There is a half text of the gospel which is often quoted to those who complain about the heavy load of taxation: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's". We said half-text because the complete text adds: "and to God the things that are God's". It is this second half which is generally left out. And yet it is the half which is violated the most seriously and the most frequently.
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's" must not be invoked to authorize Caesar's snatching of those things which do not belong to him. Nor must it be used to justify Caesar's taking the things which rightfully belong to the people, and passing them over to Mammon. And yet every government today is guilty of committing these two crimes.
If we are under an obligation to give Caesar what belongs to him, we are under even a stricter obligation to give to the individual what belongs to the individual and to the family that which is the family's.
The person has priority over every type of human organization - financial, economic, political, over even governments themselves. This primary principle of human life cannot be repeated too often or stressed too emphatically. For today, in society, the very opposite idea prevails almost everywhere.
"'The human person should be placed in the first rank of terrestrial things". (Pius XI)
"It is the human person which God has placed at the summit of the visible universe, making him, in things economic as well as political, the measure of all." (Pius XII).
The human person is born in a family. It is raised in a family. The family is the only temporal society established directly by God. It is, moreover, the cell of the social body.
When a Caesar - let us say the Caesar of municipal government — takes from a family the house in which children are being raised, simply because this family does not have enough money to pay the taxes imposed upon it by this Caesar, then this Caesar is guilty of robbing the family of that particular good which is the family's, which it needs in order that individuals composing the family may lead a normal and decent life. Caesar, in fact, in such circumstance becomes a robber. A thief.
Likewise, when a provincial or federal Caesar by its income taxes, its other taxes, direct and indirect, cuts into the revenue necessary to the life of an individual or a family, it takes from that individual or family a good which belongs in strictest justice to them. Thus this particular Caesar makes itself a robber.
Caesar does not have such a right. It has not the right to live at the expense of the normal life of an individual or to the detriment of the family which is the life cell of society. To do so is to strike at the very welfare of society. It is Caesar's duty, on the contrary, to protect the rights and goods of families and individuals.
But, you will answer, governments must be able to carry on their proper functions. And to do so they also must have a revenue, money with which to pay for the goods and services which the public welfare requires.
- We agree with you. But the question is: Where is it to get such a revenue? Where is it to raise this money?
The practice of governments at the present time to raise money is to tax - tax goods, services and incomes; or by borrowing money. The latter, of course, is nothing more than deferred taxation: taxes to be gathered at a later date and taxes swollen by the interest rates charged upon the original loan.
But we of the movement of the Union of Electors repeat, with Major Douglas, the founder of Social Credit, that, "modern taxation is nothing more than legalized robbery". And note that we say, modern taxation is legalized robbery, taxation as it exists today in the midst of the productive capacity of the country.
The taxes which we denounce might be justified if individuals and families possessed globally the means to draw upon the total productivity of the country. In such a case it would be necessary for individuals and families to agree to the surrender of a portion of their capacity to draw upon production to the government for public needs of goods and services. They would have to share a fraction of the production which was in their possession.
But such is not the case. And that it is not is not difficult to demonstrate if you merely consider the large number of unemployed who represent a vast amount of production which is not being utilized; if we consider the large number of occupations which are not only useless to families, individuals and governments but which are downright harmful to the body of society.
Even if the totality of the population possessed globally all the production, this would still not give the government the right to tax indiscriminately as long as certain individuals or groups of individuals did not themselves share appreciably in this totality of production. Yet the governments do so. Modern taxation touches everyone. If certain taxes are paid directly only by the well-to-do and the industrialists, let it be known that such manage to pass these taxes on to the little man by means of the price of their goods and services. Thus, everyone is touched by the weight of taxation.
Giving to Caesar what is Caesar's while at the same time leaving to individuals and families that which is theirs, is extremely difficult, if not impossible, under the present financial regime which commences by a swindle and dictates economic activity instead of serving through economic activity.
