Taxes: Instruments of Oppression

While there are a few things worse than taxation - famines, plagues, and wars - it is still true that taxes are one of the worst things which a government can inflict upon its own people. When a government levies taxes - when a government steals from its own people - it not only denies them the earned fruit of their own labor, but it denies them the material means by which they can exercise their freedom.

To be sure, humanity is often tempted to value material possessions too much, and value the life of the heart and mind too little. But opposition to taxation is not mere crass materialism. Rather, by opposing taxation, one manifests an understanding of the fact that material goods, used freely by their rightful possessors, are the means to expressing the life of the heart and to expressing the life of the mind. To deprive a citizen of his property is to deprive a citizen of his freedom. Yet the government, the very purpose of which is to protect a citizen's life, property, and freedom, is guilty of denying the citizen his freedom when it divests him of his property.

Concrete examples show us that taxation is one utensil in the portfolio of oppression. Whether labeled as "tributes" or "user fees," governments use taxes to subjugate populations. Around 1240 A.D., the Mongols invaded and occupied southern Russia. As one textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007), describes it,

The Mongols demanded just two things from the Russians: absolute obedience and massive amounts of tribute, or payments. By and large, the Russian nobles agreed. Novgorod's prince and military hero Alexander Nevsky, for example, advised his fellow princes to cooperate with the Mongols. The Russian nobles often crushed revolts against the Mongols and collected oppressive taxes for the foreign rulers.

Oppressors usually find willing helpers - those who will harm their fellow countrymen in return for a sycophantic chance to gain favors from the tyrants. Whether Russian nobles willing to harm their fellow citizens, or bureaucrats working for the IRS, governments require and develop apparatuses - sometimes sophisticated ones - for collecting taxes. Perhaps one of the most notorious such systems was the "tax farming" system used in parts of the Roman Empire.

People generally despise tax collection agencies of all variations. Those Russian aristocrats who aided the Mongols did so by ruining their reputation among their fellow Russians:

During the 1320's, Moscow's Prince Ivan I had earned the gratitude of the Mongols by helping to crush a Russian revolt against Mongol rule. For his services, the Mongols appointed Ivan I as tax collector of all the Slavic lands they had conquered. They also gave him the title of "Grand Prince." Ivan had now become without any doubt the most powerful of all Russian princes. He also became the wealthiest and was known as "Ivan Moneybag."

The situation of the Mongols in Russia is one among many examples of the tension between the legitimate need for a government to have some small source of funds for its legitimate activities on the one hand and its illegitimate tendency to expand its revenues and activities beyond the practical minimum. How can a society allow its government to levy some small tax, and yet ensure that the government's greed does not cause it to tax more than the least feasible amount? This question, in varied forms, arises for every civilization. The ability to answer this question is the key to that civilization's survival. Senator Goldwater writes:

We all have heard much throughout our lifetimes, and seen little happen, on the subject of high taxes. Where is the politician who has not promised his constituents a fight to the death for lower taxes — and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible? There are some the shoe does not fit, but I am afraid not many. Talk of tax reduction has thus come to have a hollow ring. The people listen, but do not believe. And worse: as the public grows more and more cynical, the politician feels less and less compelled to take his promises seriously.

The senator goes on to distinguish between the false notion that a government has an "unlimited claim" to the property and income of its citizens and the plausibly true proposition that a government might have some limited claims on its citizens. Given the reality of the world as it is - imperfect - and the reality of human nature as it is - also imperfect - we must acknowledge that government is, in the words of Thomas Paine, a necessary evil. If government is necessary and the world imperfect, then taxes will also be necessary. Although necessary, they must be strictly limited and held to the lowest conceivable minimum.

We have been led to look upon taxation as merely a problem of public financing: How much money does the government need? We have been led to discount, and often to forget altogether, the bearing of taxation on the problem of individual freedom. We have been persuaded that the government has an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people, and that the only pertinent question is what portion of its claim the government should exercise. The American taxpayer, I think, has lost confidence in his claim to his money. He has been handicapped in resisting high taxes by the feeling that he is, in the nature of things, obliged to accommodate whatever need for his wealth the government chooses to assert.

