5 PROPORTIONAL PAYMENTS TO GOD And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD for his sin which he hath sinned, a female from the flock, a lamb or a kid of the goats, for a sin offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his sin. And if he be not able to bring a lamb, then he shall bring for his trespass, which he hath committed, two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, unto the LORD; one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering (Lev. 5:6-7).
But if he be not able to bring two turtledoves, or two young pigeons, then he that sinned shall bring for his offering the tenth part of an ephah of fine flour for a sin offering; he shall put no oil upon it, neither shall he put any frankincense thereon: for it is a sin offering. Then shall he bring it to the priest, and the priest shall take his handful of it, even a memorial thereof, and burn it on the altar, according to the offerings made by fire unto the LORD: it is a sin offering (Lev. 5:11-12).
This passage extends the law of purification offerings. This was a special form of purification offering that applied to a specific kind of sin: a sin of omission (vv. 2-4).(1) A purification offering was required to purify the tabernacle or the temple, so that the worshipper could enter into the presence of God. A burnt offering was the means of reconciling God and man through the sinner's re-dedication.(2) In the case of the turtledoves, one was for the purification offering, while the other was for the burnt offering.(3) Both the sinner and God's sanctified environment had to be cleansed.
Why was a female animal required? James Jordan argues that this was because "The animals represented Israelites in terms of their social or symbolic order." Laymen were regarded as the social brides of God, so their representative sacrifices had to be female.(4) This was a sign of their subordination.
The law granted to the one bringing a sacrifice the right to make a substitution: a less expensive animal for a more expensive animal, or meal for the less expensive animal. The word of the individual regarding his ability to pay was acceptable to the priest unless there was evidence to the contrary. This means that self-government under God was the operational assumption of the laws of sacrifice. God delegated considerable authority to the individual to decide how much he could afford to pay, even in the case of a violation of God's law by the individual, although a minor violation.
To understand why this substitution was allowed by God, despite its low price to the sacrificer, we must first recognize the principle of proportional payment to God. This means that we must first understand the tithe, for it is through the tithe that God announces the principle of proportional payment. We shall then move from a discussion of the tithe to a discussion of civil taxation. Then we shall return to the economics of this sacrifice. This is a roundabout excursion, but it is necessary if we are to grasp the underlying coherence of God's mandated economy. Modern man has violated this economy throughout the twentieth century, and even conservative theologians have accepted -- sometimes quite enthusiastically -- the legitimacy of some of these violations.
The Taxation of Capital What is important for purposes of economic analysis is the fact that this sacrifice to God was proportional to the wealth of the transgressor. Milgrom calls this a graduated purification offering.(5) Because of the deliberately non-proportional nature of the modern income tax -- those in higher income brackets pay a higher percentage of their income than those in lower brackets -- the use of the term "graduated" is misleading. The required payment was proportional. This element of proportionality was analogous to God's required system of ecclesiastical financing: the tithe. The tithe to God is a fixed percentage -- 10 percent -- of a person's net income from his labor or his net increase from investing. This percentage payment to the local church -- and only to the local church(6) -- is made on the basis of the increase that God gives to a person: "Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year" (Deut. 14:22).
There were cases in which God did require payment on the gross, irrespective of costs of production. One case was the Firstfruits offering. Firstfruits was a tiny representative payment, small enough to be carried by a man who walked to Jerusalem. The cost of delivering this payment to the temple was vastly higher than the value of the Firstfruits offering itself. Second, the poor were paid out of gross production when they gleaned. Third, a payment was required for the firstborn (Num. 18:15-17). Fourth, when the nation was numbered, all men over age 20 who were eligible to serve in the armed forces paid half a shekel to the priests (Ex. 30:12).(7) But these were either very small payments or infrequent. The major ecclesiastical tax, the tithe, was paid out of net income. In the New Covenant, only the tithe remains as a mandatory payment, so God no longer taxes capital, except in the sense that the sabbath principle must still be honored: forfeited income one day in seven.
Let us consider the case of a modern farmer. When a farmer begins his career, he has a stock of "after-tithe" seed corn. From this point on, when he saves the same quantity of seed corn from a harvest and plants his next crop with it, there is no tithe required on the land's fruitful replacement of that original capital investment. Whatever quantity of seed and other inputs that it took to plant this season's crop is not subject to the tithe. So, if a farmer had to pay wages to his workers through the year, the tithe begins only after he has replaced the equivalent of the wages paid. God taxes only the increase on capital invested. Except for the previously listed payments, there was to be no taxation of gross income in Israel's economy; there should be none today.
