God and Caesar

A few years ago I attended a meeting of the Catholic Newman Society at St James. I can't remember what provoked the question, but one of the audience asked the priest speaker about Catholic teaching on taxation. The good Father merely quoted Christ's advice -" give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." This answer was perfectly true and perfectly useless. Jesus on that occasion was not giving any universal advice on taxation, merely sidestepping a trap laid by the malicious.

It is astonishing that in 2,000 years there has not been much development in Church teaching on the morality of raising, paying and spending taxation. Gathering and spending tax deeply affects everyone in a modern economy, even if, miraculously, they pay no direct taxes themselves. I thought that possibly enclosed nuns and monks might be in such a position, but they interact with the taxed economy if they do something as basic as paying for a phone connection or an electricity supply.

It would be nearly impossible to survive for more than a few days in any modern city without paying or receiving taxes. Every time I ride on public transport in Europe I am in effect receiving a taxation subsidy. On Berlin's superb public transport system the subsidy covered up to 90% of the "true" cost of the trams, buses, U-Bahn and S-Bahn. This subsidy was showered on all users, whether they were paupers or billionaires. And please don't ask me if the subsidy came from taxpayers in the city of Berlin, the region, the German economy as a whole, the European Community or some Byzantine combination of the lot.

Even if I buy a total essential such as food, which is VAT free, part of the price embodies tax costs along the production and distribution chain. Or the food "price" may reflect whopping agricultural subsidies at taxpayers' expense. My sister and niece are part of this racket, as they work at the Intervention Board which distributes subsidies from the taxpayer to British farmers.

I remember being taught as a child that it was our Catholic obligation to pay just taxes, a statement which raised infinitely more questions than it answered. What is "just"? Digging for more subtle advice and insights as an adult is hardly more satisfying. There have been more developed answers, that we cannot withhold taxes on the grounds that part of it may be used for purposes of which we disapprove, e.g. a war or abortion facilities. But this looks like the opinion of particular moralists, rather than a clear teaching of the Ordinary Magisterium. I have seen a statement that Pope Benedict is about to issue a document condemning tax evasion, which in some countries, such as Italy, is practically a national sport. But I have yet to see such a document and have no idea if it is also condemning tax avoidance - i.e. legal skillful reduction of taxes, usually with the help of accountants and lawyers.

A major difficulty for the Magisterium is that taxation and the honesty of governments vary so enormously across the world. Any document from the Vatican has to be universally applicable, but how could any advice which covers countries such as Northern European democracies and the kleptocracies of much of Africa be more than bland generalities? Yet the question needs urgent consideration on so many levels.

Firstly, taxation is removing resources from individuals and companies to politicians and civil servants. However "competently" the latter use the money, it is a plain example of opportunity cost which is hardly ever analysed. To what better use could the individual or business have put that money? So much money is sucked away and people accept the plunder as an unavoidable part of life, like the weather. No one considers how they might have used that tax directly for their own benefit and that of family, friends, parish and charity. Or how taxes "invisible" to most people, such as heavy company taxation, might have been better spent on creating new products and worthwhile new jobs.

Secondly, money from taxation will inevitably be used less effectively because the public servants have less regard for public money than their own. The extreme illustration of this principle had to be the case of the Scottish politician Donald Dewar who promoted the building of the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh. The cost of this building quickly soared from an initial estimate of $80 milllion to a "final" cost of $860 million. I say "final" as an indication of total uncertainty, because the building has proved to embody design and construction defects which will burden the taxpayer with continuing extra costs for the rest of its life. Yet Donald Dewar was notoriously tight-fisted in his personal life. His habit of concealing vol-au-vents and other treats from official buffets in his pockets was legendary and his estate was worth over $5 million when he died after a life of officially modest salaries. Wisely, both he and the architect Mirales died before the full extent of the fiasco became publicly notorious.