When the government confiscates people's money and property, it also reduces their freedom. Whether in Mongol-dominated Russia or in twenty-first century America, resistance to taxation is a defense of freedom. From the Magna Carta to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, from the First Continental Congress to the Second Continental Congress, thinkers who have coherently advocated liberty have, as a corollary, consistently sought lower taxes.

Islam and Taxes

The religion of Islam appeared around 630 A.D., and a century later, its armies had occupied much of North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and other parts of the Near East. To finance these military actions, and the occupational governments which ruled over the populations of the conquered lands, Islam needed to raise funds. It did so through plunder and booty, confiscating valuables in the lands it invaded, but also through taxation.

Shortly after Muhammad died in 632 A.D., and shortly after Abu-Bakr became his successor, the central role of taxation in Islam emerged. Some Muslims who had followed Muhammad did not want Abu-Bakr as the next Islamic leader. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction, they

refused to pay taxes, and a few individuals even declared themselves prophets. For the sake of Islam, Abu-Bakr invoked jihad. The word jihad means "striving" and can refer to the inner struggle against evil. However, the word is also used in the Qur'an to mean an armed struggle against unbelievers. For the next two years, Abu-Bakr applied this meaning of jihad to encourage and justify the expansion of Islam.

Already in a very early stage of Islam's development, taxation is a major issue, and it is linked to jihad - linked to the military expansion of Islam. It is important to remember that the word jihad probably did once refer to an inner psychological or spiritual struggle against evil, and may even still occasionally be used that way. Note also that this first major Islamic tax controversy was not related to the taxation of the oppressed peoples in the lands conquered by Islam, but rather related to the taxation of Muslims by their leaders.

As Muslim armies conquered and occupied vast territories in Spain, North Africa, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, those subjected to Islamic military government would also face taxation. Those in such territories were taxed according to their religious status. If they converted to Islam, they would pay a lower tax rate. Those who chose to remain with their own culture's native religions were treated more harshly: "They paid a poll tax each year" which might be in coin, in agricultural goods, or in the form of having one's children confiscated to be slaves or laborers.

Starting around 750 A.D., the Caliphate - the Islamic empire - fell under the control of a dynasty called the Abbasids. One of their goals was to conquer and occupy Gaul - what we now know as France. The first attempted Islamic invasion of France was in 732 A.D., but this attempt had failed. The Abbasids would try again. This effort would require a large imperial military, and lots of money - money to be gained by taxation.

The Abbasids developed a strong bureaucracy to conduct the huge empire's affairs. A treasury kept track of the money flow. A special department managed the business of the army.

The Abbasids would fund their military buildup with taxes that disproportionately burdened the residents of lands occupied by Islamic armies, and of those residents, the taxes would disproportionately burden the non-Muslims, who conveniently lacked any political influence whatsoever. These non-Muslims were also, on average, poorer than the Muslims in their regions: poorer both than the locals who had converted to Islam, and than the occupying Islamic soldiers who were foreign to the region.

To support this bureaucracy, the Abbasids taxed the land, imports and exports, and non-Muslims' wealth.

But not all taxes collected were for military expansions. Some went to support the luxurious style of a the Caliphs - the leaders of the empire. Some went to support the mosques and the religious leaders - mullahs and imams. Some of it was collected for the purposes of helping the poor.

India and China: Learning about Taxation from History

Between roughly 400 B.C. and 550 A.D., a series of major empires established themselves in India and China. Their tax policies partially determined their durations and ultimate declines. Imperial governments which levied more than the lowest practical amounts of tax were often overthrown.