This is true for the church's tithe; it is also true for the State.(8) Both church and State must be supported by proportional levies based on income rather than property. A farmer who makes no income in a bad year, but is instead forced to consume capital and borrow, is not to face the threat of the confiscation of his inheritance by either church officers or tax collectors merely because he holds legal title to land and equipment. The same objection applies to a head tax or a poll (voting) tax.(9) God's monopolistic ministries of church and State are to prosper economically only to the extent that their members do. God authorizes both church and State to tax success at a low, common, fixed rate, with the combined taxes of all branches of the State at less than the tithe (I Sam. 8:15, 17). Neither institution is authorized to tax the capital that makes success possible.
Off the Top
God is entitled a tithe on our net productivity. His share comes "off the top." But the modern State in many cases demands this initial payment, leaving the church with a tithe on whatever remains. This is wicked but common. In the United States, the taxpayer is allowed to deduct payments to charitable organizations before the U.S. government assesses an income tax on whatever remains. But this is not the case with the Social Security (old age pension) payroll tax, which is euphemistically called a contribution. The U.S. government collects its tax on total wage income -- no deductions allowed. This is standard practice in most nations with respect to the taxation of all income.
The question arises: Does the Christian owe God a tithe on his pre-tax net income? He does if the State does not collect the tax first. But if the State collects the money "off the top" and does not allow the taxpayer to deduct his tithe payments from his gross income before estimating his income tax obligation, the answer is clear: the tithe is 10 percent of whatever remains after the tax collector has collected the State's immorally extracted tax. The State has stolen from God: sacrilege. This is not the tithe-payer's responsibility. He is a victim. If the tithe-payer had to pay a tithe on his pre-tax income, God would be taxing what the tithe-payer never received. This would constitute a tax on capital.
Put another way, God does not tax us on that portion of our net crop that the locusts eat. Tax collectors are the economic equivalent of locusts, except that we can lawfully eat locusts.
On the other hand, if the State allows us to deduct our tithe payments before it computes our taxable income, we owe the tithe on our pre-tax income. God should always get paid first. If a man takes in a hundred ounces of gold a year, net, and he pays his tithe, the State should tax him on the remaining 90 ounces. If it collects a tax equal to the tithe -- immoral (I Sam. 8:17) -- it receives 9 ounces. An even more immoral State will collect 10 ounces, leaving the tithe-payer with 90 ounces of gold after taxes. He then pays 9 ounces to the church. In both examples, he retains 81 ounces. In the first example, the church collects 10 ounces and the State collects 9; in the second example, it is the reverse. The first example is closer to God's standards than the second.
Sharecropping
We can understand this better if we think of the pre-twentieth-century agricultural practice of sharecropping. Land owners owned land and capital. (Capital is the product of land and labor over time).(10) After slavery was abolished, they no longer owned people. Instead, they hired people.(11) Rather than paying them wages, land owners leased to sharecroppers tools and land. Owners concluded that it was less expensive to monitor economic results -- a local crop -- than it was to monitor the productivity of their employees' labor inputs to the production process, requiring them to specify a wage for these labor inputs.(12) What mattered to land owners was results, not labor inputs. ("Activity is no substitute for production.")
Hourly wages are based on the average productivity of a particular class of workers. An above-average producer in any given class is usually much better off to become a sharecropper, a piece-rate worker, or a commissioned salesman. He is paid in terms of his measurable net productivity, not in terms of his membership in a class of laborers. The lower the percentage of the crop owed contractually to the owner, the better this arrangement is for the efficient producer. To gain the services of such workers, owners are willing to take a lower percentage of the crop: a smaller percentage of a much larger pie.
God is the owner; we are His sharecroppers. He does not tax capital today for the same reason that the land owner does not tax his own land and tools. They are being used by the sharecroppers to produce a crop. The land owner collects a fixed percentage of the crop after the replacement of seed and tools. So does God. God demands a low percentage of our net output -- 10 percent to the church; less that 10 percent to the State -- in order to encourage us to work efficiently. He does not have to monitor our inputs except for prohibiting our labor one day a week. He authorizes His agents, meaning ordained ministers (church and State), to monitor our net output and collect God's mandated share.
This system of taxation is appropriate to a decentralized economic order. It is consistent with God's system of representative government. God's kingdom, unlike Satan's, is not a top-down commonwealth. God delegates tremendous authority and responsibility to the individual. He treats us as sharecroppers: people who are responsible for final results, not bureaucratic wage-earners. This structure of ownership and taxation is why a Christian social order rewards economic growth rather than time-serving. God as the owner is paid in terms of our net productivity, not a fixed tax. We sharecroppers keep the lion's share of our crop: above 80 percent in a society that honors God's law. The twentieth century has not honored it. It has suffered wars, taxation, inflation, regulation, and socialist impoverization as its appropriate reward. God is not mocked.
