The moral question of taxes has been ignored for too long

 There are economic and moral arguments both for and against taxes.

The economic argument will always be a consequentialist one and will always be essentially academic, and so essentially infinitely arguable. All we can know for sure is that the truth will lie somewhere in the Goldilocks zone: too much tax will be economically counterproductive, while too little tax will fail to cover the minimal costs necessary to maintain a functioning state. The debate around this has been going on for centuries and will continue to rage for as long as there is a spectrum of economic beliefs.

However, perhaps more interestingly, and certainly less commonly, is the moral debate around taxes.

Up until this point, recent discourse in UK politics has taken for granted that the state has a right – even a responsibility – to take taxes in order to provide services. The only debate has been around how much the state should provide; and the answer has been that it should provide more and more. The pandemic response is commonly blamed for this, but the trajectory was heading that way beforehand. It is now accepted that the state must not just maintain a safety net but must jump in for every crisis. Beyond spending money, it is also assumed that the state should intervene in our diets, working habits, and all aspects of our ways of life. We frame our debates around this assumption. We argue how far the state should go, not whether it should go there at all.

We seem to have forgotten, wilfully or otherwise, that, as Winston Churchill said, “taxes are an evil—a necessary evil, but still an evil”. Even though opposition parties constantly lambast the Government for being incompetent, they also believe they should be entrusted with more taxpayer money. Instead of asking “should the state intervene?” or “can the state actually help?”, our first question now is always “how much should it intervene?”

The first step to changing the public debate around the size of the state and the tax burden is to change this. To start every debate with a discussion of whether the state should step in at all (even if it is decided quickly that it should) would slowly but surely remind us that there is a debate around the morality of taxes and the limits of the state that has long been forgotten.

We should be constantly asking ourselves if there is a way to achieve the same outcome without state intervention; whether the costs of the intervention are acceptable; whether the positive effects of the intervention offset the moral weight of restricting the freedom of individuals and taking their money. Even if the answer to all these is “yes”, it is the moral imperative of the Conservative Party to ask, and the act of doing so will make it more obvious (and hopefully missed) when this debate is absent.