TAXATION
by Fr. Austin Fagothey, S.J.
THE STATE has from the natural law the right to the means necessary to accomplish it's end. One of these means is revenue, and the ordinary way of raising revenue is by taxes. The state has therefore the right to tax it's citizens. But this right is not unlimited. The state has the right only to the taxes it needs or forecasts that it will need, and acts against justice by demanding more. Legislators have a strict moral obligation not to impose too heavy a tax burden on the people, and those in charge of public funds are morally accountable for their use.
There is also a moral obligation to distribute the tax load as justly as possible. The only practical method is to make the taxes proportionate to the citizen's ability to pay, since there are many who not only cannot give anything but actually need help from the state. How the taxes ought to be arranged so as to fulfill the end of distributive justice is a matter for political and financial experts, and is beyond the scope of ethics as such.
If the state has the right to impose taxes, the citizen has the duty to pay taxes. In exercising it's right the state must observe distributive justice; conversely, the citizen's duty to pay taxes is one of legal justice. One who is not too poor to pay some taxes yet pays none whatever is plainly failing in an important duty concerning the common good. But there are so many indirect taxes today that no one could avoid paying some taxes. Whether a man could fulfill his whole tax obligation in this way would depend on the amount and kind of his wealth.
Is one morally obliged to pay all the taxes imposed? If the tax is clearly unjust, there can be no moral obligation. The judgment that taxes are unjust must not be made hastily; people are always complaining about taxes even when there is no doubt of their necessity. On the other hand, the complete lack of conscience shown by too many public officials in spending the people's money makes the conviction all but inevitable that the state has not the right to all the revenue it asks. We must therefore distinguish between the duty of paying taxes in general, a real moral obligation, and the duty of paying this or that particular tax, a duty that is often not at all clear.
Are particular tax laws, then, purely penal laws? Those who reject the term entirely must give a negative answer. But those who admit purely penal laws in some sense, whether they mean only so-called laws that are mere directives or whether they mean real laws with a disjunctive obligation, consider it a solidly probable opinion that some particular tax laws are purely penal. Taxes have become too numerous and complicated for the ordinary citizen to handle, are accompanied by disproportionate penalties, and are often deducted at the source so that the citizen is not even trusted to do his duty; the state shows that it simply wants it's money and makes no appeal to the public conscience. It is therefore difficult to see a moral fault in a man who in general meets his tax obligation and supports the state, but occasionally evades a tax here and there, provided that in doing so he does not resort to such practices as lying and bribery. Conduct of this kind is certainly not recommended and a truly upright man would despise such pettifoggery.
─Right and Reason: Ethics in Theory and Practice Based on the Teachings of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Chap. 26─Civil Law. (2nd Ed. 1959. TAN Books)
