Expositional Lectures

Taxation

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Doctrinal Studies

Lesson: 11-12

Genre: Speech

Track: 081

Dictation Name: RR122A1 - Taxation

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s - 1970’s

[Dr. Rushdoony] From Exodus 30, I should like to read verses 11-15.

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, When thou takest the sum of the children of Israel after their number, then shall they give every man a ransom for his soul unto the LORD, when thou numberest them; that there be no plague among them, when thou numberest them. This they shall give, every one that passeth among them that are numbered, half a shekel after the shekel of the sanctuary: (a shekel is twenty gerahs:) an half shekel shall be the offering of the LORD. Every one that passeth among them that are numbered, from twenty years old and above, shall give an offering unto the LORD. The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less than half a shekel, when they give an offering unto the LORD, to make an atonement for your souls.

One of the great but forgotten tragedies in American history occurred in Boston, in 1917. In one respect it was a horrible event. From another it was rather amusing. To this day it is not known, and the case is closed, whether it was sabotage or due to causes unknown of an accidental nature. In the downtown area of Boston, there were some amazingly large storage tanks of molasses. Law since has prevented any such similar storage. Suddenly, without any warning, there was an explosion. In a matter of seconds, many people were overwhelmed and killed by a wave of molasses that engulfed them. The molasses spread throughout the downtown area until finally it was a little wave of two or three inches. Moreover, the explosion left them dripping from the light posts, from the tops of buildings. The death toll was serious.

But the aftermath was the horrible and yet amusing part of it. With the explosion, people came pouring out into the streets and stepped into the molasses. They carried the molasses back into the department stores and office buildings, and every building in the downtown section was covered with molasses. They got in their cars and they got into the street cars and headed for home. And they carried it into the streetcars and into their homes, on their feet. And since it was dripping from the buildings, they had it on their coats. So every home of every person who was in that downtown area, and tens of thousands were, hundreds of thousands to be exact, carried it home. It was carried all over Boston, it was carried into the suburbs. There was scarcely a home without a sick housewife, as she saw the molasses brought in, and on the clothes of her husband, or on her clothes if she were shopping downtown. People went to work the next day, and molasses does not disappear from streetcars or from carpet or from the streets overnight. And they brought more molasses home. The city worked for months trying to get the molasses off the buildings and off the streets. And during that time, the mess got worse and worse. They scrubbed down the streetcars, they worked to scrub down the carpeting and the floors in the stores, they could not get rid of it. More was tracked in everyday, and it seemed as though all Boston was going to drown in this muck of molasses. When they finally thought they had gotten rid of it, the next summer rolled around. I believe this happened during the Christmas holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when there were lots of shoppers downtown. The summer heat brought that oozing out of the walls of the buildings and out of the concrete, so they had molasses all over everything again. And for years, many years, whenever the summer heat began , the sickly smell of molasses permeated downtown Boston. And there’re a few people who swear to this day you get a whiff of molasses on the hottest day in the immediate area of the explosion. But the housewives never forgot. It was the worst experience of their lives.

Now our problem of taxation is something like that molasses explosion. It isn’t something that goes away. It’s a problem that communicates itself, it creates ripples. Just as the incompetent driver and his consequences are passed on to the tax-payer. And then, because he is subsidized, he has all the more license to continue his irresponsible course, so that you aggravate the situation continually. So it is with our nationwide taxation problem. A state senator, talking to me in the pas six weeks, expressed total despair. And he said, Rush, when I go over the tax situation, nationally and statewide, he said, I don’t see any answer to it. The demands for funds increase, they’re snowballing. And the taxation is increasing to the point of confiscation. And he said, I see nothing ahead except sheer disaster. And I think he’s right.

It is all the more important for us therefore, as we see the impending disaster of our present tax structure, which is working towards confiscation, that we understand the biblical perspective. It was John Marshall, Supreme Court Justice, who said, the power to tax is the power to destroy. Should a state have such a power? And what is the biblical law concerning taxation?

The sad fact is, if you take a biblical commentary or dictionary off the shelf, you will find that nothing in it about taxation. The Bible has been perverted into a church book, whereas it is in actuality a book for all of life. To govern not only the Church, but the home, the school, the state, business, the private life of man and the public life of man, to govern the whole life of man. It is the Word of God for the whole world. God is King of Israel, ruled from His throne room, the Holy of Holies. And to Him the taxes were brought, for the civil and religious rule of Israel. The tabernacle was not the ecclesiastical, the church center, but the religious and civil center, the throne room of Israel. Only three times a year was every male required to go to the tabernacle, and later to the temple. It was not a place of worship. Worship was locally, in the home or with the Levite who carried on religious education in the community. There were two kind of taxes according to the Law of God. The first was the poll, or head tax. This is described in Exodus 30:11-16, and the scripture we read. The fact that atonement is cited as one of the aspects of the tax, misleads many people. The meaning of atonement is something we have missed. Atonement does refer to the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross. But the word atonement in the Bible has a variety of meanings as well. All of which are focused in the atoning work of Christ. But it also means a covering, that’s the literal word atonement. A covering, a protection. Now, when a state provides you with law and order, with protection against criminals, it is providing you with a cover. So the state has an atoning function. This is what the common {?}.