For example, the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya, who ruled from approximately 321 B.C. to approximately 297 B.C., financed a lavish lifestyle for himself. To the east of India, Seleucus ruled an area which had been part of the empire of Alexander the Great; Seleucus sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to visit Chandragupta Maurya. Megasthenes wrote a famous account about the wealth of India's emperor, including descriptions of the amount of gold used in the emperor's palace.

To pay for his personal wealth, as well as to fund his military, Chandragupta Maurya stole from the people of India. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007),

He divided the empire into four provinces, each headed by a royal prince. Each province was then divided into local districts, whose officials assessed taxes and enforced the law.

Taxes were not always paid in coin (paper money had not yet come into common use). Sometimes the government required taxes to be paid in the form of labor: either as a solider or as a worker building a magnificent structure for the emperor. Chandragupta Maurya stole huge amounts of money, as well as agricultural produce, from the people:

The government levied high taxes. For example, farmers had to pay up to one-half the value of their crops to the king.

Chandragupta Maurya started an era known as the Mauryan Empire. A later phase of Indian history, from approximately 320 A.D. to 535 A.D., is the Gupta Empire. The people likewise suffered because of harsh taxation. Amazingly,

There was a tax on water, and every month, people had to give a day's worth of labor to maintain

the emperor's projects. The ruler stole from the people. When taxes exceed the smallest practical amount, they are theft.

As in Mauryan times, farmers owed a large part of their earnings to the king.

Two principles emerge from the details of these empires. First, taxation is necessary; for common military defense and to maintain a legal system. Second, if taxes exceed the lowest practical amount, they inflict misery on people; this is true even if the taxes are instituted in order to fund some activity which is well-intended and designed to benefit the people. Both the Mauryan Empire and the Gupta Empire fell, in part, because of the people's anger about taxes. In China, the Qin Dynasty fell after the death of emperor Shi Huangdi.

Rumblings of discontent during the Qin Dynasty grew to roars in the years after Shi Huangdi's death. Peasants were bitter over years of high taxes.

The common people resented the "harsh labor quotas" and other methods devised by the government to steal from the people. Invariably, government officials, who have much wealth already, work to take even more from the common people, who have less. The Chinese rebelled against the Qin Dynasty because of its taxes. One of the rebel leaders was Liu Bang. He later ruled from 202 B.C. to 195 B.C. and became known as Emperor Gao.

To win popular support, Liu Bang departed from Shi Huangdi's strict legalism. He lowered taxes.

Throughout history, rebellions have often been organized because of taxes. People find taxes to be politically intolerable. From Rehoboam in the Ancient Near East, to King George III in 1776, the worst governments and the most cruel tyrants are those who tax. Revolution is the people's desire for freedom, and taxation is the enemy of freedom.

Sadly, Liu Bang's successors did not maintain his policies. The Han Dynasty, which replaced the Qin Dynasty, slowly drifted back into the habit of raising taxes instead of lowering them.

The Chinese emperor relied on a complex bureaucracy to help him rule. Running the bureaucracy and maintaining the imperial army were expensive. To raise money, the government levied taxes. Like the farmers in India, Chinese peasants owed part of their yearly crops to the government. Merchants also paid taxes.

Again the bureaucrats, who have more, find ways to steal from the common people, who have less. Leaders like Liu Bang, who can resist the temptation to take money from the people, are rare in history. In China, the Han Dynasty was not content with stealing money from the ordinary people.

Besides taxes, the peasants owed the government a month's worth of labor or military service every year. With this source of labor, the Han emperors built

some useful things, like roads and the additions to the Great Wall, but also many personal luxuries and palaces for the Dynasty. Even when the taxes and forced labor were used in projects for the common good, like roads, the money was used wastefully and inefficiently. When government officials obtain funds for a specific project, like building a road, they ask for, and receive, more money than the project actually costs. The extra money they use to buy luxuries for themselves or to hire friends - even if there is no work for the friends to do.