Costs of Ownership What this means is that God has assigned the ownership of most property to individuals, families, business partnerships, and corporations. These profit-seeking economic agents act in God's behalf as stewards. Their God-assigned, market-driven task is to increase the productivity, and therefore the market value, of the property under their lawful management. This is the economic process of adding value. God allows men to retain 90 percent of the pre-tax increase that their efforts produce.(13) He requires a tithe as a means of sustaining the work of His institutional church, but also as a token (representative) sacrifice to Him by His stewards: the public mark of their subordination to Him. As in the case of the first sacrifice listed in Leviticus, God must be paid first -- men's public acknowledgment of His absolute sovereignty -- but not paid very much: the sign of our inability to buy His favor with our own wealth.(14) Paying the tithe is man's public denial of his own autonomy.
God's long-term economic goal is to use the tithe-financed expansion of His church to bring the whole earth under His public authority through the extension of private, tithe-paying ownership. He is redeeming (buying back) the earth in history. The extension of private, tithe-paying ownership is God's authorized and required means of enabling His people's reclaiming title to the land -- land that was previously appropriated in history by Satan through Satan's successful covenantal subordination of Adam and Eve.(15) Each self-proclaimed sovereign master of the universe, God and Satan, exercises ownership representatively. Each claims ownership of the earth. Each establishes ownership boundaries that are to be defended by his covenantal subordinates.
Private Ownership
Why does God assign ownership primarily to profit-seeking private owners? Because it is only through the private ownership of the means of production, especially capital assets, that it becomes possible to count the costs of operation. Without private ownership, there cannot be competitive pricing. Without market-established prices, especially prices for capital goods, there cannot be rational accounting. All economic allocations made under socialist ownership are inherently irrational, a fact proven theoretically by Ludwig von Mises as early as 1920(16) and revealed to the world publicly in 1989 with the public acknowledgment by Gorbachev of the utter collapse of the Communist economies.(17) Mises for decades was not believed by Western intellectuals, including economists.(18) They much preferred to believe the utopian promises of socialist dictators. They still generally refuse to acknowledge the accuracy of Mises' theoretical case.(19) Robert Heilbroner, a socialist who made millions of dollars from his best-selling book on the great economists, did admit in 1990 that Mises had been correct after all, that his generation had been completely wrong on this point, and socialism as an ideal is dead unless it can come to power through the ecology movement, which he still hopes will happen.(20) This admission came late and under extreme duress: the collapse of Soviet Communism. Mises was not mentioned once in Heilbroner's book, but there was room for chapters on the utopian socialists, on Karl Marx, and on Thorstein Veblen.(21) It was only when the tyrants who ruled the Communist slave State known as the Soviet Union publicly admitted the total economic failure of Soviet Communism(22) that Western intellectuals began to parrot these critical views, although without understanding the theoretical case behind the reality. Prior to this overnight shift in the Communist Party line, Western intellectuals had steadfastly defended both socialism and Communism as valid economic systems. This included the vast majority of academic economists.(23) Intellectuals are like literate sheep; they move in herds, with a handful of skilled sheep dogs keeping them moving. From time to time these sheep get sheared by reality; in totalitarian societies, they get slaughtered by tyrants.
To be successful in a free market, resource owners must steadily increase the economic value of their assets' consumer-satisfying output. They must also keep down the costs of operation. This forces owners to count the cost of their actions -- a biblical injunction (Luke 14:28-30). Through private ownership of the means of production, those who make mistakes in allocating producer goods to meet expected consumer demand are those who bear the cost of their own actions. The dominion covenant is therefore accomplished progressively over time through this process of profit-driven economic growth. Through private ownership of the means of production, more and more of this world's abundant resources are brought under the control of mankind.(24) Entrepreneurs continually seek out ways to satisfy consumer demand without proportionately increasing the consumption of capital and therefore the proportionate destruction of capital value. The whole world becomes a potential capital asset. By seeking new ways to satisfy buyers, producers raise the value of God's creation. This is exactly what God requires from His stewards (Matt. 25:14-30).(25) Again, this is the process known as value-added production. Man's efforts add value to the resources that God has provided for him. It is human creativity, therefore, not raw materials, that is the creation's most important scarce resource.(26) But this is derived by God's grace (Deut. 8:16-18). Economic growth is the dominion covenant in action, the fulfilling of Adam's original task to dress the garden and guard it.
Voluntarism vs. Compulsion
For the church or the State to interfere with this value-adding expansionist economic program by confiscating privately owned capital -- as distinguished from taxing the net economic fruits of capital at low rates -- is to interfere with the God-assigned task of dominion. Neither the church nor the State is a profit-seeking institution; both are God-ordained monopolies that are supposed to be financed by a fixed percentage of the net economic increase that God gives to His people, i.e., the principle of the tithe.
