Tariffs are the Big Thing right now. I, admittedly, don’t have the expertise or knowledge to critique specific policies on a data level. I don’t know what the specific effects of a specific tariff will be, nor will I make the case for tariffs on an empirical level, arguing that they’ve worked historically or in the calculations. No, I want to consider tariffs from the ground up, evaluate their principles and their morality, under the assumption that righteousness prospers.

Article II Shortcut

Dimensions of Taxation

Taxes have four axes we should consider: financial benefit, information gathering, ownership assertion, and economic control. The first is simple: taxes fund the government at a cost to other agents, usually its own people whether directly (sales tax, etc.), indirectly (many import tariffs), or militarily (tribute gathered from other nations costs effort and money of the nation gathering). This is the traditional purpose of taxation, the one we all immediately recognize.

The second purpose of taxation, from the government’s perspective, is that a tax system can be an exceptional way to gather intelligence on those taxed. Every deduction is a data point (one given by the citizen himself); every audit is a potential mine of blackmail. A sales tax necessarily tells the government the proportions of the economy; an income tax necessarily declares whose wages are what. Perhaps the least informative tax is the poll tax, as the government already knows who voted without it, but those have a bad history of being used to block off populist or lower-class voters (see point four). Regardless, taxes are an information gathering method.

The third element of taxation is its assertion of ownership. John Marshall, a Supreme Court Justice of undoubted acuity despite his turpitude, wrote in McCulloch v Maryland, “[The] power to tax involves the power to destroy….” For the government to tax a part of life is to declare ultimate dominion over it, the power to increase the tax to 100% and claim full control. Ask yourself: what happens if you refuse to pay property tax? The house becomes the government’s to sell (often at a suspiciously poor rate, because debt to the government is enslavement to the government (Prov. 22:7)).

The fourth element of taxation and probably its second-most-famous part is its ability to alter behavior, to control. Tax cigars heavily, the price goes up, and less people smoke (in theory). Tax income more the higher it gets, people are less incentivized to increase their output, and productivity goes down (we don’t like to acknowledge this one). Tax companies with regulation-costs (these are a tax, just control-focused, not finance-focused), the barrier to market entry rises, and big companies are advantaged. Taxes are a way of modifying economic behavior, and with economic behavior the rest of human life (church, family, and cultural affairs all connect to the economy, you see, because we all need food, clothing, and the like, because economics matters to location (infrastructure) and opportunity for these things).

Now that we have a four-part structure to consider tax, we should ask the questions of morality (and a little of practicality, admittedly). Each axis has a moral question, though the answers to those questions could take books. Today, we’re asking about tariffs, but these categories apply to all taxes, to regulation as well (with a little modification and re-weighting). Regardless, let’s dive in….

Finance

Should the government be funded? Can and should tariffs fund it?¹

Government, we can all accept, needs funds to persist. Government is also, as per Exodus 18 and Romans 13, a God-given part of life, a good means by which He does good to us. We do not have the moral right to destroy government altogether, though possibly to remove a particular government. The continuance of government necessarily involves its funding; taxes, whether internal, tariff, or tributary, are the only visible means of doing so, apart from voluntary contribution (which I do not think has been tried).

Can tariffs fund the government? Historically, they did fund the federal government. That they possibly cannot fund the current federal government is not, to me, an objection. So far is necessary, they can be supplemented by other taxes. Or we could do what we really should: eradicate 99.9999% of the federal government. Rightly, it should be a small military (to support the militia and provide security against certain types of attack, such as ICBMs), Congress, a sparse network of courts backed by local state executive power when necessary, the President and his necessary assets (planes, security, etc.), the Supreme Court (which should not run the way it does), and border-safety assets. The need even for federal law enforcement executive powers escapes me.

The United States do have this problem, though: funding the state governments (or counties) through tariffs is not congruent to federalism or morality. To do so would be to hand the central government massive control over the local governments which should restrain it. Already federal money in the various states exerts immense and evil influence; this would be the apotheosis of that specter. Further, it would result in states paying in disproportion to their benefit, as it seems hardly possible to trace who actually bears the weight of the tax between different states in anything approaching a free market. Tariffs, we should be therefore clear, cannot serve as the sole funding for any principality large enough to significantly differentiate (possibly anything larger than a city state), else they become a means of centralizing control (in a sufficiently small state, they can still centralize, but the effect is massively smaller).

Should tariffs fund the government? To put it bluntly: the should is going to be analyzed in the other three pillars. At this point, I will simply say that tariffs do not involve outrageous crimes, such as murder, rape, kidnapping, or blasphemy.

Information

Does the government have a right to the information obtainable via tariffs?

Now, certainly a tariff system sufficient to trespass His law in this point is possible. A tariff which included recording of all information carried across the border, including diaries, medical records, intellectual property, patents, and correspondence, that would be beyond the state’s right to demand. Yet the basic idea of a tariff is not integrally a violation of the citizen’s rightful privacy. As a function of protecting the citizens, as a government must (Is. 60:17) against foreign invaders and threats, the government has the right to know what enters the country up to a certain point. Tariffs need not and should not be extremely specific; a percentage-of-value tariff with little or no differentiation of the form that value is stored in will suffice (we’ll consider specific protectionist tariffs a little later).

Ownership

Does the government have a property interest in the exports-imports taxed by tariffs?

This is a tricky question, but I argue that yes they do, in a limited sense. Once again, the government has a national security interest in what passes over the border. In its passing over the border, it is fair to say, the government obtains temporary stewardship over the import or export, sufficient to determine whether it may be allowed to enter or leave respectively. This right may be exercised in morality only with due cause, such as (to give an incontrovertible case) if a nuclear weapon is discovered in the luggage.

Further, to establish a property right which specifically underlies tariffs, consider 1 Timothy 5:18, reading, “For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,’ and, ‘The laborer deserves his wages.’” The labor of the government is to secure the border; tariffs can here serve as the wages for that labor. It is analogous to paying a shipping company, except that the value produced is national security, not transportation. Think of it as a security company working on commission, albeit a security company with a necessary monopoly on a region.

The final category, Control, is significant enough that it’ll be the focus of the next article’s entirety.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. Strictly speaking, only the last four words are the question proper, but the larger moral question of funding government, as well as the practicality of tariffs, is worth a short discursion. ↩︎