Having finished my taxes without an extension this year, I now am free to indulge a desire to reflect on taxes from an Biblical perspective.

As much as we complain about income taxes, especially their complexity and the frequent opaqueness of the instructions, they are Biblical in both the sense that such taxes are found in the Bible and that God prescribed such taxes for Israel. We know these taxes as tithes, which were based on one’s income or ‘increase’ in the course of a year, and the proceeds went both to support the Priests and Levites who were not given an inheritance of land and to succor the poor.

Indeed, there was more than one tithe in Israel. (In Homily 4 on Ephesians, St. John Chrysostom speaks of the Hebrews giving “tithes upon tithes” and then wonders why Christians under the new covenant scruple to given even a bare, first tithe and marvel at those who do.) The first tithe (Numbers 18:21), ten percent of one’s increase, went to support the Levites, an entire tribe that had been taken into the service of the Tabernacle and the Priests. The second tithe each year was used in two ways: in years three and six of the seven-year cycle, it was given to the “Levite, because he has no portion or inheritance with you, and the resident alien and the fatherless and the widow who are within your cities”; in the other years, it was taken to Jerusalem by the tither to be eaten there before the Lord with in a joyous celebration “that you may learn to fear the Lord your God all your days” (Deuteronomy 14:22-29). Thus the second tithe in four years out of seven funded a mandatory vacation to come and rejoice before the Lord, feasting on whatever one’s soul desired. The Priests of Aaron’s house received a portion of the sacrifices that were offered each day as well as a tithe from the Levites. And everyone was called to give alms, to loan to the poor without interest, to leave the corners of one’s field unharvested and not to pick over the vines and fruit trees twice so that the poor could come and glean from what was left.

What is striking by its absence in the polity of Israel is a common tax that is far less controversial to modern man than the income tax: the property tax. Property was the primary form of capital that allowed people to produce wealth, primarily food and clothing. It was a gift from God to His people, an inalienable inheritance. Each family had an inheritance of this inalienable land which could not be permanently sold. If a family fell on hard times or so chose for other reasons, they could sell their property for up to forty-nine years, but in the fiftieth year, the Year of Jubilee, all such land reverted back to the original owner. Thus no one was permanently dispossessed; everyone had access to productive capital. Everyone was taxed on his production, but not on his capital.

In our land, we are taxed on just about everything, and the property tax is one of the cruellest of taxes. It drives retired people out of the homes they own free and clear and in which they have long dwelt because their fixed income cannot keep pace with rising taxes. It denies people the existence afforded by subsistence farming, for to hold land, one must participate in the cash economy. It adds, I might argue, to the general rootlessness of our culture, where few people continue to live where their parents and grandparents lived.

The unpleasant truth for lovers of freedom is that there is little private property left in our ‘land of the free’. The term home owner in contradistinction to renters is a false. To pay a tax on one’s home or land is not to own it in the most meaningful sense. In reality, the state owns it, for if you fail to pay the state’s property tax, the state will take ‘your’ home or land (or the bank will get it under the state’s authority). Property owners are simply renters by another name. Although they have far greater control over the property than the classic renter, it does not change the essential fact of their relation to the land–that they are renters.

And what do these ever rising property taxes fund? Our shining bastions of knowledge and enlightenment, the public schools, who voraciously consume ever greater amounts of money to achieve ever higher standards of illiteracy of every sort. But that is another subject.

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