The layers of scandal and incompetence on this relatively small rip-off beggar belief - or rather they would beggar belief if they were not so routine in British public spending. For example, the Spanish architect Mirales had no certificate from a British professional architectural association which would have permitted him to design a British public building with British taxpayers' money. After the cost overrun became general knowledge, it was revealed that he had designed a sports centre in Spain whose roof collapsed; this mishap earned him the title "El Callapso" from the Spanish media. Not surprisingly, the Scottish Parliament's debating chamber was evacuated hastily soon after completion when one of the oak beams in the elaborate interlocking roof structure broke loose at one end.

Obviously anyone commissioning a private or business building with their own hard-earned money would never have behaved with such insouciance, either in hiring the essential workers or controlling expenditure. Plainly this sort of monstrous incompetence is a massive crime against all taxpayers and an enormous sin. Yet it is routine in all branches of Government expenditure.

Thirdly, the uses to which taxation are put are often visibly, directly and indisputably evil. Obvious examples include abortion facilities and the waging of illegal wars. Once the political decision has been made and laws passed by deluded and/or depraved politicians, reversal of such evil is near impossible.

Fourthly, taxation may be used to facilitate evil and make it far more widespread than it would otherwise be. I mentioned in earlier posts one obvious example: how generous social security provision in Britain makes it far easier for a parent (usually the father) to abandon one family and start another.

Two extreme British examples made banner headlines in early 2008. The abduction and rescue of Shannon Matthews, a 9 year old girl in Yorkshire, gave rise to huge rejoicing at her safe return to her mother after nearly four weeks in the clutches of a kidnapper. The reporting was spiced by the revelation that Shannon was one of seven children who her mother had produced with the help of four, five or six fathers, depending on which version you believed. Also the kidnapper turned out to be the uncle of the mother's current live-in lover. The Yorkshire police came in for vociferous criticism from the usual armchair experts. They had mounted the biggest search since the Yorkshire Ripper investigation in the 1970s, but it had taken them over three weeks to find the girl when she was imprisoned only a mile from her home.

To be fair, as one police spokesman explained, there was such a network of "family associates" to investigate, all with axes and grudges to grind. I should say there were. Normally when a child disappears, the male relatives are among the top suspects, but the list of Usual Suspects was much longer here. The very vocabulary of "traditional family" life is inadequate now. We need new coinages such as "para-sibling" or "para-uncle" to describe the people who have some sort of loose connection to the genetic relations but are not formally related by blood or legal recognition..

Now the mother's current live-in lover has been arrested by the police on suspicion of possession of indecent images of children. It was another uncomfortable reminder that the biggest factor in child abuse is having an unrelated male living in the same house - providing maximum temptation and maximum opportunity. But then the general public is seldom reminded of this link, at least in part because so many people in politics and the media have messy domestic lives. Less still does anyone proclaim that traditional marriage is the best guarantee of long-term happiness and effective child rearing. Obviously no one quotes Jesus' comment on a child molester - that he would be better cast into the sea with a millstone round his neck. What would He have recommended for those who facilitate abuse on an industrial scale?

The second example was the murder of Scarlett Keeling, a 15 year old English girl in Goa. She was one of 9 siblings or half-siblings from one mother and four or more fathers. The mother had been able to take the whole clan (minus the fathers, of course) on a 6 month trip to India. She had been able to save $14,000 from her benefits to finance the journey. The scale of this fecklessness broke all normal barriers; no normal person could ever afford to take 6 months off from their normal lives and responsibilities.

Plainly neither of these menages could have survived a week without massive State subsidies. Very clearly the easy availability of Social Security encouraged gross irresponsibilty (or monstrous immorality if you want to use religious language) in these cases. There are countless other "families" in similar circumstances, but who are fortunate enough to stay out of the media - until some disaster swings the spotlight their way for a day or two. Even the most depraved and dim witted member of the underclass would call a halt after the third or fourth illegitimate child - unless State allowances continued to pour in and indeed increase with every new child.

In those circumstances, mass illegitimacy, serial polygamy and serial polyandry become rational economic choices, especially for the low paid who could not otherwise afford a large family. In fact, the luckless British taxpayer, in defiance of all Christian tradition and current British law, is now to pay for parallel polygamy - where Moslem husbands claiming social security have more than one wife. I have not yet heard of any bizarre cult devotee claiming social security for multiple simultaneous husbands. But the logic of Human Rights legislation (heavily pushed by Tony Blair's equally repulsive lawyer wife Cherie) and Equal Opportunity legislation would make a polyandrous claim undeniable.

