation vote to agree to a merger, in which their stock of, say, Cingular Wireless, is replaced by the stock of, AT&T, and 20% of the shareholders vote against the merger, do those 20% get to opt out of the deal?  Do they remain as shareholders of a now 80% smaller Cingular Wireless, while the rest are bought out by AT&T?  No.  Can they then claim that their stock, their company was “stolen”?  Not generally!  Or how about this?  A town referendum agrees on a levy to cover the town’s expenses in a number of different areas.  The town council, which has the responsibility for allocating the funds, then looks at the situation and decides it needs to spend, say, more on education and less on infrastructure than many of the townspeople would have liked.  Can the latter complain of “theft” since they’ve now had “their money” taken to pay for things they haven’t agreed to?  

In any society, decisions about how to dispose of resources amongst various needs of different portions of the society will have to be taken, without, except in very rare cases, the consent of every member of the society.  This means that most members of a society will have some of their pooled resources used for purposes that they’d rather not; but this is simply part of the cost that comes with being a member of a society (and, not being a contractarian, I don’t believe that we have the choice to opt in or out of being a member of civil society, at least on some level).  

As John Medaille of The Distributist Review put it to me, 

Every society has some public and obligatory contributions to justice. The plain fact of the matter is that man is both individual and social, and there are social obligations which may be enforced by law. We live within a framework of institutions, and these institutions are always imperfect, and will imperfectly deliver justice to all the participants. Hence the needs for charity, both social and individual....Certain services must be socialized, and those who object to all forms of socialism should not pull that socialist lever in their homes, the one that carries away their wastes into the socialized sewage system.

So, by all means let’s complain that our society’s values are screwed up, that it’s structured in such a way that the will of the members is easily disregarded, that a lot of people are getting a raw deal, but let’s not talk as if we were just sitting in our homes, minding our own business, and along came a tax man with a gun and took our money.  I should add one more example, that seems most akin to the question under consideration.  In the years leading up to World War II, a tremendous percentage of US defense spending was budgeted to protecting the Hawaiian Islands and other US Pacific territories from potential Japanese attack, even those these were not actually part of the United States and very few Americans lived in these places.  Should Americans in Missouri or North Dakota have complained that they, who were perfectly safe from Japanese attack, were having tax money extorted from them in order to pay for the defense of a few Americans chilling on Waikiki Beach?  I don’t know...but for whatever reason, while conservatives always cry “theft” over liberal causes, they never do when it comes to defense spending. 

Second, the narrative requires that we can characterize taxes as the result of “coercion” or “raw extortion,” which just doesn’t seem accurate, based on the discussion above.  In general, societies, even our American society, prefer not to resort to violence, but seek to establish consensus that the money is being used for a good cause and to establish a sense of social responsibility that everyone ought to pay up, and only use coercion as a last resort.  Our society’s laws would not work if they depended simply on coercion, and taxes would not be collected if they really had to be “extorted”; rather, the majority of the people either willingly obey, or else conclude that, as members of society, it’s their duty to obey whether they want to or not.  Only with that minority who will only obey under compulsion is compulsion truly exercised.  At least, that’s how I analyze coercion’s role in civil societies, but this is a fairly incidental point, if you be disposed to disagree.

(See Part 2 for “Third, and most significantly in my mind...”)

Protesting the Tax Protests

I just saw something that disturbed me...hundreds of people, including many Christians, friends of mine, out in the city square protesting taxes and deficit spending and the like. Now, it was odd to me that this was so disturbing, given that, until recently, I would've been among the most eager; heck, a few years ago, if there were a secession movement, I would've jumped on the bandwagon. I think our country's economic policies and deficit spending and all that are on the whole stupid; I think our taxation is ridiculous. I think the government has no right to do 90% of what it does, and I'm not sure about the other 10%. In other words, I agree with all those people who are out there protesting, in terms of all that there is to protest about. But it seems rather wrong to me that they are out there protesting, and it seems to me a bad witness that a lot of them are Christians and from my Church. Now, why? I must figure out why I feel this way. Here are a few ideas.