Money draws its value not from the material of which it is composed but from the goods and services, actual or potential, which it is intended to represent in value. These goods and services come from natural resources and from activities of people living together in society. Hence, money is essentially social in principle. That is, social at its source.
But what do we find at the source of money? We find profiteering by a private institution set up to make money for its owners — the bank. Money takes its origin in the bank as simple figures in ledger, which figures are a representation of a part of the country's capacity to produce. The banker considers this financial credit as his property and he lends it out to producers who wish to realize a portion of the country's potential production. But along with this loan, the banker also adds, for his profit, the yoke which binds society in slavery — the interest charges. We say it is an imposed slavery because the people are obliged to furnish the producer with the means of repaying both capital and interest.
In sanctioning this first robbery of the nation's credit, the government becomes an accomplice in this robbery. What is more, the government as well as the people suffers from this robbery.
Another aspect of this robbery by the banks is that the banks decide how much of this financial credit should be put in circulation. The amount is decided by the profits they want and not according to the physical realities of the country's productive capacity, not according to the needs of the people ! We denounce taxes because they are hinged to a system of robbery, because they do not agree with the real, because they are at odds with the respect and dignity due to the human being, because they contribute to the maintenance of a system which puts profit above service.
Basically, the capacity of production to furnish goods and services is immense today. It should be placed at the disposition of both private interest (the needs of individuals, families and private bodies) and public interests (governments and other public bodies). It is certainly sufficient to serve the normal needs of all the families of the land and, at the same time, the reasonable needs of the various governments. Why, then, should one go without in order that the other may have?
The satisfaction of this two-fold need for goods and services could be accomplished without any difficulty if there existed a financial system which was a faithful reflection of physical realities; if financial operations were only an expression in terms of accountancy of the operations of production and consumption.
The methods may vary, but briefly the main outline would be as follows:
The government would submit, as it does now, its needs to the representatives of the people. These latter would authorize the government to make use of that portion of production which would be necessary to meet public needs, without at the same time diminishing or obstructing the production necessary for private needs. In such decisions the capacity to finance would be completely ignored. Only the capacity to produce would be taken into consideration.
In other words, to decide what public bodies. and private needs would get, instead of considering purchasing power as though it were some sort of a cake to be divided between the two (and there isn't enough for one or the other), the cake to be divided would be the capacity to produce which is more than sufficient to meet the total needs of both.
And the financing? Well, Caesar would express in money, in financial credit, through a social organism set up for this purpose, the credits to be levied on production which parliament would authorize. For its part the population would use, to make its demands upon production, the purchasing power which it actually possesses, completed (through the dividend to all) by the same social financial organism, in the measure that this purchasing power was inadequate in the face of productive possibilities not yet realized.
And what about the return cancellation of these financial credits?. This would be adjusted at the counter of the retailer where the consumer exchanged purchasing power for the products offered. It is there, also, through the application of a coefficient of prices mathematically calculated from period to period, that the population would pay for the depreciation only of public goods (depreciation being a form of consumption.) Thus the population would pay for that which it consumes and not for that which it produces. Public goods, in the final analysis, are the production of the population, except, of course, for what has to be imported from abroad and which should be balanced off by exports.
In all of this, naturally, the details will have to be arranged according to times and circumstances. Safeguards would have to be arranged. But always the capacity to produce must be the guiding principle and not a system of finance which rations; and with this capacity to produce the needs of the people must be considered. And these needs must be considered according to their order of importance and urgency. The absolute privation of goods, the reducing of the standard of living below a level which provides an honest and decent subsistence, is utterly inadmissible in a world and a country where the problem is not the production of goods but their distribution.
Caesar is not living up to his duty - a duty which he alone can accomplish; that of freeing the people from the stranglehold of a financial system which is completely at odds with reality. Caesar must put an end to such a system which can finance luxuries, which can even finance those things which are harmful to society, but cannot finance the simple needs of the people which go unfilled because of a lack of money.