How Moral are Taxes?

“Utopia is not one single vision… The best of all possible worlds for me may not be the best for you. The best possible world for us all is the one in which each of us can pursue our own visions, insofar as they do not interfere with others doing the same.”

These lines are taken from the book called “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” which was published in 1974 and was written by Jewish American philosopher Robert Nozick.

Nozick is known for being one of the early influential voices of Libertarianism. A socialist in his youth, Nozick began leaning towards Libertarianism after reading the works of economist Friedrich Hayek. However, as opposed to Hayek or Milton Friedman who came after him, Nozick was a philosopher and not an economist, and his ideas developed as a part of his moral philosophy which stemmed from his concern with human rights. “Anarchy, State and Utopia” was written as his answer to John Rawls’ “A Theory of Justice.”

To simplify Nozick’s answer to Rawls for the sake of this short column, suffice it to say that Nozick’s reaction to Rawls’ “fair distribution of goods,” was: This is all great, other than the fact that those goods are not yours to distribute. 

I decided to bring Nozick today because of our Torah portion this week, Terumah. Terumah in Hebrew means “contribution” and it is named after the contributions that the Israelites made towards the building of the Tabernacle:

דַּבֵּר֙ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל וְיִקְחוּ־לִ֖י תְּרוּמָ֑ה מֵאֵ֤ת כׇּל־אִישׁ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר יִדְּבֶ֣נּוּ לִבּ֔וֹ תִּקְח֖וּ אֶת־תְּרוּמָתִֽי׃

“יהוה spoke to Moses, saying: Tell the Israelite people to bring Me gifts; you shall accept gifts for Me from every person whose heart is so moved.” (EXO 25:1-2)

Most Torah commentators understood the phrase “whose heart is so moved” to mean that these were voluntary contributions.

Here is Sforno: “G’d commanded that the procedure should not be like the imposition of every man’s contribution for the public charity fund which was treated as a tax. Contributions were to be accepted only from volunteers.”

The phrase “whos heart is so moved” in Hebrew: “Kol eish asher yidvenu libo” the word “yidvenu” comes from the word Nedava - which means the giving of charity out of one's' kindness of heart.

The Haftarah for this Torah portion which can be found in the book of II Kings in the times of King Joash, describes in detail the instructions for the priests of how to handle the money that is being contributed to the Holy Temple. Here, the contributions were a mixture of both voluntary contributions and mandatory taxes.

However these contributions were made, they were made in good faith: 

וְלֹ֧א יְחַשְּׁב֣וּ אֶת־הָאֲנָשִׁ֗ים אֲשֶׁ֨ר יִתְּנ֤וּ אֶת־הַכֶּ֙סֶף֙ עַל־יָדָ֔ם לָתֵ֖ת לְעֹשֵׂ֣י הַמְּלָאכָ֑ה כִּ֥י בֶאֱמֻנָ֖ה הֵ֥ם עֹשִֽׂים׃ 

“No check was kept on those to whom the money was delivered to pay the workers; for they dealt honestly.” (II Kings 12:16)

The people making the contributions trusted the “administration” wholeheartedly to use their “money” for the upkeep of the temple and for holy work.

Later in the chapter it is described that the King of Aram invaded and King Joash decided to use the treasure of the Temple to bribe the King of Aram and convince him to retreat.

King Joash was assassinated shortly after.

How moral is a tax system, and can it ever be? Is it a violation of human rights to coerce people to contribute their money towards purposes they might disagree with? 

These questions have been asked all throughout history and are being asked nowadays. Attempts to answer these questions have been made by economists, political economists, psychologists and philosophers, which are still being passionately debated today.

Nozick, a deontologist, approached this question as a question of human rights and used Rawl’s weapon against him, and that weapon was Emmanuel Kant.

According to one of Kant’s main principles: Human beings should always be treated as an “end” and not as a “means.”

Nozick wrote: "Side constraints upon action reflect the underlying Kantian principle that individuals are ends and not merely means; they may not be sacrificed or used for the achieving of other ends without their consent. Individuals are inviolable. Why may not one violate persons for the greater social good? Individually, we each sometimes choose to undergo some pain or sacrifice for a greater benefit or to avoid a greater harm… Why not, similarly, hold that some persons have to bear some costs that benefit other persons more, for the sake of the overall social good? But there is no social entity with a good that undergoes some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people, different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him and benefits the others. Nothing more."

Nozick’s ideas, as much as they technically make sense, make us squirm uncomfortably as we read them, some of us might even read them with horror.

That is because we have all witnessed those ideas backfire over the decades as they assist to create greater and growing inequalities, suffering and unrest. 

Nonetheless, those ideas are important to study and consider as we try to bewilderedly make sense of the transformation in our society that we are all now seeing in front of our eyes.

How can we compromise the tension between Nedava (charity) and Mas (tax)? The tension between Nozick and Rawls? Between Friedman and Marx? Between Hobbes and Rousseau? Those tensions are all a part of who we are as a society, and I would argue that they are a part of each of us individually as well. 

Looking at the title of Nozick’s book, between Anarchy and Utopia, there is the State. The state is for us to design and I can only pray that we wake up to find a way to design it so that it benefits us all — otherwise we will wake up to witness our collapse serving as someone else’s utopia.