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Conservative legislators and organizations who support exempting food from the Idaho sales tax have called such a tax “immoral”. I was curious about this line of rhetoric, so I posed a question on Twitter this afternoon:
Is a sales tax on groceries “immoral”?
If so, is it also immoral to tax clothing, housing, automobiles, or mobile phones – all of which are also necessities?
Are all taxes immoral? Are some more immoral than others?
There were many interesting responses; check them out over on Twitter.
It seems like a silly question, but it really does take us to some interesting places. Is taxing food uniquely immoral? If so, is not not just as immoral to tax other things that we need to live? Is there such a thing as a moral tax?
Why do we have taxes, anyway? Isn’t all taxation theft?
To a degree, yes. However, most people, even most conservatives, agree that we need some form of government. Our Founding Fathers were not anarchists; they believed that government was necessary to protect the life, liberty, and property of the people, as well as handle certain aspects of society.
Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution lays out the powers of the Legislative Branch of government. These powers include maintaining a military, coining money, controlling immigration, collect taxes, regulate commerce between the states, etc. The Constitution forbid a direct income tax on American citizens until the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913.
One of the primary debates during the ratification of the US Constitution concerned the limits of government. The so-called Anti-federalists demanded a bill of rights be included in the Constitution to prevent the federal government from overreaching its authority and infringing upon the natural rights of the people. However, the Federalists argued that the federal government was by definition already constrained, as it could only do what the Constitution allowed it to do. State governments, they argued on the other hand, had no definitive limit to their authority, and so bills of rights were necessary at the state level.
Read this from the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin:
Federalists rejected the proposition that a bill of rights was needed. They made a clear distinction between the state constitutions and the U.S. Constitution. Using the language of social compact, Federalists asserted that when the people formed their state constitutions, they delegated to the state all rights and powers which were not explicitly reserved to the people. The state governments had broad authority to regulate even personal and private matters. But in the U.S. Constitution, the people or the states retained all rights and powers that were not positively granted to the federal government. In short, everything not given was reserved. The U.S. government only had strictly delegated powers, limited to the general interests of the nation. Consequently, a bill of rights was not necessary and was perhaps a dangerous proposition. It was unnecessary because the new federal government could in no way endanger the freedoms of the press or religion since it was not granted any authority to regulate either. It was dangerous because any listing of rights could potentially be interpreted as exhaustive. Rights omitted could be considered as not retained. Finally, Federalists believed that bills of rights in history had been nothing more than paper protections, useless when they were most needed. In times of crisis they had been and would continue to be overridden. The people’s rights are best secured not by bills of rights, but by auxiliary precautions: the division and separation of powers, bicameralism, and a representative form of government in which officeholders were responsible to the people, derive their power from the people, and would themselves suffer from the loss of basic rights.
Eventually, the Anti-federalists achieved a compromise in which a bill of rights was added to the Constitution in the form of its first ten amendments. The 10th Amendment made explicit what the Federalists already believed was implicit, that, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”
Therefore, according to our Founding Fathers, state governments had certain inherent powers that were not granted to the federal government. In our state constitution, for example, Idaho claims the right to (among other things) ban gambling, regulate alcohol, manage water rights, protect livestock from disease, and maintain and fund a free system of public schools.
My point here is that there are differences between what is technically constitutional and what is moral. The first is a legal discussion, while the second is open to much wider interpretation. If you believe all taxation is theft, and all taxes are by nature immoral, then what do you make of George Washington personally leading an army to crush an anti-tax rebellion in 1794? It’s fine to hold anarcho-libertarian positions, but we must also contend with the reality of the way in which our Founding Fathers structured our states and our nation.
All that is to say that the State of Idaho has the constitutional authority to levy taxes on its citizens. The question is, are such taxes moral?
Let’s start from the basics. Human beings are not, and have never been, entirely individual actors. We belong to families, clans, tribes, and nations, and each level of society grants certain privileges while imposing certain obligations. Many modern libertarians, and even some conservatives, want to put all their eggs in the basket of individual rights, but this is not the position of our Founders or of any major political philosopher of Western Civilization. Contra Voltaire, man in the state of nature was never a fully autonomous individual existing without societal constraints.