As a matter of fact, in the ancient world and up until fairly recent times, no one who was not under the atonement of the religion of the state was a citizen. In ancient Rome you could not be a citizen if you were not present at the annual rite of Lustration, where you signified that you accepted the lustrations, the atonement, of the Roman gods, the cleansing and the covering of the Roman gods. You were under the atonement. The state of Virginia if you please, in the colonial period and in the early constitutional period, said that a citizen was someone who believed that the Bible is the infallible Word of God and affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity and the orthodox doctrine of Jesus Christ. He alone could vote, he alone was entitled to the protection of the state, the covering, the atoning, of the state. And the law of Virginia was very severe here. If you did not believe this, the state had a right to take your children from you for their own welfare. This is why Thomas Jefferson, although he was secretly a Unitarian, never opened his mouth during his lifetime to express any doubt of orthodox biblical faith. Had he done so his children could have been taken from him for their own welfare, by Virginia state law. He would not have been entitled to the covering, the protection, the atoning power, of the state. Because it was the Christians state. Designed to proclaim the Kingship of Christ, and to cover with the protecting care of godly law and order all those who are the Lord’s. I understand you face a new constitution possibly in this state. It would be interesting if at this time the Virginia constitution of that era could be dug up and published. It would shock a great many liberals.

The census was taken, both for a military register of Israel, and for tax purposes. Every male 20 years old and older, for the rest of his life, paid a half shekel of silver tax annually. The amount of the taxes, the Scripture makes clear, was the same for all. The shekel, incidentally was a weight of silver, not a coin. The dollar originally was a weight of silver. And every US coin was by weight, so many grams of silver. 20 dollar gold piece was an ounce of gold, 900 fineness, and every fractional coin thereof, the eagle, the half eagle, the quarter eagle, represented weights of gold. That’s why they were used all over the world, because being patterned after the biblical standard of weight, a certain weight of gold or of silver, in China they knew what an ounce gold was, or a fraction thereof. And so the American gold was very popular in China, very popular in Europe, all over the world. It went by weight. The shekel was a weight of silver. The head tax required the amount for the rich and poor. Thus it had to be small, less it oppress the poor, but sufficient to do its purpose. Discriminatory taxation was forbidden. It was collected by the civil authorities. It was a head tax, a poll tax, paid to these civil authorities as the required tax for maintaining of covering, or atonement, of civil order. Thus it provided for the courts, for the instrumentalities of justice, for law and order, basically. And that was all. That was all.

You couldn’t develop a bureaucracy when you had only a head tax for all males, and it had to be the same for all. How are other things taken care of? The answer was, second tax. We encounter that second tax in many Scriptures, Leviticus 27:32, First Corinthians 9:12-14, Numbers 18:21-28, Malachi 3:8-12, Proverbs3:9-10, Matthew 23:23, Hebrews 7:1-8, and elsewhere. The second tax was the tithe. Now how did the tithe function? The tithe was, we are told repeatedly, wholly unto the Lord. The tithe does not belong to the Church, it belongs to the Lord. As a matter of fact, according to Numbers 18:21-28, one tenth of the tithe went to the priests. A portion of the tithe, and the tithe was actually closer to being eighteen percent, fifteen to eighteen percent, then ten percent. In that you paid a first tithe every year, ten percent across the board, to the Lord. Every other year you paid another ten percent, and the argument is, was it ten percent of the original amount, or ten percent of the balance and I don’t know the solution to that. You paid that second ten percent for the poor, a tithe unto the poor. In the intervening years, the second, the fourth, and the sixth year, the second tithe was for rejoicing before the Lord as a family. This would average out to five percent a year that a man was to spend on the family pleasure, on their rejoicing before the Lord. You wives tuck that away and remember to use it on your husbands. Five percent a year. That adds up. You can have a lot of fun on that. And you are to praise God when you do.