The attitudes of Liu Bang lived on. There naturally arises, among any people oppressed by taxation, the desire for liberty. Ban Gu and Ban Zhao, two ancient writers who recorded the history of the Han Dynasty while it was happening, are cited in World History: Patterns of Interaction as they comment on the need to free people from taxation:

Agriculture is the foundation of the world. No duty is greater. Now if [anyone] personally follows this pursuit diligently, he has yet [to pay] the impositions of the land tax and tax on produce ... Let there be abolished the land tax and the tax on produce levied upon the cultivated fields.

Ban Gu and Ban Zhao are pointing out that a farmer, who is already doing a very difficult job, should not have, on top that, to pay taxes. They are demanding the abolishment of two particular taxes, and a reduction in taxation as a whole.

In sum, throughout history, taxes are and have been the tools of oppression. A government's taxes can never be too low; they are usually too high. Rulers are very creative in finding excuses to take money from their people. The government may claim that it is doing work which will benefit the people, or it may warn that if it doesn't take the people's money, it will go into debt - or further into debt. Both arguments are specious: projects done for the common good can often be done better by other social institutions and not by the government; debt can be reduced or avoided when the government simply spends less. Few things are more harmful to the human race than taxes.

Saving Lives in Poland

Across Europe, during WWII, brave and creative people invented a variety of ways to hide Jews from the Nazis, or to smuggle them to safe regions. Amazing events took place as secret operations hid or transported the Jews inside Nazi-controlled areas.

In Germany, for example, ecumenical networks organized the rescue of Jews - the word 'ecumenical' reflecting the fact that Lutherans and Roman Catholics were willing to set aside their differences in order to oppose the Nazis and save as many Jewish lives as possible.

In Poland, however, the situation was different. Poland was, at the outbreak of the war, approximately 95% Roman Catholic and 5% Jewish (exact numbers vary). There was no need for an ecumenical spirit: the Polish underground was seamlessly Roman Catholic. Among the many tales of heroism emerging from wartime Poland is the narrative of a zoo in Warsaw which was used to hide Jews from the Nazis. Historian Diane Ackerman writes:

Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who capitalized on the Nazis' obsession with rare animals in order to save over three hundred doomed people. Their story has fallen between the seams of history, as radically compassionate acts sometimes do. But in wartime Poland, when even handing thirsty Jew a cup of water was punishable by death, their heroism stands out as all the more startling.

The occupation of Warsaw (and the rest of Poland) was a long affair. Nazis had occupied the city since October 1939. The Nazis would leave in January 1945, as the Soviet Army began its occupation of the city. After more than five years of Nazi oppression, the city of Warsaw would then be subjected to Stalinist oppression. The Nazi occupation was, of course, explicitly anti-Semitic, pursuing its objective of killing as many Jews as possible.

Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer's family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed "collective responsibility." Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city's underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist's dummies.

As the brave citizens of Warsaw continued to preserve the group of Jews hidden in the zoo, the war progressed. The Soviet army was advancing toward Warsaw from the east; the Poles anticipated that the Russians would liberate them from the Nazis. At the same time in 1944, thousands of Polish soldiers, organized as the Home Army, were preparing to stage a massive resistance action, later known as the Warsaw Uprising. This action was to be timed to coincide with the Soviet army's approach to the city. This would have confronted the Nazis simultaneously both with the Soviet attack and with the internal uprising - hastening the liberation of the city. "On July 27, when Russian troops reached the Vistula sixty-five miles south of Warsaw," Ackerman writes that the Nazi

Governor Hans Frank summoned 100,000 Polish men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to work nine hours a day building fortifications around the city, or be shot. The Home Army urged everyone to ignore Frank's order and start preparing for battle, a call to arms echoed the next day by the Russians, pushing closer, who broadcast in Polish: "The hour for action has arrived!" By August 3, as the Red Army bivouacked ten miles from the right-bank district that included the zoo, life grew even tenser.

The anticipation was agonizing,

and people kept asking: "When will the Uprising start?"

