The Diablogue

In many of the more conservative Christian circles there is this radical idea that taxation is completely against Christian morality and principles. The argument is always a strange syncretism of Libertarianism and Christianity and usually follows these lines:

God created man to work, and work is good. The fruits of a man’s labor are his and his alone. No one has rights to another man’s resources, taking it is theft. The government takes a man’s income through threats of prison and physical violence as taxes. Clearly this is theft and also against the commandments of God. Therefore taxation is immoral and unbiblical.

The argument is compelling, but not well thought out.

Firstly, as all Americans (and all citizens of free nations) know, the power of government derives from the consent of the governed. This is a basic tenant of Classical Liberalism, from which the modern ideology of Libertarianism gets its basis. If free men make up a society then the rules and rulers of that society can only have the powers given to them by that society. One of the most familiar examples of this is a democracy like the government of the US. Free people elect others to represent them, who then create the rules of society. By electing these leaders to do their will, the people are consenting tacitly to follow them. Therefore, anyone voluntarily and peacefully living in such a society has also consented to the laws created by these elected officials. Therefore if taxes are part of these laws, they cannot be stealing since the citizens have consented to give up their money freely.

Secondly, while the Bible is explicitly against stealing, the Bible is also just as explicitly for paying taxes. In Luke 20:22 Jesus is asked “Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” Noting that the coin had Caesar’s face on it, he famously answers: “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Its hard to get more explicit than that: if it is the government’s then give it to the government. If the government requires taxes from you, then pay them. This is repeated again by Paul in Romans 13:6-7 “This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. Give everyone what you owe him: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor.”

Lastly, on a more theological note, when trying to baptize the accumulation of personal wealth as something ordained by God, one should keep in mind that God doesn’t have a particularly high view the rich. One simply has to look at Jesus’ exhortations to give up all earthly possessions and his oft repeated statement about it being easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle than to enter heaven. Wealth is just as much a hinderance as a blessing for a Christian. Therefore Christians should weigh the retention of their material wealth against the possibility of that wealth providing a social safety net for the unfortunate, or providing protection for their neighbors.

No one likes paying taxes. However taxation is a necessary way to fund services that maintain order and make living in a modern society possible. Everyone is aware that their taxes go to fund roads and police, but  in the US huge amounts of tax dollars are also spent on research grants for medicine, science, and technologies that do not have any immediate monetary return. The DARPA network was one such project, and apparently that turned out pretty well. So, while there is always waste to be eliminated, Christians simply cannot assert that taxation is stealing or that it is inherently immoral.

Much has been said about the downfalls of socialized health care, but almost no one has dared to raise the systemic issues with “capitalized health care.” The charm behind capitalism is its fabled ability to efficiently allocate resources. The theory goes, proper allocation and cost efficiency brings prices down and improves quality. This can be attested to in most situations, but sadly, with health care the incentives are all wrong.

Healthcare is what is known as an inelastic commodity. As price increases for this commodity demand will barely decrease. According to a RAND study commissioned for the Department of Defense:

Despite a wide variety of empirical methods and data sources, the demand for health care is consistently determined to be price inelastic. Although the range of price elasticity estimates is relatively wide, it tends to center on -0.17, meaning that a 1 percent increase in the price of health care will lead to a 0.17 percent reduction in health care expenditures. (page xi)

The reason behind this is pretty simple. When someone gets sick or injured money is often the last thing on their mind. After all, if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything. So basically, people will pay whatever is necessary to keep themselves healthy. This makes sense, but the inelasticity of health care as a commodity becomes a problem when you consider the incentives it creates for those involved in supplying health care.

In a pure capitalist system, if people are willing to pay almost anything for a product, it shouldn’t be surprising if the cost of it starts to float upwards. After all, the suppliers of health care exist for the sole benefit of their investors and shareholders. Corporations with higher returns on investments attract more capital and can thus become larger. Those that can provide a good return are the ones that grow and conquer. Therefore, the obvious incentive here for a health care corporation is to raise the price as high as possible, but not so high as to create a public outcry and have pesky regulations created.

Secondly, since the outcome of all quality health care is the same — health — health care businesses with satisfactory records providing care must compete for customers by using gimmicks and small but ultimately irrelevant perks. For instance, one that is quite common now is proclaiming the greatness of brand new therapies as being the most “high tech” available despite there being little or no actual improvement in results offered. Another common one is simply inviting new patrons by offering “VIP” treatment. Both of these offer no substantial improvement to one’s health but add to the costs of treatment.

Then, as prices inevitably rise health care becomes prohibitively expensive insurance becomes mandatory. Insurance, while not an intrinsically bad thing, adds yet another layer of profit on top of what is being charged by hospitals and physicians. Then to compound the problem for the average consumer is the fact that insurance corporations also exist for the sole benefit of their shareholders. As income is fixed by monthly payment schemes, revenue maximizing action is taken on the costs side. Minimizing costs as an insurance company is quite easy: simply deny coverage in as many instances as possible.

A Capitalist system of health care without significant and intrusive regulation will produce high costs and terrible coverage for this simple reason: the incentives are designed to maximize the good for investors and corporations at the expense of the average person. Health care providers are encouraged to raise prices as high as the political zeitgeist allows while innovating on sometimes very frivolous things. Costs thus become prohibitive and insurance companies, with a desire to minimize losses, begin deciding who receives treatment and who does not.

Pick your overlords carefully: the government responsible to voters, or corporations responsible to shareholders.

I just finished reading Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman, and was rather intrigued by one of the points he makes regarding the duties of the public school system:

Great streams of immigrants were flooding the United States from all over the world, speaking different languages and observing diverse customs. The “melting pot” had to introduce some measure of conformity and loyalty to common values. The public school had an important function in this task, not least by imposing English as a common language.

The flow of immigrants and the need to integrate them is the same as in Friedman’s time, but public opinions of English being the only and primary language in education have changed. In several places across the southern US Spanish is used as a primary language in schools. The arguments for this are generally quite practical: most people in those areas simply don’t speak English, but will benefit greatly from better education. All true, but there are other issues as well that need to be addressed. Is this dangerous to national unity? Will fragmented communities arise that don’t share the American ideals if we allow cities and individual communities to break from the common language in their education?

I would argue that language probably a more important factor in the isolation of a specific community or culture than perhaps even their own cultural practices. If a family exclusively speaks Mandarin for example in the US and has no facility for English, it will stay a Chinese culture. However, at the point that English penetrates that family it introduces an entirely new paradigm. New vocabulary, new ideas, new metaphors, all with few exact equivalents in Chinese culture enter the family structure and begin to open it up to not just experiencing the external culture but allowing the family to genuinely interact with it. Or to put it another way, the Americanisms instilled in the everyday language begin to enter a person’s thoughts allowing understanding and true integration to occur.

This is exactly why education in English is important in the US if we want to retain loyalty to the core ideals of our founding. If we eventually have entire generations of Americans growing up without learning English and not having their reasoning and communication framed in the language in which our values are woven, America ceases to be the healthy conglomeration it historically prized and will become a loose grouping of parallel cultures.

This is a question that forces our ideas of freedom and individuality to conflict with the national community ideal of an American “melting pot” culture, and doesn’t have one easy answer. The solution is far from as easy as simply saying “Everything must be in English!!” That way lies Xenophobia and racism. Education in America needs to instill the common language but at the same time allow for the great variance of cultural expression that makes this country unique. So, should The United States be monolingual? Never. However, if Americans want to retain the beautiful thing that is the interweaving of cultures within the framework of American ideals, we absolutely must encourage English as the primary language of all citizens.