Now what does this tithe accomplish? The basic function of the tithe was to minister to the social functions of society. I mentioned the poor were cared for by the tithe. It went to the priests in part, one tenth of the tithe did. It was given to the Levites to meet the necessary expenses because they had charge of education throughout society. It went for the training of prophets, the Lord’s servants. Elisha received tithes, you remember. People brought him tithes for his school of the prophets.

It went for music. The choir of Psalm singers were provided for in the temple by the tithe. It provided all the basic social functions. And when we examine its history in church history, the results are remarkable. What did the tithe do? Very early in the Early Church it took care of all needs of people who were in want. Of widows and orphans, of the families of those who were thrown into prison during time of persecution. It provided for health needs. I mentioned last night to some of you that all the hospitals are Christian in origin. Until the last century were created and established by tithe money. Schools were established the same way. And incidentally, the distinction between profit and non-profit is not biblical. That’s a modern statist distinction. Everything in the Bible was expected to do well. To do wisely and to show a return if it could, to further bless the Lord. Foundations were, until the Carnegie foundation, without exception, religious foundations. The whole idea of a foundation was a religious institution to further Christian work in some area, with tithe money. All schools were, until 1833-34, products of the tithe. This is how all the immigrants who were landing in the United States, up until the 1860’s, it was after that that the public school movement really took off, received their basic training, their basic education. In Christian schools which were tithe agencies.

And once in a great while you can find records, in a used bookstore, of some of these missionary societies. School societies. This is why, in those early years, vast numbers of Europeans came who were completely alien to everything that America was religiously and educationally, and in a very short time they were thorough Americanized and Christianized. It was these missionary schools with tithe money, that did it. And did it with remarkable success. In New York, Boston, Baltimore, all these sea port cities, in the slum areas where these immigrants were pouring in, there were tithe schools. Just as there were in the local community. In the local communities they normally paid their own way, but they were established with tithe funds. But in these slum areas these tithe schools were educating the new comers. This is why they were quickly absorbed into the religious life of America in a way that they were not after 1860 when the public schools took over, when the state schools were the means used.

This tithe money was also used to carry on missions. To carry on emergency relief. In other words, all the basic social functions of society were cared for by God’s tax, the tithe. The tithe was required of all citizens in early America. When Virginia, after the War of Independence, some few years later, abolished the tithe, George Washington was very upset. He knew it was a dangerous thing to do.

Now both forms of taxation in the Bible, the poll or head tax and the tithe, are mandatory, but with a major difference. The head tax went directly to the central authorities, the civil order, the state. The tithe was paid to individual agencies, privately controlled agencies. And a person had the opportunity of giving there to those who he felt were most deserving.

The state required that you pay a tithe. But you chose the place where your tithe was to go. When you examine, for example, medieval history, you find that over and over again the medieval Church was reformed from within. How? Well, if corruption developed, what happened? Someone would come along and start a new order within the Church or a new foundation, we would say. A group of friars or teaching monks or what have you or lay brothers, who were married men. Who would dedicate themselves to a Christian cause. And the people of God would stop giving to the corrupt priests or the corrupt orders and foundations and would give to them. And you would have a reformation. And it was when the kings began to confiscate these foundations that the power of reformation was lost and reformation had to come from without. And what happened after the reformation? Why, these foundations of tithe money increased even more than they had during the medieval period. There’s an English scholar who’s written three volumes analyzing the tithe foundations that the Puritans set up. I refer to one of the books, written by W. K. Jordan, in this Independent Republic. What did Jordan find? Well, when Henry the 8th confiscated all the Catholic foundations, immediately there was a major problem in England. There was no relief money, there was no money for education, there was no money for anything. And there were tremendous social problems in England. But the Puritans immediately began to create new foundations, new tithe agencies, to provide for education for everyone, to provide hospitals, to provide work houses for the poor who are workless, so they could be trained in jobs.

They provided so many agencies that in no time at all they were taking care of everyone who needed to be taken care off, unless they willfully wanted to follow a life hooliganism and crime. All the basic functions of government, except the courts, were taken care of by tithe money in England. And then in the United States.

Now, the importance of this fact is tremendous. God has provided us a way. This is the God given way. It meets all the needs of a society, in the Lord’s name.

There was no land or property tax in the Bible. A man’s home was his castle. And that’s why James Odis could make that statement. Because in colonial America, there was no property tax. There was no tax on land. It was regarded as unscriptural to have such a tax. Do you know that in the first continental congress a statement was issued, and it was mailed to Canada to try to enlist the Canadians in the war against Britain? And what did they say? They said, if we do not make a stand now, Parliament is so far gone in its contempt for everything that is godly, that the day will come when they will be taxing land. That day came here, without the British, because we forsook God and His Law. Incidentally, let me add, that the South was the last to resist a property tax, a land tax. And they resisted it in the name of the Reformed faith in terms of a biblical standard.

