14 - Taxes and the Two Faces of the State since the Eighteenth Century

Summary

The great objection to the state in the eighteenth century was not that it was necessarily overtaxing its subjects, but that it was arbitrary: it had little knowledge or care of who could pay how much tax. It thus resorted to violence and arbitrariness to extract what it could. The revolutionary and reformist regimes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed a simple answer: assess what people owned, not the people as such. They preferred impersonal forms taxation which proceeded from knowledge of objects, not of the aggregate capacities of each payer. By the twentieth century, progressive income taxes on persons and businesses were introduced, based on concrete knowledge of payers' capacities. They required the payer to take part in the process by way of declarations, reporting, and commissions. If the older orders raised objections because they were arbitrary, careless, and agnostic about the payers, the new regime inspired anxiety because the distinction between payer and collector had been obscured. How was one to resist oneself? Common objections to the state, then, are contradictory: that it knows too little; that it knows too much about us; that it should leave us alone; and that it should care much more.