Among the choice privileges conferred on a man by the blessing of civilization, count the privilege of being a tax-payer. So much education, cultivation of social sense, training in civic virtue and adherence to the public good go to the making of a tax-payer. All the social philosophers and thinkers from Plato and Aristotle downwards (except perhaps Rousseau, who thought that man should become a royal savage and so avoid being a taxpayer) endorse the beauty of the character of the rational man in his capacity of a conscientious tax-payer.
If tax-payment were an evil then we should have expected so modern and up-to-the-minute an expert and philosopher such as Sir William Beveridge to condemn it and propose its immediate removal. Among the securities which he wishes to have guaranteed for the inhabitants of the post-war New World he would have included that most important security from tax-paying. But he does nothing of the kind.
He tacitly accepts the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle and the rest of the orthodox thinkers on the necessity and moral rectitude of taxing and being taxed: he parts company with poor Rousseau (who fled the country to escape payment of taxes in France only to succumb to the imposition in Switzerland); and he warns us that all those delightful securities which the New Order will bless mankind with at no distant date will depend on tax-payment, more tax-payment and better tax-payment.
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Failing to find any adverse comment on taxation in the epoch-making Report of Sir William Beveridge, those few of us, who sometimes grumble or grouse at the thought of paying taxes, will now receive new consolation and apply themselves more energetically to do their bit to the creation of a better world by honouring the demands of the public taxing authority.
Those others of us, who are the large majority and have paid without grouse or grumble will now realise that we were always right and that, even without the good counsel and expert knowledge of Sir William Beveridge, we have contributed our quota in advance to the establishment of the perfect society con-templated or adumbrated by that eminent moulder of the socialist and secured Republic of Man.
Come to think of it, that great exponent of truth, Socrates, was condemned to death for denying worship to some of the gods of the time and not for denying the duty of paying the taxes customary in the Athens of the Golden Age. That other great thinker, Diogenes, no end of a cynic though he was, said to Alexander: Be good enough to step out of my sunshine, But he did not say: Be good enough to exempt me from your taxes.
The Roman philosopher, Seneca wrote powerfully on Benefits but not a word did he breathe about benefits derivable from non-payment of taxes. That ferocious disturber of the unity of the world, Luther, gave a new double measure of support to the treasuries of the German princes. When he enunciated the principle of Cuius regio, eius religio, the princes thanked the Lord and Luther and increased the taxes.
Our John Milton cursed the licensing authority, but he did not curse the tax levying authority. The eighteenth century political doctrinaires of the New World across the Atlantic did not object in the least to taxation; they only deplored the tad manners of taxation without representation. (To this day their posterity keep the polite usage of representation and then proceed to tax. Their plentiful millionaires swallow the lump in their throats but, being represented, proceed to pay). And dear Marx, though deploring taxation as disastrous in its influence on the Sovereign Proletariat, admitted “that excessive taxation is now not so much an incident as a principle”
Under any kind of system there would be tax to pay. Under any kind of sun there would flourish the taxpayer. Under the Manifesto the capitalists, kulaks and other bourgeois paid the tax-even when the levy was their heads, as a principle they paid. As an incident merely, the Sovereign Proletariat also pays, but only in cash or kind. Under the capitalist scheme also there is paying. The under-dog pays the tax. The top-dogs are understood to pay the super-tax. It is the mark of civilized living.
The Greeks taxed and were taxed but the barbarians kept aloof. The Romans forked out. But the Scythians did not. God’s Englishman pays. Upon his forehead is borne the device of the world’s most taxed person; the perfect tax-payer. The totalitarians are at one in this matter with the united democracies. Their gang taxes; their millions of sheep pay. But we need not assume a superiority over them; because we also pay.
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With the payment we make the State does its tremendous tasks; the councils vote moneys; politicians’ promises are fulfilled; public officers draw salaries; honours are reaped; and our world becomes a nicer place to live in.
If we only realised the greatness and noble creativeness of our simple action in our capacity of tax-payer we should proceed in state to the receipt of custom, we should pay down our quota of tax with a magnificence of gesture worthy of the heroes of the nation and we should return from it with the superb air of popular idols returning from a triumph.
Having done such signal service by our country we should expect public recognition of ourselves as tax-payer. One way, let us say, of receiving this would be for the public authority to confer on us some title of honour to mark its appreciation of our .long and faithful services to the community in our career as taxpayer.
Or they could give us the honour of a civic reception in the Hall of the City Fathers who would pronounce eulogiums on us and present us with an address of thanks enclosed in a casket of precious metal. Or a thankful country could put up a statue of ourselves in some fitting place (possibly in the grounds of the General Treasury) as a devoted lover of our nation because a consistent payer of tax.
But alas, these tributes to our fidelity to the payment of tax are still to be. For the moment the only public mention of ourselves is when the authority announces its duty to make a slight increase in the burdens on the tax-payers’ shoulders or when- the daily paper’s editorial speaking for one and all demands a little more consideration of the tax-payer’s feelings. But in this way at least we know that we are there, alive and kicking, taxed and tax paying.
Social Justice, 1944.