And it was only after the war that they were broken and the tax was imposed by reconstruction in many areas in the South where it had not yet been established. It’s that recent, in other words, the old biblical standard.

The principle of Scripture is the earth is the Lords and the fullness thereof. The only tax therefore can be God’s tax, because the earth is not man’s, it’s not the state’s, God alone can tax the earth. God alone can tax man. And His tax is the head tax and the tithe. A man cannot say, according to Scripture, that he has given a gift to the Lord unless that gift is above and beyond the tithe. Only that which is beyond the tithe is a gift to the Lord. If you give less than a tithe, you are, according to Malachi, robbing God. You’re a thief in God’s sight. You’ve broken the commandment. Now do you see the impotence of conservatism today? The conservative says if we get control of the government we will change things. But how can you change things? The basic social functions must be paid for. Social financing is an inescapable fact.

Washington was smarter here than our conservatives today. If you don’t finance the basic social functions of society, welfare, education, health and so on, by God’s tithe, the state will have to take over, will it not? And this is exactly what happened. As people stopped tithing the state began to move in and take over the functions that were the function of the tithe, God’s government. So that the power to tax in the modern world has become exactly what John Marshall said it would be. The power to destroy. Taxation is no longer godly nor biblical. It is no longer the support of law and order, it is used to further social revolution.

And someone remarked a year or so ago, the purpose in Washington today is to take poverty from those who cannot use it wisely and give to those who haven none of it. Taxation is now the state sponsored means for revolution and social destruction.

The state senator was right. The modern means of taxation promises nothing but social decay and death. It creates a greedy monster, the state, which will demand more and more and more, and every reforming group that takes power will only take over the power to tax, and will demand more and more, supposedly to reform society. They will never alter the situation until they return to God’s way. The history books have suppressed these facts. The tithe barn was once a familiar part of the American scene. You can still find in Europe some of the old tithe barns where the farmers would take their produce or their cattle and give it to some Christian group that was carrying on a particular work. Once in a while, on rare occasions, you find old pictures reproduced, Eric Sloane has reproduced one or two, of tithe barns in America. I think they have all disappeared now. Perhaps one or two exist. This was the way the Western World flourished and prospered and developed a Christian society.

We cannot have God’s blessing on anything save God’s way. Then how are you going remake this country? Only by adopting God’s standard. Now you’re not going to get the state until you have a radical breakdown and a Christian population to accept a cutback to a head tax and poll tax as its only tax. This would mean that Washington would be a village almost overnight. A blessed thought.

But you can restore God’s government to a great degree by means of the tithe. God requires it of you. You can give it to the Church, you can give to missionary agencies, to Christian agencies, you can create Christian agencies which minister to the basic social functions of society in the Lord’s name. And you will then begin that godly reconstruction of all life which God requires of His people.

[Other] We have opportunity for questions …{?}…

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] In Bible times it was just straight ten percent of the gross. That’s the way you figured it. Now today actually, between state, county and local, direct and indirect taxes, you’re paying forty-five percent of the gross in taxes. Back in 1950, Dr. F.A. Harper did some figuring on the number of taxes that were in a pair of shoes. From the time it was a beef going to market to the time you bought it at the store, and he calculated five hundred and two taxes. Five hundred and two on a pair of shoes. And that was twenty years ago, so they’re probably far more now. But when you’re paying forty-five percent in taxes and if sometime at the end of May they’ve calculated before you’re really working for yourself, remember how good God is. He says fifteen or eighteen percent. And that’s it, plus a head tax, which isn’t much.

What did He did say to Samuel and through Samuel to Israel, in 1 Samuel 8. If people were deserting Him as they were doing, then they would pay a tithe and more than a tithe to their rulers. A tithe of their vineyard, a tithe of their money, a tithe of their children. They would pay a price. In other words, God’s tax is modest. That of the state is not. You’re paying about forty-five percent now. Just figure what it will be like in a few years. In some European countries it is so great that the taxing structure has broken down. In Italy it has been calculated that if everybody paid all the taxes that the law requires of him, it would amount to a hundred and ten percent of his income.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] The First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion and so on. That was passed at the insistence of the clergy of the states. Why? The reason it was passed was this. Every state was a Christian law order. Every state was a state that declared that Christianity is the law of the state, and the religion of the state. On top of that, some states had a religious establishment. A particular church was the established church or in some cases two or three churches were recognized as the established church. Now, each of the thirteen states said, we don’t want the federal government telling us which church to establish. Or establishing a church overall, because this was one of the causes of the War of Independence, incidentally you never read this. Dr. Bryden Bothe{?} has a book on this which has been very much neglected. All his other books are trash but he wrote one good book which the reviewers promptly neglected. ‘Miter and Scepter’. And the whole point of it was that, since Great Britain was considering requiring that the Episcopal Church be the established church of all the colonies here, all the colonies, including Virginia where the Episcopal Church was the established church, took offense.