Fifthly, taxation encourages massive dependence on the state. The dependence on State benefit has reached grotesque proportions in Britain, where nearly a million Poles and other East Europeans have arrived in less than four years and quickly established themselves in the workforce. There are so many here doing so many essential jobs that they are almost certainly permanent additions to the UK population. But hundreds of thousands of able-bodied native Britons continue to draw benefits and turn up their noses at the sort of work the Poles are doing. In a notorious example, when the British unemployed in a town were told that Poles were making up to £25,000 ($50,000) a year working on local farms, they still preferred to stay on Social Security.

Sixthly, high taxation encourages massive corruption in numerous forms. Even worse than maintaining the idle in idleness is expanding the State payroll. As one fellow civil servant said to me around 1980, much of the work done by his Department would be better left undone. And we cost the productive taxpayers far more than the unemployed. And the pay of a civil servant is much less than the fees of the thousands of "consultants" who have latched onto state money. And the plunder by consultants is dwarfed by corporations who know how to work the system to land government contracts or subsidies. And all these mouths receiving state money have a vested interest in maintaining and indeed expanding the status quo.

The long-running joke about Nigeria is that it is a country where everyone is united in condemning corruption and equally united in practising it. This gibe is equally applicable to much of Europe now. The corruption of individual Members of Parliament has attracted an undue share of media attention, but it is a useful sample of the much more grotesque theft noted above. As I said in an earlier post, corrupt MPs make the mistake of embezzling relatively small sums which most of us could easily understand. Mick Martin, the Speaker of the House of Commons (one of the most senior officials in the land, paid a basic salary of $275,000 per year) has been caught out paying $8,000 of taxpayers' money for taxi fares for his wife. The media uproar about this embezzlement was out of all proportion to the offence; $8,000 is the price of a second hand car, or a good family holiday. Still, in an earlier and more honourable generation he would have resigned instantly. But this thieving crook has not resigned or even apologized. Why should he feel any sense of shame when so many others are making so much more from the taxpayer? And as Speaker of the House, he is well near-impossible to fire.

Seventhly, the concentration of power in the State is a plain contradiction of the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which advocates that functions be carried out at the lowest possible level - family, neighbours, parish, local charities, town council, regional body, with a national organisation intervening only if all these successive layers have failed. And this intervention should support the work of the lower layers of society, not override them or absorb them.

So why the deafening silence from the Church on taxation? Part of the problem is the obvious Church complicity in the racket. Examples include Catholic charities in the US receiving tax dollars and thus government control, or the long-established German practice of receiving "church taxes" as part of the secular income tax collection process. Even secular France pays for the maintenance of ancient Church buildings. In an earlier post I noted how one group of "Catholic" clerics is funded by the European Union (i.e. the European taxpayers) as a propaganda front for the EU. The large network of Catholic schools in the UK is largely funded out of taxation. It is hardly surprising that a recent document "Taxation for the common good" by the British Catholic bishops seemed to blindly and blandly accept so much of the status quo on taxation policy. Or that a reviewer in Faith magazine was so dismissive of radical new policies on tax and government spending proposed by a think tank. Too many of the great and good in Catholic life accept the welfare state almost as something ordained by God.

Also many Catholic clergy in so many countries seem obliged to cosey up to politicians, or positively seem to enjoy their visible connections to tax-fueled power. The prime British example is our local lad Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor and Tony Blair. The prime US example must be the Kennedy clan and the Boston archdiocese. The senior clergy and their subordinates thus become compromised in proclaiming Catholic teaching. I do not give a fig what excuses they offer about exercising "behind the scenes" influence; any "friendly" relations are plainly worthless when it comes to the crunch, such as recent Parliamentary decisions on legislation on embryo research and fertility treatment.

I await Pope Benedict's advice on paying tax with interest but suspect that there will be little radically new thinking in it.