On August 1, 1944, the Uprising began. The Home Army anticipated that the Soviet soldiers, camped only a few miles away, would attack the Nazi occupational troops at the same time, and make quick work of liberating Warsaw. Instead, the Russians did nothing. Without Soviet support, the Polish resistance was facing the Nazis alone, a difficult or even impossible assignment. Historian Michael Korda places the Warsaw Uprising in the larger context of the European Theater of WWII:

In the east, of course, a war on an even larger scale was taking place - the front line ran from Memel on the Baltic to the Danube in Bulgaria, with a huge, threatening bulge developing in the south, where the army groups of Marshals Malinovsky and Tolbukhin were advancing swiftly to take Belgrade, surround Budapest, and approach within fifty miles of the German-Hungarian border. In the north, fanatical German resistance had stalled the Russians in East Prussia; but in the center the Russians at last held Warsaw. The Russians had paused for two months in sight of Warsaw to allow the Germans to savagely put down an uprising led by the Polish government in exile - which was based in London - so that Stalin could replace the so-called London Poles with his own communist Poles: one of the darkest and most cynical chapters in a war of stygian darkness.

Stalin was willing to let the Home Army die, man by man, at the hands of the Nazis. Once the Polish resistance had been exterminated, the Soviet army would then occupy Warsaw - not liberate it. Once the Poles knew that their defeat was certain, soldiers of the Home Army began to escape from the neighborhoods surrounded by Nazis. They eluded the Nazis by sneaking out through the underground sewer system. Diane Ackerman writes:

By September, 5,000 soldiers in the old town had escaped through the sewers, despite Germans dropping grenades and burning gasoline down the manholes. Elsewhere, the Allies were advancing on all fronts: after liberating France and Belgium, the United States and Britain were pushing into Germany from the Netherlands, Rhineland, and Alsace; and though the Red Army paused near Warsaw, it had already captured Bulgaria and Romania, was prepared to take Belgrade and Budapest, and planned to storm the Reich from the Baltics; the United States had landed on Okinawa and was pounding the South Pacific.

The war seemed to be progressing toward its end in every place except Warsaw. The Uprising continued, with no help from the Soviets and therefore no prospect of success. Yet the Poles fought fiercely and the Nazis found that they could not easily quash the Uprising. Soon negotiations between the leaders of the Home Army and the Nazi officers took place, trying to find terms of a ceasefire. On October 2, 1944, the Home Army surrendered, and Warsaw was once again occupied by the Nazis.

Although the two months of the Uprising were over, life was still very tense for the residents of Warsaw who were hiding and supporting Jews. For three agonizing months, they lived with the knowledge that the Soviet army was camped only a few miles away and yet refusing to drive the Nazis out of Warsaw. Every day was a risk; if the occupying Nazis discovered that a Roman Catholic Pole was helping a Jew, both would be executed. Finally, however, the Soviet army took action, having waited so long to allow the Nazis to eliminate more Poles, and to allow the Poles to eliminate more Nazis. Diane Ackerman writes:

The Red Army finally entered Warsaw on January 17, long after the city's surrender and too late to help. In theory, the Russians were supposed to drive out the Germans, but for political, strategic, and practical reasons (among them, losing 123,000 men en route), they had camped on the east side of the Vistula River and complacently watched the bloodshed for two months solid, as thousands of Poles were massacred, thousands more sent to camps, and the city extinguished.

The relief was minimal: Warsaw did not erupt in joy and celebration. By the time the Nazis left, the horror had been too great and gone on too long to allow for festivities. When the Soviets took over, it soon became clear that their use of the word 'liberation' was insincere indeed. The Soviet communists subjected Poland to a dictatorship that was, if somewhat less anti-Semitic, nearly as harsh as the Nazis had been.

Nonetheless, the bravery of Poland's Roman Catholics saved thousands of Jews. The courage of these Poles has been acknowledged and honored worldwide.