The Ethical Basis for Taxation in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Critical Essay‪)‬

"Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?" (1) With these words, Augustine of Hippo challenges the moral legitimacy of government by conquest and in the process invites consideration of the fundamental ethical question raised by the phenomenon of taxation: What is the difference between just taxation and legal plunder? A similarity between kings and robbers, after all, is that both extract resources by force from productive members of society. On the face of it, the common claim that, whereas the robber's behavior is antisocial, the king's behavior constitutes a public service, requires justification. The question of what justifies the state's forcible extraction of resources from the populace is fundamental to any ethic of taxation, not only because a discussion of the ethics of any behavior should begin by articulating the moral principles underlying its analysis, but also because any answer that is offered to the question of what justifies taxation should also go a long way toward answering the questions of by whom, from whom, under what circumstances, in what manner, and for what purposes taxes may justifiably be collected. Yet, surprisingly, the question of what justifies taxation in the first place has been largely neglected in recent public and scholarly discussions of taxes and tax reform from the point of view of Christian ethics. Instead, those discussions have focused on questions of how best to distribute the tax burden while maintaining or increasing funding for popular government programs. (2) All too often the fundamental question remains unasked.