From the Bible to the Beatles and beyond, the tax collector has been an object of derision. While we don’t have to deal, usually, with “tax men” these days, a lot of people still hate the idea of paying taxes.
From now until mid-April, you will hear the complaint “Why should the government take my hard-earned money?”
Questions of whether most tax dollars are actually “hard-earned” aside, I think it is worthwhile to enquire into the basis of this complaint. Why should we, or should we not, be expected to pay taxes?
Like most political issues, views on this debate often presume some basic anthropological assumptions. To put it a different way, whether or not you think taxation is just often depends on what you think it is like to be a human being who lives with and among other human beings. Of course, some people might just like to complain, and not all positions are deeply philosophical.
However, for classical liberals, and their more radical brethren, libertarians, the view that taxation should be limited, or abolished, is tied to a particular view of the human person. That person is an atomic individual, whose main characteristic is the freedom to do what he or she wants without external coercion. Something like this view is probably behind much of our ill feelings for the “tax man” and is apparently popular with a good segment of this campus.
Of course, that view has a venerable history, and has done quite a bit of good. It probably finds its most eloquent, and simple, expression in John Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government.” There Locke tells us that human beings are free individuals, who use their bodies to do labor that produces private property. He calls this condition the “state of nature,” and one gets the sense (vindicated to an extent by Locke’s references to natives in the wilds of the Americas) that he is thinking of solitary, rugged types forging their own way in the world. Government comes on the scene fairly late.
It is only after people have amassed property and want to protect their right to that property that they get together and decide to form a government for protection. This government is presumably minimal and limited; for a more recent Lockean like the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, it should not even be called a government. It is more like a privately organized security company whose sole purpose is to protect our individual property rights. It certainly would not have the power to demand citizens to give it part of their own property. One might have to pay for the protective services, but beyond that, something like taxation would be akin to theft. Maybe we are right, then, to complain about the government taking our hard-earned money.
While I do not have the space to make a full argument here, this strikes me as a mistaken view of the human person. I would tend to agree with another long and venerable tradition, which stretches back to Aristotle. He famously said that human beings are “political animals” by which he meant that we are from the beginning a part of a society that shapes who we are. Thus, our ability to be free individuals depends on the social interactions, from basic family life to larger public life, that help form us. Individual liberty is hollow and one-sided if it isn’t placed in a social context.
On this view of the human person, it seems legitimate to think that we might owe something back to our society for its maintenance. After all, your earnings could only have become yours on the basis of the operations of a good number of social institutions. Why shouldn’t we be expected to help support those institutions?
Of course, nothing in this view ratifies the specific things our government does with the money it collects. I have serious doubts about whether my money is going to be put to good use this year. This is not a problem with paying taxes per se, though, and in principle I am more than happy to do my duty to the IRS. Ultimately, though, my point here is not to make you be happy about paying taxes. Rather, I want to encourage you to take some time during this tax season to think about the principles underlying your own views on what you are doing when you fill out your 1040. Are you playing a necessary part in the greater social nexus, or is some external force impinging on your freedom? It is definitely worth considering.
J.C. Berendzen, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of philosophy.
