In the year 910 A.D., a monastery was founded in the town of Cluny in France. This monastery would come to be associated with a reform movement which aimed to return the church to its tasks of helping the poor, educating the common people, and offering spiritual wisdom. This movement had a significant effect. Monasteries increased their efforts at dispensing food and clothing to anyone who needed them, literacy rates rose, and the church's message that God cares for and about people replaced superstitious traditions about needing to earn God's favor.
The reform movement also had a political side. Its goal was to protect the church from exploitation by worldly-minded monarchs who sought to use the church for political instead of spiritual goals. Specifically, some monarchs had adopted the practice of appointing whomever they chose to offices within the church. Instead of spiritually-minded women and men whose purposes were to help the poor and educate them, friends of the royal family, who had neither the desire nor the ability to make a positive impact in society, were appointed to church jobs. The Cluny movement worked to put this trend, called lay investiture, to an end. A similar practice, called simony, involved the selling of church jobs; the Cluny movement was likewise opposed to simony.
Along with the intentions of the Cluny movement, its funding was also important. While monarchies had only one source of funding, taxation, the church had several. First, monasteries were often self-supporting; on their own land, they grew crops and raised animals; they made cloth and candles and other necessities. Some monasteries even generated a surplus, selling the excess produce, and using the money to fund their work among the poor. Second, both rich people and poor people made large and small donations to the church; some gave money, others gave land, and others gave materials like lumber or flour.
While it is true that some monarchs arranged for a fraction of tax revenues to go to the church, many history books overemphasize this aspect of church funding. The fact that the church had other sources of funding, sources which were independent of the monarch, gave the church the ability, in some situations, to take a principled stand and oppose the monarch. The word 'tithe' means 'tenth' and was the traditional donation to the church - one gave a tenth of one's annual income. One history textbook - World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007) - notes:
The Church used some of the money to perform social services such as caring for the sick and the poor. In fact, the Church operated most hospitals in medieval Europe.
Economic developments over the course of the Middle Ages affected incomes for the monarchs. Manufacturing, importing, and exporting expanded, and royal tax revenue increased accordingly, because it was then, and is now, calculated as a percentage of income. At first, then, the merchants' taxes increased the king's power and wealth. The new merchant class, however, did not want to endure the royal taxes, and worked to find a way to retain their freedom. The narrative of resistance to taxation is the narrative of the fight for freedom.
The merchants and craftspeople of medieval towns did not fit into the traditional medieval social order of noble, clergy, and peasant. At first, towns came under the authority of feudal lords, who used their authority to levy fees, taxes, and rents. As trade expanded, the burghers, or merchant-class town dwellers, resented this interference in their trade and commerce. They organized themselves and demanded privileges. These included freedom from certain kinds of tolls and the right to govern the town. At times they fought against their landlords and won these rights by force.
As merchants found ways to free themselves from taxes and tolls, a new kind of civil freedom was born. This type of civil freedom would stabilize itself in written forms of government: constitutions which would limit the power of government and thereby protect the freedom of the individual. This would be the case in England, where King John had made himself unloved among his people.
Some of John’s problems stemmed from his own personality. He was cruel to his subjects and tried to squeeze money out of them. He alienated the Church and threatened to take away town charters guaranteeing self-government. John raised taxes to an all-time high.
Not only was John harassing the people by means of taxes, but he was interfering in the church by appointing his friends to posts, he was damaging the freedom of individuals by arranging or forbidding marriages, and harming the freedom of town by dictating to them how they should arrange their own matters inside the town. The English people had enough of such misery, and took matters into their own hands.
His nobles revolted. On June 15, 1215, they forced John to agree to the most celebrated document in English history, the Magna Carta (Great Charter). This document, drawn up by English nobles and reluctantly approved by King John, guaranteed certain basic political rights. The nobles wanted to safeguard their own feudal rights and limit the king’s powers. In later years, however, English people of all classes argued that certain clauses in the Magna Carta applied to every citizen. Guaranteed rights included no taxation without representation, a jury trial, and the protection of the law. The Magna Carta guaranteed what are now considered basic legal rights both in England and in the United States.