The modern era has seen a trend toward individuality and atomization as the bonds of society have been systematically broken down. There were many issues about which our Founding Fathers never concerned themselves, because they were naturally handled in other spheres of government. A man owed certain obligations to his family, others to his community, still others to his church, and still others to his nation. Today, most of these obligations have been erased in the name of individual rights, and the only authority left in our lives is the government. Hence our government is now called upon to legislate morality, such as prohibiting doctors from mutilating children in the name of transgenderism.
Last year, I wrote about how many citizens want their government to provide them with nice things, but often balk at paying the taxes necessary to fund those things:
Imagine a line from left to right, with communists on the far left and anarcho-libertarians on the far right. Communists believe that every penny belongs to the government, as the embodiment of the people, and should be used to operate society on behalf of the people, including distributing food, clothing, and housing based on need. Anarcho-libertarians, on the other hand, believe that government is inherently illegitimate, and that there should be no public services at all, with everything from schools to police to roads operated by the private sector.
Most conservatives agree that some level of government is necessary. There should be an entity responsible for essential functions like public safety, criminal justice, transportation, and resolving disputes. However, that entity must be strictly limited, carefully constrained, and fully accountable to the people it serves. The distinction between a government that collects resources through taxation to provide public services and a mafia family that demands protection money lies primarily in scale and legitimacy, but in both cases you see a transactional relationship between the government and the governed.
When taxes are reasonable and public services are useful and equitable, the social contract remains intact. However, when taxes become excessive, when the government starts playing favorites, or when it fails to deliver the expected level of service — as seen in southern California this month — that contract is broken.
If we accept the premise that some form of government is necessary, and with it, some level of taxation, the question becomes: what form of taxation is the most moral — or perhaps the least immoral? In Idaho, taxes are primarily collected through three methods: a consumption (sales) tax, an income tax, and property taxes.
Of these three, property taxes seem the least moral, because you’re being taxed on the unrealized value of something you own, rather than what you make or what you buy. Nevertheless, property taxes are local taxes, and therefore of the three the one most subject to local control. Property taxes are levied by cities, counties, school districts, library districts, fire districts, etc. Each of these taxation districts is overseen by a board that is elected by the people, and those boards must by law hold public hearings before raising taxes.
Income taxes are frustrating too, because taxation diminishes everything it touches. An income tax decreases the value you receive from the work of your hands. If there was a such thing as a 100% tax bracket, then not a single person would pay it because they would simply cease working before hitting that bracket. Workers today choose how much to work based on how much of their own money they get to keep. The fastest way for a young idealist to become an anti-tax crusader is to get his first paycheck and see how much the government took away.
Finally, nobody likes sales taxes either, but many conservatives throughout the years have considered them the least immoral of all the taxes. Why? Because they are the most responsive to personal choices. Beyond the basics, people can choose whether or not to buy products depending on how much tax they wish to pay. The so-called Fair Tax, which has long been desired by many conservative lawmakers, would eliminate income taxes and impose a national consumption tax in its place. Cong. Buddy Carter of Georgia introduced a new Fair Tax Act just last week.
Conservatives have also long believed that as many citizens as possible should have skin in the game. It’s usually progressives who want to see the rich pay more and the poor pay less, or even nothing at all. The danger of a tax system that is too progressive — putting more of the burden on the wealthy — is that politicians are incentivized to push it further and further, winning votes by promising to exempt ever more people from taxation.
There is a conservative argument to be made that not only is a sales tax the least immoral of all taxes, but that keeping it flat, with no carve-outs, maintains a fair system that allows every citizen to have skin in the game.
I know this doesn’t easily fit on a bumper sticker like “Taxation is theft” or “Grocery taxes are immoral,” but I believe we need to have deep conversations about these issues as we work together to make society more free and prosperous. Clearly we all want taxes to be lower and government to be smaller. The question is how best to accomplish those goals. Should we use our finite time and political capital to exempt groceries from the sales tax, or should we instead lower the income tax another half percent? What about removing barriers within industries that cause service providers or homebuilders to pass along exorbitant costs to their customers? What about finding a way to further relieve homeowners of the burden of property taxes?
I’m not writing this to give you pat answers, but to help you ask insightful questions. The Legislature will be debating various proposals over the next few weeks, and I want to arm you with as much information and historical context as I can to help you be a better engaged citizen. The decisions our lawmakers make today will affect not only our lives but also those of our children and grandchildren, so let’s work together to ensure they make wise choices.
About Brian Almon
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