The tithe principle's restriction -- no consumption of existing capital -- applies only to compulsory wealth transfers. To consume voluntarily one's existing capital assets at any rate above zero is to reduce future economic growth; it is to consume one's tools of dominion. It is legal in God's eyes to do this, but it does impose costs: reduced opportunities to increase future wealth through profitable investing. The owner-consumer will pay the price in the forfeited future income that the capital might have produced. There is therefore an element of negative feedback in this private property system. The present beneficiary knows that he or his heirs risk suffering a reduced level of future income if he consumes capital today. He has an incentive to refrain from consuming his capital base.
To consume other people's capital assets by moral or legal compulsion is also to impede the fulfillment of the dominion covenant. Worse; it encourages private owners to consume it before the tax collectors arrive.(27) The threat of confiscation changes the private owner's view of the future, including his personal responsibility for the future. The taxation of capital transfers assets from those agents who are production-oriented to political institutions that are inherently present-oriented and consumption-oriented and which, because they are monopolies, are insulated from the free market pressures of consumer choice. Those people who act as capital confiscators are immediately enriched; they increase their control over scarce economic resources. Those who are God's assigned stewards of capital suffer immediate economic losses -- the reduction of their present wealth -- as well as any forfeited future productivity that the confiscated capital might have provided, if it had been put to consumer-satisfying uses. Those who bear the costs -- capital owners -- are not those who benefit from the wealth transfer. Thus, there is very little visible economic negative feedback on the State's consumption of capital. There is only political negative feedback.
Any monopolistic institution that compels the transfer of capital is a seed-corn-eating institution. It is inherently present-oriented. It is a lower-class institution.(28) It is an institution that fosters a short-run view of time and human decision-making (high time preference, high interest rates) rather than a long-run view of time and decision-making (low time preference, low interest rates).(29)
The Ability to Pay All sin is an affront to God. The rich man's sin as well as the poor man's sin enrages God. But there is this distinction: the rich man has sinned in the face of greater blessings from God. He therefore owes more to God than the poor man does in absolute terms. Making restitution to God is supposed to hurt, but one man's economic pain is another man's economic destruction. Thus, sinners are to make restitution to God in terms of the proportional benefits they expected to gain from their sin.
A fundamental biblical principle is invoked at this point: from him to whom much is given, much is expected. The context of this rule is the imposition of God's eternal sanctions.
And the Lord said, Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Of a truth I say unto you, that he will make him ruler over all that he hath. But and if that servant say in his heart, My lord delayeth his coming; and shall begin to beat the menservants and maidens, and to eat and drink, and to be drunken; The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more (Luke 12:42-48).
If this system of proportional sanctions is true throughout eternity, then it surely must be true in terms of the restitution payments in history owed to God by men. Marx's principle of expectation and economic remuneration is therefore wrong: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"(30) The first half of the statement is correct; the second half is true only in the case of the physically or mentally incompetent, or those who in the England were for centuries called "the deserving poor."(31) The general rule is this: "To each according to market value of his actual production." We know this from the parable: "And the Lord said, Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of meat in due season? Blessed is that servant, whom his lord when he cometh shall find so doing. Of a truth I say unto you, that he will make him ruler over all that he hath" (Luke 12:42-44).
Misused Slogans
The slogan, "the ability to pay," has throughout the twentieth century been used by politicians to justify taxation policies that extract widely differing percentages of men's income as taxes. Sales taxes, "sin" taxes (cigarettes and liquor), luxury taxes, and property taxes are imposed by means of a fixed percentage of the sales price or estimated value. Income, in contrast, is taxed at varying rates the rates escalate as the income level rises.(32) The graduated or "progressive" income tax is not a proportional system of taxation but rather a system of disproportional taxation. "Paying one's fair share" is a slogan used mainly by those policy-makers who plan to use State coercion to see to it that they themselves -- or at least their political constituents(33) -- pay a lower percentage of their income to the State than others do, especially their main political opponents. The word fair is never defined. The politicians and their ideological apologists appeal to the envy of those who believe they are poorer. Envy justifies the extraction of a higher proportion of income from those they perceive as richer.(34) This policy is a consistent application of the socialist's version of the eighth commandment: "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote."
The ludicrousness of such a view -- that a graduated income tax is consistent with the biblical principle of the ability to pay -- can be seen in the recommendation of Protestant liberation theologian Ronald Sider. Sider calls for a graduated tithe. But the biblical tithe is 10 percent. This leads to both terminological and conceptual confusion between the mandatory church tithe and voluntary offerings. His recommended system is this: the more income a person makes, the higher the incremental percentage of his giving should be. But, he hastens to add, "Obviously it is not the only useful model. Certainly it is not a biblical norm to be prescribed legalistically for others."(35) So, this is not really a tithe; it is a recommended but not compulsory system of offerings.
