Doug Jones Takes on Bastiat

I've added Doug Jones to my short list of daily blogs (he's number 11 in my list of 11). He's been writing about economics and the state from a Trinitarian point of view, as someone who is more in the "conservative camp," but who is having some "second thoughts" on free market ideology. I can totally emphathize with this, because I became an economist by reading (among maybe 3 other people) Gary North, who is an Austrian-influenced theonomist, and who is also sometimes called "Scary Gary" by his friends (imagine what those who don't like him call him). In today's post, Doug takes on Gary and points out that Gary's argument that the Bible mandates libertarian governance begs the question when it comes to the point of Bastiat's argument that all taxation is just legalized plunder. This is, of course, a key axiom to the ethical libertarian position (it is not so much required if one takes a more pragmatic approach). Here, Doug writes:

Ironically, North chides Jim Wallis: “there is no verse in the Bible that the civil government provide either food for the poor or old age pensions.” But earlier in the essay, when North seeks to explain his claim that taxation is theft, he doesn’t cite Scripture either but instead uses the radical individualist Murray Rothbard: ‘When the government, in short, takes money at gunpoint from A and gives it to B, who is demanding what?…Who are the demanders and who are the suppliers?…[T]he government, in other words, performs his act of ‘redistribution’ by fleecing A for the benefit of B and of himself.”

Again, all this does is assume individualism and explain its application. Yes, granted (insert yawn), if individualism is true, then taxation is theft, and so is God’s demand for the tithe and His gleaning laws (Lev. 19:9-10; Deut. 24:19-22).

But in his better moments, North opposes his individualistic assumptions when he says, “God owns the world because he created it” (“The Bible Mandates Free Market Capitalism” — “9,000 pages of exposition!” or question-begging?). If God owns all our money, and we’re merely stewards of this property, then we can’t automatically blurt “theft” when transfers take place. We have to ask other questions first, about God’s use of his own property, delegated authorities, etc. If, let’s say, we have a crazy community that denies “that any of the things he possessed was his own” (Acts 4:32), then it’s harder and more complicated to generate a charge of theft.

We can only shout “theft” absolutely if individualism is true. And it’s certainly not insightful to accuse people of advocating theft who deny the underlying individualism. On the face of it, if we believe that God owns everything, then we can’t be buddy-buddy theologically with a Rothbardian individualism.

The whole “taxation-is-theft” line is very common in parts of the Christian Right (I’m sure I have articles floating about asserting it). But it should give us some pause that Scripture doesn’t use the language of government theft (it talks about oppressive taxation but not theft, e.g., 1 Sam. 8). In fact, Paul, though faced with the great oppression of the Roman Empire says, “Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due” (Rom. 13:7). If taxes are due to the Roman Empire, then we have to say the empire has some right to it. It’s not theft, then, because God owns our money and has chosen to delegate some to a pagan empire, for whatever reason, perhaps a curse. But God owns it and permits this transfer. It’s not theft.

FWIW, I think Doug is dead on here, and I think more or less lines up with my own evolving beliefs in regards to property rights and its relationship with the Christian tradition and ethics. It's also what makes it hard for me to teach the ethics component this fall in principles of microeconomics, because quite frankly, the only "ethics of economics" that I know is this conservative "taxation is theft" line of thinking, and I now believe that this is probably just a simple baptism of classical liberalism. And while I am sympathetic to classical liberalism, I'm more a pragmatist and empiricist when it comes to political governance than I am something principled. And when it comes to economics, I am actually a dyed-in-the-wool microeconomist, which does not obviously at all require any discussion about God or the Christian belief in the resurrection.

Anyway, Doug's post is interesting, so maybe check it out. I think I actually started to first let loose of the Austrian approach, theologically, when reading Peter Leithart's work on the kingdom and hearing him say that much of the theonomist's arguments are really arguments from silence - the Bible does not say the state can redistribute wealth, therefore the state should not distribute wealth. See the transition? There isn't one, because the conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, yet I think that line of reasoning (a kind of regulative principle approach to the state, in other words) appears a lot in theonomic writings. Also, after talking to a political science at length, or arguing rather, I realized that the bible does not treat individual property rights as absolute, and so Bastiat's point about taxation as theft may not fit so well with Christian theology.

I also just wonder sometimes if it's not sufficient to simply think that wealth maximization shouldn't be our goal, ethically. Social welfare maximization, at least, and maybe more specifically wealth maximization itself. Much of the ethical goals Christians and other sub-groups can only be achieved through higher incomes.