God and taxes

Editor’s note: Ian Hodge is a regular columnist for Business Reform Magazine, the leading Christian business magazine with over 100,000 readers. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.

The New York Times, on April 12, carried an article explaining why some people find it necessary to leave home. Taxes ? property taxes to be precise.

In a period of rising house prices, it is easy to forget that with rises in prices come increasing property taxes. And property taxes can mean financial ruin for many whose income cannot rise to meet the increased tax burden.

As a result, some residents in Massachusetts are suffering. In a small town 30 miles from Boston, a resident had her tax bill increase from $2,200 to $3,500, while her income remains fixed at $12,000 a year. The result? Sell the family home, with all its sweat and tears (it was built by the current owner and her late husband) and memories.

While the stock market may be languishing, there is little evidence that the real estate market is in the doldrums. With personal debt on the increase in recent years, a lot of which has gone into home buying, prices were bound to increase ? and property taxes along with them.

There are efforts in some communities to limit the tax rises. In some cases, the unpaid taxes are allowed to accumulate until the current owner sells, or the home becomes part of the estate left to others.

No matter how the taxes are managed at present, what is clear is that the future generations are being decapitalized by property taxes. This should not surprise us, since the purpose of all taxation is to confiscate property in the name of the political order.

But taxes are more than that. They are also a mark of sovereignty. This is why foreign embassies do not pay taxes in the host nation. To do so would be to put the foreign nation under the jurisdiction of the host nation, and no sovereign state will admit there exists a higher authority to which it must pay tax. Nations thus see themselves as equals, and equals do not tax one another. Superiors tax inferiors. That’s the way the taxing game is played.

But more than that, taxation indicates the god of a society. Taxation is, in essence, religious practice, imposed by those in authority. But authority is either self-claimed or else it is delegated. In the Christian view, authority is delegated, and with that delegated authority goes very limited taxing power.

How a nation constructs its taxing system indicates its source of authority. And taxes that are all embracing, allowing little or no concept of the idea of relief for those who cannot afford them, indicate a sovereign state that will extract its pound of flesh, whatever the cost to the individual.

We were warned about such a political order and accompanying taxes (I Sam. 8ff), and it comes about when God is rejected as King and therefore the source of all law and authority. Since few people today are willing to accept the idea of God as sole law-maker, and therefore the determiner of what taxes are just and unjust, it seems we get the government ? and the taxes ? that we deserve.