The spiritual problem with taxation

[ClaytonB]

In the past, I've written on other forums (now closed) about the subject of taxation from a spiritual perspective. Romans 13 is the "locus classicus" (that is, primary text) in Scripture regarding the Christian perspective on the State and taxation. In Romans, Paul explains that taxation -- regardless of whether it is good or evil -- is something that the State does and, therefore, Christians should not resist it. In fact, every action of the State, however evil it may be, is not to be resisted, up to and including murder.

In modern times, this teaching is heavily misinterpreted. American Christians on the religious right tend to view the American government very sympathetically. In fact, many, perhaps most, conservative American Christians believe that the American government is actually a Christian government, whatever that is supposed to mean. On this view, the teaching of Romans 13 is re-interpreted as a general praise of the exercise of State powers -- after all, Paul calls the government "God's servants", and so on. But this is a heavily revisionist reading of Romans. At the time Romans was written, Christianity was welcome nowhere in the Roman empire. Paul himself would soon end up being taken to Rome to be tried and executed for his faith. The Jews viewed Christianity as a divisive sect (which it was) and Christians were not welcome in Jerusalem. The Romans viewed Christianity as a divisive Jewish sect that was inflaming the already unmanageable province of Judea, a logistically important crossroads in the Middle East connecting southern Europe, the Asian continent and North Africa. Rome's agenda was to promote local stability by empowering locals to keep law and order in their own districts to the greatest extent possible. This usually meant backing the incumbent ruling class which, in Judea at that time, were the very people that Jesus had pissed off. Rome had no patience for divisive sects like the early Christians who were extraordinarily divisive.

When Paul says, "they are God's servants", this should not be read in the reverential tone that modern, American, religious right-wingers read it. Rather, Paul is slapping the emperor in the face. "They are not Caesar's servants, they are God's servants." He is asserting that divine sovereignty overrules and nullifies the paltry "power" of Caesar. That is what Paul is saying.

This same misinterpretation applies to the entire modern reading of the passage. Paul is not praising the State. Rather, he is pointing out the irrelevance of the State from the divine perspective. For all his pomp and circumstance, Paul is saying, Caesar is a nobody, a slave of God. He's puny by comparison to God and can only ever do what God permits him to do. God is King, Caesar is not. The State looms large in our consciousness because of the material power they wield, seemingly willy-nilly. But God, Paul argues, is in direct and immediate control of each and every twitch of the State's muscles, so much so that the State itself is just a paper tiger. If we die at the hands of the State, then we do so in imitation of Christ's obedience unto death. How much more this applies to taxation, and other exercises of State power!

But what about justice? God is just, so why does he permit injustice to not only go unchecked but actually to hold the prominent place of power and prestige at every point in the world we presently find ourselves trapped in, this fallen relic of the perfect world he created for Adam and Eve? Are we really meant to give our moral stamp of assent to every act of State murder and State theft simply because "they are God's servants"?? The answer, obviously, is no. How then should we evaluate the actions of the State?

Murder and theft -- that is, war and taxes -- are the granite foundation-stone of the power of the State. All the other accoutrements of State action -- surveillance, inflation, nepotism, anti-competitive regulation, and so on -- are built on this foundation. That murder and theft are evil and opposed to God's character is so obvious that it is embarrassing to have to spell it out. The evils of war have been thoroughly covered -- I would like to focus on the spiritual evil of taxation. Taxation is theft but it is so much more than just theft and I want to get to the bottom of this spiritual evil.

In order to tax people effectively, the State needs to impose two basic controls. The first control is a border (containment) and the second control is financial surveillance. If the State does not contain its population, when it raises taxes, they will just relocate outside of the territory. This might involve relocating their family (in the case of an ordinary employee) or it might involve relocating a business headquarters or other assets. Capital tends to flee taxation. The State must also implement rigorous financial surveillance -- revenues, outlays, assets and liabilities must all be thoroughly documented and audited at all levels, both for businesses and individuals. Otherwise, the State will be unable to assess the actual size of the "pie" from which it claims to be merely taking its own slice.

There is another social context that involves containment and surveillance: prison. The only notable difference between prison and the State, in these respects, is that modern prisons tend to impose enforced idleness (no gainful employment is permitted), whereas, in the non-prison population of a territory, gainful employment is presupposed by the apparatus of taxation. The point of taxation is to take some of what you earn through productive effort.

[Side note: It's interesting to wonder why people who have committed no crime are saddled with the cruel dilemma to "work or starve", while those who have (presumably) committed a crime and are imprisoned are relieved of the burden of work and, instead, are forced to be idle. The more I contemplate the architecture of modern society, the more it seems to me to be indistinguishable from a madhouse, top-to-bottom. The whole thing is completely bonkers and the more you think about it, the more bonkers you will inevitably realize that it is.]

The intent of any penal institution is to impose suffering. That's what makes a punishment, punishment. That it induces suffering. Prisons do this in at least two ways. First, the imprisoned individual is unable to move about in society and interact freely. Second, the imprisoned individual is compelled to endure involuntary boredom (inaction). Most normal people find even tiny amounts of boredom very hard to endure. Imprisonment imposes an enormous dose of boredom.