There is a hidden problem here, however. Sider repeatedly calls on the church to become the model for the world.(36) This means the political world. But the political world is governed by compulsory taxation, not by the church's system of morally mandatory tithes and voluntary offerings, let alone the "give whatever the Spirit leads" system of antinomian giving.(37) When, in our 1981 debate, I challenged Sider twice to name the percentage of one's income above which the State cannot morally extract, he twice refused to suggest a figure.(38) The answer, Samuel tells us, is something under 10 percent, i.e., the tithe; anything as high as the tithe is political tyranny (I Sam. 8:15, 17). Even this level of taxation would drastically shrink the modern State,(39) but men like Sider have no intention of shrinking the modern State. On the contrary, their demands for social justice can be met only be a vast expansion of the State and taxes.(40)
Discontinuities of Sacrifice When men were required by God to sacrifice animals as substitutes, the priests faced a problem: How were the required restitution payments to correspond with the sinner's ability to pay? When the tithe was owed, this payment could be estimated easily: so many pieces of silver or so many units of grain. It could also be done in terms of so many animals. "And concerning the tithe of the herd, or of the flock, even of whatsoever passeth under the rod, the tenth shall be holy unto the LORD. He shall not search whether it be good or bad, neither shall he change it and if he change it at all, then both it and the change thereof shall be holy; it shall not be redeemed" (Lev. 27:32-33). The animals would be lined up randomly and passed under a rod; every tenth animal was culled out of the flock to be given to the Lord. If a man saw that a favorite animal was lost to this procedure, he could redeem it by paying its market value plus 20 percent (Lev. 27:31). If he in any way tampered with the lining-up process, he could not subsequently redeem the animal. Thus, God created risks for tampering with the flock; if the herdsman miscalculated in his prohibited calculations, he could lose a cherished animal.(41)
The animal sacrifice system created a problem that did not exist to the same degree in the case of the tithe. A tithe was proportional to net increase. A net increase could be measured or at least estimated fairly well. But offering an animal sacrifice was not the same as paying God a fixed proportion of net income. A specific kind of sin required a specific sacrifice. The nature of the sin determined the nature of the sacrifice. Then how could God maintain the principle of proportional pain? Had the sacrifice been a specified amount of money, either the rich man would have paid too little proportional to his economic benefits in life or the poor man would have paid too much. The penalty would not have been proportional.
There is no way to sacrifice one-third of an animal without killing it. This is the problem of sacrificial discontinuity. Thus, proportional restitution to God is not possible in a world that requires a single type of animal sacrifice. If killing a lamb or goat is the only legitimate way to placate God, then both the rich man and the poor man have to pay it. But this would violate the biblical principle of greater responsibility on the part of those possessing greater wealth.
The problem of sacrificial discontinuity is reflected in the specified sacrificial animals in Leviticus 5: lambs or goats, a pair of birds,(42) or fine flour and oil. The payment for sin to God (as distinguished from an earthly victim) was not to be made in terms of money, except by someone who was willing to pay an extra 20 percent to buy back (redeem) the animal. The wealth (capital) of the sinner was to determine which animal he was to sacrifice, or even if he was to sacrifice an animal. The poor man could legitimately sacrifice fine flour and still meet the judicial requirement, but the sacrifice had to impose pain on the sinner. The sacrifice was to reflect or represent the intensity of the negative sanction he was avoiding, on earth and in eternity.
Rich Man, Average Man, Poor Man The tripartite division that we commonly make in class analysis -- upper, middle, and lower -- is reflected in this passage. The idea that each wealth group was bound by differing ritual obligations pointed to the biblical principle of present obligations in terms of prior benefits. If the rich man imagined that he could escape God's condemnation by the payment of a trifle, he did not understand God's analysis of the nature of the specific infraction. The earthly restitution payment to God was to be a token of the required eternal payment, what Paul called an earnest (Eph. 1:14), meaning a down payment. God promises to inflict great pain for sin in eternity; the pain endured by sinners in history is to reflect this coming pain. The sanctions of Israel's sacrificial system were designed to teach this lesson before it was too late for repentance.