The Magna Carta was a foundational document, setting a precedent that in order to protect the people's liberty, the government's power must be kept to a minimum. The group of nobles had the power to approve or reject any proposed tax from King John. Over the years, this group of nobles gradually redesigned itself into the Parliament. By 1295, when King Edward I was on the throne, the Parliament began to include not only aristocracy, but also the commoners. Thus the aristocrats were able to check the king, and commoners were able to nudge the aristocrats into more vigilantly working against any potential tax. In 1295, the parliament included not only the nobles and top church officials, but knights and burgesses. Burgesses are not from the aristocracy or royal family; they are commoners. When the king proposed a tax, he called two burgesses
from every borough and two knights from every county to serve as a parliament, or legislative group. In November 1295, knights, burgesses, bishops, and lords met together at Westminster in London. This is now called the Model Parliament because its new makeup (commoners, or non-nobles, as well as lords) served as a model for later kings.
The success or failure of the Parliament depended upon the members, noble or common, remaining vigilant and steadfast against taxes. The king would certainly try to tempt them, through personal favors or political pressure, to allow taxation.
Over the next century, from 1300 to 1400, the king called the knights and burgesses whenever a new tax was needed. In Parliament, these two groups gradually formed an assembly of their own called the House of Commons. Nobles and bishops met separately as the House of Lords. Under Edward I, Parliament was in part a royal tool that weakened the great lords. As time went by, Parliament became strong. Like the Magna Carta, it provided a check on royal power.
By acting as a restraint on taxation, the Parliament made England a model for those future nations, including the United States, which hoped to maintain freedom. In France, however, things did not go so well for the idea of liberty. On a large historical scale, France was sinking into absolutism, a form of government in which there were no checks whatsoever on the king's power to tax. This would cause limitless misery, and eventually erupt in the savage but futile French Revolution. Philip II, king of France, subjected his subjects to the worst possible treatment: high taxes.
Philip II not only wanted more land, he also wanted a stronger central government. He established royal officials called bailiffs. They were sent from Paris to every district in the kingdom to preside over the king’s courts and to collect the king’s taxes.
Taxes are fueled by two different types of greed: the personal greed of a monarch for luxury, and the institutional greed of a monarch or president for power. As the old proverb says, money is power, and those monarchs who desired great power achieved it, or tried to, by massive taxation. The human cost involved is nearly incalculable, given that taxation ripples through society, harming education and culture, forcing people into bitter poverty, and taking away hopes for the society's future.
One of Philip II's successors, Philip IV, knew that taxation was power, and in order for the king to have all the power, and for the people to lose all their freedom, no exceptions could be tolerated to the king's power to tax.
In 1302, Philip IV, who ruled France from 1285 to 1314, was involved in a quarrel with the pope. The pope refused to allow priests to pay taxes to the king. Philip disputed the right of the pope to control Church affairs in his kingdom.
Philip IV was willing to use a legislative body which looked like a Parliament, something called the Estates-General, to strengthen his case for taxing everyone, even the priests. But in reality,
the Estates-General never became an independent force that limited the king’s power.
Through this unlimited taxation, France slid down into absolutism, and the French people suffered the loss of much of their freedom. The United States, in its origin and development, followed more after the British model than the French model, and developed a governmental structure which had the purpose of maximizing and protecting personal freedom and individual liberty. Great strides were made as slavery was abolished and women were given legal and political equality. But even in the United States, freedom was lost as Sixteenth Amendment enabled income tax, and the IRS inflicted merciless harm to almost all citizens. As Senator Goldwater wrote:
Government does not have an unlimited claim on the earnings of individuals. One of the foremost precepts of the natural law is man's right to the possession and the use of his property. And a man's earnings are his property as much as his land and the house in which he lives. Indeed, in the industrial age, earnings are probably the most prevalent form of property. It has been the fashion in recent years to disparage “property rights,” to associate them with greed and materialism. This attack on property rights is actually an attack on freedom. It is another failure to take into account the whole man. How can a man be truly free if he is denied the means to exercise freedom? How can he be free if the fruits of his labor are not his to dispose of, but are treated, instead, as part of a common pool of public wealth? Property and freedom are inseparable: to the extent government takes the one in the form of taxes, it intrudes on the other.
The statement "private property and freedom are inseparable" is often attributed to George Washington, but evidence for that attribution is not strong. Senator Goldwater writes something quite similar above. The linkage between property and freedom is important: they may seem to be two different issues, but they are closely related. Freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of belief, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are neither possible nor meaningful without private property rights. Because property rights are essential to all those forms of freedom, taxation, which is an attack upon property, is an attack upon freedom.