The key components of enforcing boredom are (a) containment and (b) the removal of privacy (surveillance). If you have privacy, you might find ways to amuse yourself that the guards did not think about. So they must actively check and make sure you are not doing anything that would defeat the purpose of imprisonment. And if you weren't contained, you would just walk out. There is a close parallel between the architecture of prison and the architecture of taxation, in these respects. At an even deeper level, the removal of privacy and the containment of the individual are meant to remove his capacity to act. By "act", I mean make choices and effect change in the world. As Mises defined it in Human Action:

Action is will put into operation and transformed into an agency, is aiming at ends and goals, is the ego's meaningful response to stimuli and to the conditions of its environment, is a person's conscious adjustment to the state of the universe that determines his life. (Section I.I)

In order to tax, the State must contain and surveil. In the limit, this containment and surveillance entails complete imprisonment of a population, although not the kind of imprisonment that has to do with enforcing boredom and, therefore, requires the cessation of gainful employment. Rather, the purpose of this imprisonment is to maximize labor in order to increase the size of the pie from which the State will later take "its slice" as much as possible. What is lost is not the ability to move about, to interact with others or to earn income. What is lost, ultimately, is the capacity to act, at the deepest level. The State must undercut the individual's innate self-goals and substitute goals that are socially useful. It is useful for the State that you become influential and influence people to consume. It is useful for the State that you get an education and use your technical learning to produce more goods, thus increasing economic (taxable) activity. And so on. Viewed from the perspective of a Martian, the maximal State is a paperclip-maximizer run amok. In its mad pursuit of complete control over all material resources within its territory, the State is ultimately seeking to colonize our very minds and hearts, to reduce each and every subject to an automaton, a mechanical extension of its impersonal will.

We have finally reached, I think, the real spiritual problem with taxation. When I first entered the workforce, it never really bothered me that the State takes some of "my" income since, as I reckoned, everyone is subject to the same loss and so you might as well not cry over spilt milk. Over time, however, I have realized that the real problem with taxation is far more insidious and has nothing really to do with the net monetary loss. Rather, it is all the opportunities left un-explored, all the choices that could have been made instead but were not, for fear of the unknown liabilities that might attend. Since the State has effectively unlimited power vis-a-vis the solitary individual, there is no point in taking even the smallest risk of angering it. Better to let sleeping dogs lie. And so I am compelled by force to participate along with the State in profaning the image of God within me, that is, I am compelled by force not to develop my natural endowment.

I would not wish to trade places with anyone but, at the time that Paul wrote Romans 13, at least those who would one day be burnt alive or fed to the lions by Nero had the solace of not being forced to actively participate in profaning the image of God within themselves. They were entirely victims of the State alone. They were not forced to become complicit with the State in brutalizing themselves and profaning the image of God within. They had a clean death which we, in all our modernity, are denied. Instead, we are relegated to this zombie state, stumbling through life in a detached stupor, trying to avoid stepping in some unseen financial bear-trap in the form of some new regulation we did not know about.

Following Paul's admonition in Romans 13 is the best that one can do but the reality is that, in the modern age of technological hyper-containment and hyper-surveillance - the burden of the State is no longer of the sort that can be psychologically externalized and ignored as "part of the world." It is inside of each of us, every waking moment, like a festering sore on the bottom of the foot that is felt with every step and will never heal and can never be ignored. It suppresses the heart and bears bad spiritual fruit, moment by moment.

The problem is only going to get worse as AI and other technologies come online that will centralize power beyond anything that our ancestors could have imagined in their wildest dreams. I am not saying this in order to prophesy doom and gloom -- I remain spiritually optimistic for the future. Rather, I am saying this to point out that taxation (and the containment and surveillance that come along with it) is a much larger and more spiritually significant problem than we tend to realize. If it were just a matter of a certain percentage of our property being "spirited away" by the State in some non-intrusive, non-threatening manner, it would have only a material (not spiritual) significance. Sure, we would still be victims but only by the express will of God (Romans 13). This is bearable. What taxation really is, however, (and will continue to become even more of) is unendurable. It is a spiritual attack directly on the soul and involuntarily brings forth the opposite of the fruits of the spirit -- instead of love, joy, peace and so on, it brings forth anxiety, fear, depression, pessimism, inertness and so on. This, I assert, is the spiritual problem with taxation. The material problems with taxation are between God and the State and the State will answer to that terrible judge at the end of all things. But the spiritual problems cannot be ignored, they are the immediate face of Satan himself.

[The Rebel Poet]

Great points. I'll just add what I've said before:

That is largely due to mistranslation. Translators (biblical or otherwise) usually have the philosophy that their job is to help the reader understand difficult information within a text by making subtext (which is subjective) explicit. Since, translators are subject to cultural bias like everyone, and our culture is saturated in statism, you get a bible that says anything a government does is good.

The word translated here as "governing" (ὑπερεχούσαις) actually means "above," or "higher." This is actually one of the few things that the King James translated well, "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers."
The next sentence "For there is no authority except from God" is strangely translated to say that all authority figures are from God, but in the Greek texts it is an if (εἰ) statement. This should therefor be rendered "For there is no authority if not from God."
Boring technical note: the majority of manuscripts have ὑπὸ "under", but TR has ἀπὸ "from."

Putting these three facts together without changing anything else from the translation you used would make verse 1 read "Let every person be subject to the higher authorities. For there is no authority if not under God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." The question then becomes what authorities God established (rather than begging the question that government is the answer).

The rest of the verses sort of follow one way or the other depending on what the first one means, but the last one is more interesting/problematic:
"Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed." This does say pay whatever you owe, but it doesn't actually say who you owe. The very next verse says explicitly: "Owe no one anything, except to love each other, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law."