On the other hand, had the poor man been expected to pay a rich man's obligation, he would have lost sight of the reality of diering sins: any sin would bankrupt him. Such a restitution system would economically subsidize the worst sins by poor people. Why not commit really serious infractions if the end result in history is the same for great and minor infractions, i.e., bankruptcy and enslavement? To impose an impossibly high penalty on all crimes or sins is to make it equally expensive to commit all crimes or all sins. Man being what he is -- totally depraved apart from God's grace -- this system of sanctions would be a subsidy to his depraved nature. It would be comparable to imposing the death penalty for murdering a policeman and also for stealing a bicycle. It would result in extreme danger for any policeman attempting to arrest a bicycle thief. The thief would know that killing the policeman would not result in any greater earthly penalty. This assessment of comparative risk would eventually lead to very high expenses for the arrest of suspected bicycle thieves. Squads of police would have to be allocated to the arrest every suspected bicycle thief. Meanwhile, someone calling the police department's emergency phone number in order to stop a murder might nd that there were very few police left to respond; too many of them would be assigned to arresting some armed and dangerous bicycle thief.
Interpersonal Comparisons of Subjective Utility My interpretation of this law returns to an issue raised by economist A. C. Pigou in the early years of the twentieth century. In his book, The Economics of Welfare (1912), Pigou offered a scientific justification of the graduated income tax. He argued that one additional monetary unit of income for a rich man meant little to him compared to what that same monetary unit of income would mean to a very poor man. Therefore, a net increase in aggregate social utility could be attained by taxing the income of rich men at rates higher than those imposed on poor men. This argument has persuaded many economists. But in 1932, Lionel Robbins challenged it in his book, The Nature and Significance of Economic Science. He insisted that we cannot, as scientists, make interpersonal comparisons of other men's subjective utility. Scientifically, no one can say what value a rich man places on an additional unit of income compared to a poor man's valuation. There is no common scale of psychic valuation. Scientifically, he is correct. No economist has ever refuted this objection.
I have surveyed this theoretical problem elsewhere.(43) We are not dealing here with scientific economic policy. We are dealing with a law established by an omniscient God who is fully capable of making interpersonal comparisons of every person's subjective utility. Second, the right to substitute a less expensive animal applied only to the purification offering. The principle of the tithe is simple to state: a fixed percentage paid by all income recipients. Proportional payment -- the judicial principle of the tithe -- also underlies this sacrifice. But one animal, unlike grain or money income, cannot be precisely divided proportionately without killing it. Nevertheless, this law does honor the proportional principle. Thus, it would be analytically perverse to use the law governing this sacrifice to defend a graduated income tax.
Conclusion The Bible teaches the principle of proportional tithing and proportional restitution to God. The problem with animal sacrifices in the Old Covenant was that they could not be precisely proportional: men cannot slay just half an animal. Thus, God imposed a system of different sacrifices for people of varying wealth.
The priests collected the sacrifices, and they could lawfully use them personally: "And the priest shall make an atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned in one of these, and it shall be forgiven him: and the remnant shall be the priest's, as a meat offering" (Lev. 5:13). But these sacrifices were not part of a predictable stream of income. These payments were the result of specific sins. These penalties were not based on income but on the sinner's total wealth; they were specific restitution payments. They were the economic equivalent of sin taxes -- literal sin taxes to God through His church. This system enabled men to reduce these sin taxes by sinning less frequently.
The market value of these sacrifices was limited by the wealth of the sinner. This was to make certain that every sinner felt the appropriate pain of economic loss; it would remind him of the eternal loss to come. There were "different strokes for different folks" only to make sure that all the folks felt an appropriate degree of economic pain. Had the sacrificial system been strictly a system of fines, the proportionality of the sanctions would have been easy to maintain. Because a living animal is not divisible on the same basis as monetary fines, God established a system of differing sacrifices for the same transgression, so that all transgressors were to feel a similar psychological burden for their transgressions irrespective of their net worth.
Summary The purification offering cleansed the tabernacle-temple so that the individual could safely approach God.
A female offering was required as a symbol of the layman's subordination: Israel as God's wife.
The law allowed a poor person to substitute a less expensive animal.
The law's operating assumption was self-government under God.
This sacrifice extended of the principle of the tithe: proportionality.
The tithe was a fixed percentage payment made to the church: 10 percent of profits or net income.
God did impose small taxes on the gross, such as Firstfruits and the firstborn offering: taxes on capital (carry-over seed corn).
The New Covenant requires only the tithe, which is not a tax on capital.
God treats us as sharecroppers: we pay Him a percentage of the crop.
The lower the percentage owed to the land owner, the easier it is to attract efficient producers.
10 percent is low.
This sharecropping system emphasizes output, not inputs.
It allows land owners to reduce their costs of monitoring workers' productivity.
God delegates ownership to specific people: individuals, families, partnerships, corporations.
Their job is to add value to whatever assets He has placed into their hands.
God must be paid first.
He expects the whole earth to be brought under His people's authority.
The visible mark of their dominion is the tithe.
By transferring ownership to private individuals, it is possible for them to assess costs.
Without private ownership, there can be no rational economic calculation.
Private property enables owners to count the costs of meeting the demand of consumers.
