The refusal of the tax, an inheritance of slavery?

Compared to Europeans, Americans seem viscerally hostile to tax: a compulsory rate of compulsory levies significantly lower than the average of theOECD (26.8 % of GDP American in 2005, compared to more than 50 % in Sweden or 44 % in France) and the vigor of antifiscal rhetoric both testify to a deep distrust of the principle of social redistribution, also visible among those who could be the beneficiaries. In the American debate, the refusal of tax and Big Government is often presented as the defense of individual freedoms and the ideological grip of neoliberalism. A few weeks after the disappearance of Milton Friedman, who did more than any other economist to discredit the state-distributor, the tax is still experienced in the United States as an obstacle to freedom, and the policy of entrenchment of public power, defended since 2001 by George W. Bush through an ambitious program to reduce tax charges, as faithful to “ real American tradition ».

These popular reactions are not new in the history of the United States. Since the episode of the Boston Tea Partywho saw in 1773 the independence of the Massa-Chussets revolting against the taxes imposed by the English colonial power, the idea according to which freedom is conquered against the tax is deeply rooted in the “ great story “American, and anti -fiscal rhetoric never ceases to draw its own legitimacy from this founding act. Just as in France, the protesters of the tax abundantly summoned the memory of the complaints of the revolutionaries of 1789 against the arbitrariness and the injustice of the royal tax, the adversaries of the federal state or the federated states were able to present themselves as the faithful heirs of the heroes of independence. Populists of the 1890s to taxpayers’ leagues from the 1930s, and until the “ tax revolt Who led to the vote of proposal 13 in California in 1978, all these movements acted in the name of the fight for individual freedom and against tax oppression.

Robin Einhorn, historian at the University of Berkeley, is therefore to a real national myth. Specialist in the economic history of XVIII^e century, Einhorn is part of critical studies which revisit the period of independence and pass the “ great story “American in a screen of historical analysis. The title of his work, American Taxation, American Slaverymay make one think of the traditional equation making tax a form of enslavement ; In reality, on the contrary, it aims to uncover the slave sources of the tax system as it was implemented in the 1780s and maintained until the beginning of XX^e century. His thesis, provocative, is stated as soon as the introduction: “ The anti -statist rhetoric which continues to saturate our political life originates from slavery and not freedom. His demonstration derives his strength from his ability not to lock himself in a purely intellectual history ; What is more, Einhorn wants to show how the question of slavery influenced constitutional debates and the form of American institutions. To hear it, slavery is not a regrettable exception to the principles proclaimed in the declaration of independence ; What is more, it must be written at the heart of the American political account.

Southern heritage

Hatred of the State and Taxes would therefore be, originally, the expression of slave conservatism rather than the reflection of a conception of individual freedom. To demonstrate this thesis, the author endeavors, at first, to compare the tax systems put in place in the colonies founded in the north and in the south of the North American continent in the XVIII^e century, before the revolutionary period. It notes a difference in size: in the North, the guarantees of individual freedoms and the establishment of a relatively democratic power went hand in hand with sophisticated taxation, based on the evaluation of wealth ; While in the south, the legislation reflected an economic life based on slavery and attached an extreme importance to limit the weight of the compulsory levy. The owners of slaves were indeed, from the XVIII^e century, obsessed with the risk of seeing other whites-notably the industrial elites which emerged in the North-jeopardizing the functioning of the planting economy by heavily taxing this servile labor. This question of the taxation of slaves, first posed on the scale of the States, later played a decisive role in the constitutional debates on the formation of the American Republic. According to Einhorn, the modesty of the taxation powers granted to the federal state by the 1787 Constitution would be explained by the determined action of slave owners, anxious to prevent a government in which they would become a minority to impose new taxes for them.

In a second step, the precise look of the historian makes it possible to understand how the interests of the southern oligarchy ended up “ lock The American institutions and to put the institution of slavery away from the power of the state. On the one hand, the 3/5 clause^e – under which a slave “ was equivalent »3/5^e of a free man during the counting of the population which determined the number of seats available to each State in the House of Representatives – offered the southern states a larger representation in the Congress. On the other hand, constitutional clauses stipulated that any direct tax taken by the federal state should be proportionate to the population of each of the States being part of the Union. These provisions, in appearance in appearance of the principle of equity, actually had the main effect of excluding any possibility of a federal tax on slaves. The tax system adopted would reflect the concern of the constituents to bypass the question of servile work and thus protect the fragile unity of the New Republic.

Respect for the interests of slave owners would therefore explain why, until the beginning of XX^e A century, customs duties were the only source of financing in the American federal state. For Einhorn, the dissemination of Jeffersonian rhetoric at XIX^e century, making distrust of the State a positive and democratic value, would have helped to mask the original intentions of “ Founding fathers »Of the Union. Pushing his argument further, the historian affirms that even after the abolition of slavery, these anti -democratic motivations of taxation served to protect industrial and capitalist interests at the end of XIX^e century. It is indeed in the name of the clauses imposed in the Constitution by the Southern States – that in particular which stipulated the obligation to proportion the federal direct tax to the population of the States – that the Supreme Court Invalida, in a famous judgment Pollock vs Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company From 1895, the principle of income tax. It was not until the vote of the 16th^e Amendment in 1913, and the creation of federal income tax, so that the obstacles to the affirmation of the federal state fiscal power, posed in the 1780s, are finally lifted.

Robin Einhorn’s thesis is radical and readily excessive. The work was received both as a remarkable work of rereading the history of American democracy in the prism of slavery, and as a militant pamphlet in favor of the relegitimation of the tax. It is part of an institutionalist historiographical current which confronts the founding myths of the United States with complex power games that have shaped political institutions. By even his excess, the words of the historian, who tends to make protesters of the tax of the last thirty years the distant heirs of the slavers of the slavery XVIII^e century, aims to break the current consensus which sees in tax and in the federal state a hindrance to the freedom of American citizens. What Einhorn is ultimately reminded is that Boston’s separatists did not fight on the other hand the principle of tax, but for the right to impose themselves freely and sovereignly: the history of tax and that of democracy are therefore inseparably linked.

Article published in The life of ideas (paper version), published in March 2007