Raising and paying tax is a privilege not a burden
Raising and paying tax is a privilege not a burden
Tax-collectors have been reviled since biblical times, writes George Pitcher. But paying it today can become a holy endeavour
Prime minister Boris Johnson can take some comfort that tax collectors have always been reviled. As Conservative backbenchers chunter this week that he has reneged on his election promise not to raise National Insurance contributions and, anyway, that his party is the one that’s meant to repudiate tax revenues rather than raise them, he might reflect – if he was the reflective sort – that he’s in good company.
In Luke’s gospel, a stunted chief tax-collector of the Jericho region climbs a sycamore tree to get a better view of the insurgent Jesus movement as it passes by and is rewarded by the Nazerene himself spotting him and inviting himself to supper at Zacchaeus’s house.
The apostle Matthew – one of the 12 – was a publican, which was the handle given to the despised quislings in Judea who collected taxes on behalf of the occupying Roman oppressors. Again, Jesus called this loathed individual to follow him, a moment caught in anachronistic metaphor by one of the Renaissance artist Caravaggio’s finest paintings.
The Pharisees called the Christ a “glutton and a bibber” - a Bunter who likes a drink – for socialising with such low life. This may be the one quality at least that Johnson can claim to share with his Saviour.
Matthew is said to have been martyred for his faith, rather than for his tax affairs, in Ethiopia. As a recent convert to tax collection, Johnson might contemplate the fate of some other historical tax collectors. Simon Affleck was a Swedish tax official in Finland who shot himself in the head and in his mansion in 1725 during the Greater Wrath (the Russian invasion) to deny Finnish peasants the satisfaction of lynching him.
Beheaded
The 15th-century Jewish Basque tax collector Jacob Gaon was set upon and beheaded by furious tax-payers – the King of Castile, for whom the cruelly enforced revenues were raised, didn’t seem to care too much. The Enlightenment scientist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was guillotined in the French Revolution officially for selling adulterated tobacco (watch out, Gauloises), but really for being a hated revenue-raiser for the ancien regime.
Whether our current PM is on the side of the angels (Zacchaeus, Matthew) when it comes to being a tax collector, or otherwise (Affleck, Gaon), or simply unfortunate to be in the wrong place and decade (Lavoisier), remains to be seen. But it’s worth asking whether tax itself is a holy instrument.
The defence that “it’s not the gun, it’s the gunner” - that the thing itself has no effect without human agency – is not available here. Tax doesn’t exist without a collector, whereas a gun does exist without its shooter (yes, it had to be made, but thereafter it exists – tax only exists with human agency at the moment it’s raised).
We can argue that tax can be virtuous and doubtless Johnson will do so, for the moment, in the context of getting social care done in the UK, or at least the NHS funded a little bit more for a while. But whether tax of itself is a virtuous human activity, which like any other one can be corrupted by oppressive power, is a moot point.
Common good
The most obvious point to make here is that revenue raised for the common good is, er, good. But in all circumstances? It was estimated well before the covid pandemic, in 2017, that an extra $214 billion per year in tax revenues is needed in low-income countries alone to meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations by the target of 2030. To say that increasing the tax take in developing economies is a challenge is something of an understatement. As Chris Morgan, KPMG International’s global head of tax policy wrote at the time:
Part of the challenge is the global tax system itself. The rules have not kept pace with modern developments. Globalisation and new business models make it harder for countries to collect corporation tax.
This observation introduces by implication a massive moral dimension to tax policy. Global corporates aren’t simply faced with the binary challenge of serving their shareholders’ best interests by mitigating their tax burdens efficiently in the jurisdictions in which they operate. Taxation actually becomes their investment in the markets in which they operate. As Ewan Livingston, a cause strategist at The B Team, puts it:
Tax does not exist in isolation from wider... concerns - it is systemic, inextricably linked to environmental and social issues. As we look to the future of tax in the wake of [covid], there is a rare opportunity to fundamentally re-shape business taxation, with a view to supporting truly sustainable business paying their fair share in more equitable societies.
That requires a fundamental and radical shift in corporate mindsets that are fixated with tax avoidance, if not evasion. Of course taxation is different from donation, but unless and until the benefits of both are seen as commensurate, great challenges to the world such as pandemic recovery and climate change can’t properly be addressed.
Zacchaeus got that (albeit with divine intervention) and gave half of all he had, equivalent to quite a marginal tax rate at the time. Matthew got it too. The likes of Affleck, Goan and Lavoisier didn’t get it and paid a different kind of price.
Johnson’s recent Damascene conversion to the virtues of tax may well prove temporary. But it may also offer a glimpse at the truth that paying tax shouldn’t be a burden, isn’t just a responsibility, but can and should be a privilege.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.