The dominion covenant is fulfilled through profit-seeking economic growth.
Men add value to God's creation because they are the supreme asset in the creation: God's image.
Church and State are God-ordained monopolies.
They are not profit-seeking entities.
They are to be supported by assessing the after-cost profits or increases enjoyed by property owners, not by taxing capital.
They are not to supplant God's system of allocating property to individuals who do not possess a monopoly.
The individual seeks to increase capital because he expects to be able to enjoy the output of added capital later on.
He conserves his seed-corn for the sake of future income.
The State must not tax capital, thereby becoming a consumer of seed-corn.
In the Old Covenant, the sinner had to forfeit a sacrificial animal according to his degree of guilt: greater guilt = more expensive animal.
Rule: from him to whom much is given, much is expected.
The poor person could substitute a less expensive animal.
The modern "progressive" (graduated) income tax is a violation of the tithe principle: fixed percentage, 10 percent.
Samuel warned Israel that a tyrant would tax them at 10 percent.
An animal sacrifice was proportional to the sin rather than to the wealth of the sinner.
God allowed a substitution for poor people.
This meant that He adopted the principle of proportional pain.
This principle applied only to animal sacrifices, not to making restitution and tithing.
Animals cannot be sacrificed proportionately, e.g., one-third of an animal, without killing them.
The familiar tripartite economic division of society -- rich, middling, and poor -- is reflected in these sacrifices: larger animals, birds, and meal.
What man paid to God in history was a small token of what covenant-breakers will have to pay eternally.
The sacrifices were proportional to a person's wealth, so that all transgressors would bear the approximately the same psychic loss of wealth, according to an omniscient God who can and does make interpersonal comparisons of people's subjective utility.
This law does not justify a graduated (progressive) income tax.
Footnotes:
1. The sins were hidden sins. Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 100.
2. Ibid., p. 101.
3. Ibid., p. 100. Birds were not used as guilt (reparation) offerings; the second passage therefore must be dealing with purification: ibid., p. 104.
4. James Jordan, "The Whole Burnt Sacrifice: Its Liturgy and Meaning," Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper, No. 11, p. 2.
5. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, vol. 3 of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 312.
6. The institutional church is a monopoly institution which alone can lawfully offer the sacraments and which alone collects the tithe on the basis of this sacramental monopoly. See Gary North, Tools of Dominion: The Case Laws of Exodus (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), ch. 32. Cf. Gary North, Tithing and the Church (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1994), ch. 3. See Appendix B, below.
7. For a summary of these payments, see Alfred Edersheim, The Temple: Its Ministry and Services As They Were in the Time of Jesus Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, [1874] 1983), p. 379.
8. R. J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, New Jersey: Craig Press, 1973), p. 283.
9. God does not impose a head tax. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 32. In the fall of 1990, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of England was forced to resign from her position by her own political party. The Conservative Party had suffered a serious decline in popularity as a result of decision to add a kind of head tax to the existing property tax. (Had she not strongly opposed England's entry into the European Community, she might have retained her office.)
10. Murray N. Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles (Auburn, Alabama: Mises Institute, [1962] 1993), pp. 285-88.
11. In the American South, 1865-80, sharecropping became a way of life for ex-slaves and ex-slave owners. It was a cost-effective system for a defeated post-war society with minimal financial capital. Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The economic consequences of emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
12. The cost of monitoring people's behavior is fundamental in the evolution of economic and political institutions. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), pp. 55-56, 65-66, 111-12, 215-26. See Sowell's index for more entries: "Monitoring."
13. A godly civil government does not impose income taxes on money given to charity. It taxes income only after tithe payments have been made to a church. But some civil governments are perverse. They tax gross income before the individual or the business gives away money. In such societies, men are not required to tithe on what the tax collector has already appropriated. If this were not the case, then God would be taxing capital. For example, if the State collects 100 percent of a person's income, for God to extract an additional 10 percent would involve the taxation of capital. God does not tax capital; He taxes only the increase. He does not tax what the "locusts" eat before the harvest.
14. See Chapter 1, above.
15. Amillennialists categorically deny that God's redemption of the earth will take place historically. This is the heart of their position Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), chaps. 4, 9. In fact, they even say that Satan's subordinates will reclaim most of what pathetically little Christ has transferred to His people since His ascension. Nevertheless, amillennialists should be willing to acknowledge that this process of redeeming the earth is God's economic goal for His people, even if Christians fail to achieve it in history.
16. Ludwig von Mises, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" (1920); in F. A. Hayek (ed.), Collectivist Economic Planning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, [1935] 1953), ch. 3; the essay was reprinted by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, in 1990. Cf. Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order (University of Chicago Press, [1948] 1949), chaps 7-9; T. J. B. Hoff, Economic Calculation on the Socialist Society (London: Hodge, 1949); reprinted by LibertyClassics, Indianapolis, Indiana; Don Lavoie, National Economic Planning: What Is Left? (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger, 1985).