First of all, it seems to be to be paradoxically exalting that which we want to bring down. As Christians, we know that we are citizens of another kingdom, serving the true King, Christ, and thus unjust governments have no true power over us. If we obey them, it is because loyalty to our King Christ requires it; if we disobey them, it is because loyalty to our King Christ requires it. Either way, we should be above the petty sentiments of fear and anger when we think they are behaving unjustly. Christ is righteous, and Christ will judge them, and our rebellions, passive and active, will never be effectual in fixing the problem. This is not a gospel of quietism--I am not saying that Christ's Kingdom has nothing to do with this world, nothing to say to the kingdoms of this world. It has everything to say to them. But what it says, it says in the language of the gospel, not in the language of secular political activism. If we want to call upon our rulers to end our injustice, we must proclaim the justice of Christ from the pulpit, we must proclaim it by our actions in the world, and we must say to our rulers, "Christ is King, not you, so stop oppressing his people!" When we dress up in the costume of right-wing tax protesters, and say "Keep your hands off our money! Stop deficit spending! Get rid of the Fed!" then we are abandoning the specific, powerful message that we have to offer to our government, and, by adopting the language and methods of modern political activism, we are actually endorsing the political system; we are agreeing to play by our opponent's rules and thus, ironically, investing with power the very power that we wish to protest!

Second, this is not the kind of submission and subjection that Paul asks for in Romans 13. Paul calls upon Christians to subordinate themselves and pay their taxes--again, not because they are subjects of the rulers, but because they are subjects of Christ, and his way of ruling is not violent and self-seeking, but shows love to oppressors. Paul knew that the Roman authorities were oppressive--much more so than ours! That's the whole point--he has just said, "Love your enemies! Do good to those that persecute you!" Why? Because this is how you triumph over them--this is how Christ triumphs over them. Therefore, be subject! Therefore, pay your taxes! If what Paul was saying is, "Yeah...you owe them obedience, so go ahead and give them what you owe, but you can grumble all you want about it," then that would be one thing. But that's not what he's saying!! He's saying, "Overcome them in love! Give them what love requires, even though they don't deserve it, even though they are greedy, even though they are unjust! Heap burning coals on their head! Pay your taxes, and do it with a smile on your face!" Any self-centered pagan can throw a fit about paying taxes--how do these kind of protests proclaim Christ? How do they identify us as Christian? The Christian protester says, "No, I'm protesting because I believe that this is Biblically unjust." But who sees that? Just because that's what you mean by the protest doesn't mean that that's the message you send! Such protest is indistinguishable from the ways of the world. If you really want to proclaim Christ's answer to unjust taxes, then shock everyone and smile and pay and pray and preach!

Finally, as I've posted before (on my Facebook), I think, neither Jesus nor Paul shows much concern at all about paying taxes. It seems like a big deal to us, and it did to the Jews, but Jesus was like..."Eh, sure, you're sons, and you're free, but don't be obnoxious, pay your taxes." The indifference that Jesus showed, and that Paul exhorted the Romans to show, would've shocked the Jews. But Jesus and Paul understood that money is the least of our worries; to make a big stink over money is to lose sight of the important things of the Gospel. If Caesar asks for your children or your worship, then you defy him to his face. If he asks for your money, well, heck, is that really worth fighting over? Do you really want to endanger your Christian witness by throwing a fit about money?

So, going out there and protesting taxes is paradoxically proclaiming that the political powers we are opposing really do have power, it is proclaiming that the ways of politics and violence really do have power, and that money really is as important as the world wants to make it. Rather than proclaiming Christ's stand against the powers of this world, it changes into the uniform of the world and enlists under its banners, simply in order to carry on an argument with other worldlings in the ranks.