You’re welcome!
The only thing more fun around here than a good thread, is a good thread civilly argued.
And the joke threads. J/k
I agree that some taxes are appropriate. Jesus said as much. The problem is: Where to draw the line? I admit I have no ready answer to that. Some answers leap to mind, which sadly are all conceptual:
–taxes become theft when they deter rational people from engaging in the taxed activity merely to avoid the tax (or the level of tax);
–taxes become theft when they are so burdensome that they prevent livelihood, or the transmission of one’s wealth to the next generation;
–taxes become theft when they require the taxed to sell their possessions to pay the tax.
This is all just off the top of my head. I’ll give it more thought.
Thank you for those reasons. I think the first one is circular. To me, it seems equivalent to saying: “Taxes are too much when rational people think they are too much.”
I think the Church Fathers can help us understand when taxes are too high. St. Lactantius indicates that Diocletian raised taxes too high. Chapter 7 of his book on persecution has these comments:
“there were…taxes on numberless commodities, and those [were] not only often repeated, but perpetual, and, in exacting them, intolerable wrongs [were committed].”
source
And: “[Taxes] for the maintenance of the soldiery might have been endured; but Diocletian, through his insatiable avarice, would never allow the sums of money in his treasury to be diminished: he was constantly heaping [money] together…”
source
And: “[By] various extortions he had made all things exceedingly [hard].”
source
And: “men were afraid to expose anything to sale, and the scarcity became more excessive and grievous than ever, until, in the end, the ordinance, after having proved destructive to multitudes, was from mere necessity abrogated.”
source
And: “[A] certain endless passion for building [haunted him], and on that account, endless exactions [were taken] from the provinces for furnishing wages to labourers and artificers, and supplying carriages and whatever else was requisite to the works which he projected. Here public halls, there a circus, here a mint, and there a workhouse for making implements of war; in one place a habitation for his empress, and in another for his daughter. … [This was] folly…”
source
He also makes this comment that reminds me of the socialist tendencies of modern times:
“[Diocletian] maintain[ed] a much more considerable military force than any sole emperor had done in times past. There began to be fewer men who paid taxes than there were who received wages… the husbandmen [were so] exhausted by enormous impositions [that] the farms were abandoned, cultivated grounds became woodland, and universal dismay prevailed.”
source
St. Ambrose praises a certain tax percentage on produce as reasonable:
“[Joseph] fixed [an] impost at a fifth of [the peoples’] produce, and thus showed himself clear-sighted in making provision for the future, and liberal in the tax he laid upon them. Never after did Egypt suffer from…a [terrible] famine.”
source
Pope St. Gregory the Great has perhaps the most detailed treatment of taxes. As an example, read the paragraph at
this link that has this phrase in it: “on some estates of the Church a most unjust exaction is practised.” I’m not sure what exactly his tax proposal was because some of the terms are unfamiliar to me. But he clearly says: “we desire you to draw up charters of security, to be signed by you, declaring that each person is to pay [a certain] amount [and no more].” And: “let them make a payment in gross amounting to seventy-two [units]: and let neither grains beyond the pound, nor an excessive pound, nor any further imposts beyond the pound, be exacted.”
source
St. John Chrysostom notes some of the things that taxes are supposed to pay for: “the benefits done to states by the rulers [include] good order and peace…the soldiery, and those over the public business.”
source And he asks: “[Why do] we pay tribute to a king? Is it not as providing for us? And yet we should not have paid it unless we had known in the first instance that we were gainers from [the government’s] superintendence. Yet it was for this that from of old all men came to an agreement that governors should be maintained by us”
source
Or people ban together and we have a age of warlords fighting for control over their own nations with what was once your country.