17. I know of no equally monumental and rapid shift in public opinion, including academic opinion, in the history of Western thought. Virtually overnight -- 1988-89 -- Communism as an economic system lost its defenders except those with academic tenure in American universities. Only when the chief Soviet Communist admitted publicly that Communist economic planning had totally failed did the West's intellectuals at last accept the proposition that Communism does not work.
18. Oscar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York: McGraw-Hill, [1938] 1965).
19. Mises was equally hostile to "middle of the road" socialism, which the intellectuals have yet to abandon. See Mises, "Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism," in Mises, Planning for Freedom (4th ed.; South Holland, Illinois: Libertarian Press, [1950] 1980); located now in Grove City, Pennsylvania. Academic economists do not mention Mises favorably; a 70-year blackout has been in force since 1920.
20. Robert Heilbroner, "Reflections: After Communism," New Yorker (Sept. 10, 1990), pp. 92, 100. This is not an academic journal; it is a magazine aimed at intellectuals.
21. Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953).
22. "Gorbachev Calls for a Strike Ban, Saying Economy Is Near Collapse," New York Times (Oct. 3, 1989).
23. The best example is Paul Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics (1970). In the 13th edition of his best-selling textbook, published in 1989, he wrote "The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989), p. 837. Mark Skousen's study of the ten major American economics textbooks in the late 1980's reports that several of them "are surprisingly sympathetic toward Karl Marx, the ideological founder of modern socialism." Mark Skousen, Economics on Trial: Lies, Myths, and Realities (Homewood, Illinois: Business One Irwin, 1991), p. 208. He says also that "Most of the top 10 textbook writers accept the conventional view that the Soviet Union and other countries with command economies have achieved a highly developed stage based on accepted GNP statistics." Ibid., p. 213. Textbooks rapidly become almost worthless because publishers require authors to update them every three years to destroy competition from used textbooks, which are rarely kept by students after final exams. But late-1980's economics textbooks may become collector items, for they document the incomparable foolishness of their authors regarding socialism and Communism. Major revisions have already been made.
24. Julian L. Simon and Herman Kahn (eds.), The Resourceful Earth: A Response Global 2000 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984).
25. North, Tools of Dominion, ch. 23, subsection "The Moral Legitimacy of 100 Percent Reserve Banking."
26. Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).
27. This is what happened in the Soviet Union in the early 1930's during Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Peasants slaughtered their animals and ate them rather than turn them over to the new collective farms and State farms.
28. Edward C. Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), ch. 3.
29. T. Alexander Smith, Time and Public Policy (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), chaps. 4-6.
30. Karl Marx, The Critique of the Gotha Program (1875); in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), III, p. 19. Marx stole this phrase from Morelly's Code de la Nature (1755-60).
31. Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1914 (New York: Scribner's, 1969), p. 26.
32. This also applies to "death duties," meaning inheritance taxes.
33. A rich politician may very well promote a high progressive income tax if he has his money invested in nontaxable wealth, or if he derives more pleasure from being re-elected by envious voters than from spending his income. This is why the very rich are so often socialists or dedicated Keynesians their wealth is in real estate, trusts, or tax-exempt bonds, and they have so much money already -- especially inherited wealth -- that they find it more gratifying to wield political power than to retain another million in after-tax income. Show me a multi-millionaire who inherited all of his money from Daddy or Grandpa, and I will show you a politician dangerous to both political and economic freedom.
34. Gary North, "The Politics of the Fair Share," The Freeman (Nov. 1993).
35. Ronald J. Sider, Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1977), p. 175.
36. Ibid., pp. 98, 111, 170.
37. If you give under 10 percent to your local church, you are breaking God's law. On the other hand, if you do not know what God's maximum required percentage is, you may feel guilty when giving 30 percent.
38. This debate took place at Gordon-Conwell School of Theology. Audiotape cassettes of this debate are available for $10 from ICE, P. O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711.
39. The average rate of overall taxation in most modern nations is about 40 percent from 33 percent in the U. S. to 50 percent in Sweden. Joseph A. Pechman (ed.), Comparative Tax Systems Europe, Canada, and Japan (Arlington, Virginia: Tax Analysts, 1987), p. 1.
40. David Chilton, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators A Biblical Response to Ronald J. Sider (3rd ed.; Tyler, Texas Institute for Christian Economics, [1986] 1990).
41. Chapter 38, below.
42. One for a purification offering and the other for a burnt offering: Wenham, Leviticus, p. 100.
43. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), ch. 4; North, Tools of Dominion, pp. 1096-1105.
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