They didn’t want an outside agency telling them which church to establish. Massachusetts said, why ours is a congregational church, and so on. So the whole purpose was to prevent the federal government from determining which church was to be established because this was a right of the individual states. So if the First Amendment were interpreted as the founding fathers intended it and as it was intended when it was adopted, Virginia could decide that the established church is Episcopal and the federal government could do nothing about it. Or Fairfax County could say we are going to be a Presbyterian county, and establish Presbyterianism here. Or Massachusetts could say we’re going to be Congregationalist and so on. This was the purpose. Now there was a reason behind this apart from the insistence that the state have the control, it was also something that went down to the county structure. Because the counties represented settlements. That is, a particular group of immigrants which come over here and settle in a particular area and establish a county government. And they would say, well we’re all Scot Irish and we’re Presbyterian. Or, we’re all English and we’re Episcopalian, or we’re all Germans and we are Lutheran, or Reformed. And so on. So that each county represented an ethnic and a religious pattern. To this day over fifty percent of the counties of the United States are still dominated by an ethnic and a religious group, that is, the county is predominately German and Lutheran, or predominately Dutch and Reformed, predominately Scot Irish and Presbyterian and so on. This is still true in over fifty percent of the counties. I think I mentioned a year when I was that up to a few years ago when I would travel across country I would find in one area that practically everybody was Lutheran in a particular county. The next county might be almost entirely Catholic. And the next county over might be entirely Dutch and Reformed.

And in some of the counties you still find that they speak a language that is three, four generations from Europe, that they still speak Dutch in the home or German or other languages. And in some places in the Mid West you can see the accent in the speech of the children who are third and fourth and sometimes fifth generation here. I’ve cited, I think I’ve cited this a year ago when I was here, Laurence Well. He grew up in a county of the Dakota’s that is German speaking. You wouldn’t think he was third generation or fourth generation American, he has an accent, doesn’t he? He grew up in a German speaking home. Now that’s the way it was at the beginning.

So they didn’t want the federal government coming down to the local area or to the state and telling them how to run it. So it was hands off, Washington. This is a matter of state concern.

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] What I advocate is what was originally intended, union of religion and state. You cannot separate religion and state. You see, every law structure represents morality. Every law that you have on the books is an enacted morality. And every morality is the expression of a religion. Now we have been a Christian country in our laws. What we are in process of doing is to abolish Christianity as the religious and legal foundation of our country in favor of humanism as the new religion. Humanism is now the established religion of the United States. It is the religion of the public schools. Now some mothers in California about three, four years ago appealed against the public schools both to the Attorney General of the state of California and the then Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, claiming that the public schools were a religious establishment, an anti-Christian humanistic religious establishment. And they submitted all kinds of documentation to prove their point. Well the interesting thing is that both the Attorney General of California, Lynch, and the Attorney General of the United States, Kennedy, said you’re right. The public schools do teach religion, humanism. They do represent an establishment of religion, what are you going to do about it?

[Audience]…{?}…

[Dr. Rushdoony] A good question. During the period of the judges they alternated between an obedience to God’s law, including the law of the tax, and disobedience in which time they fell into bondage. Then under Saul they rejected God’s law for a different kind of order. And David restored God’s order. Under Solomon there was a drifting away from it. And there was apparently a disregard with respect to taxation. And a heavy taxation in his later years. So that this was fulfilled in part then and especially under the later kings, who taxed heavily and oppressively. And in the process also debauched the currency. In Isaiah 1:22 we have the famous declaration as an indictment of Israel by God, or of Judah and Jerusalem, that your wine is mixed with water, adultery, and your silver is become dry. Instead of silver coinage you have slugs.

As an indictment of the nation, you see. And that was a part of the process of oppressive taxation. First taxing them until you rob them of about all they have and then you tax them by debauching their money. Calling in the silver and giving them slugs. Of course this is what Henry the 8th did. He called in the old money and he issued new coinage with his image on it, which was really copper or brass with a thin layer of silver on it. And as a result he gained the name of Old Copper Nose. Because on the coin his nose, being prominent, rubbed off most quickly and the silver would disappear very early and the copper nose would show. So Henry the 8th was known among the people as Old Copper Nose because of his debauched currency.

[Other] Thank you! …{?}…