My father’s father loved wit and wisdom in all its forms; he
would laboriously copy long passages of beloved poems into a
special notebook. Although I was only eleven when he passed on,
many of his jokes remain fresh in my memory. One involved a poor
Jewish man who writes a letter to God asking for a hundred dollars.
The postman, seeing the Jewish surname of the sender, decides to
forward the letter to the Israeli Knesset. They get a kick out of
the request and vote to send the man fifty. A year later the man,
down on his luck again, sends God a new appeal for a C-note, but
this time with a postscript.
“Please don’t send it through the Knesset again. They keep
half.”
Then this other classic that I heard as a kid. A Jew is
traveling with a hundred dollars in his pocket and the sun is
setting on Friday night. Once the Sabbath begins he can’t carry
money, so he’ll have to walk the rest of the way home with empty
pockets. Where to store the hundred? He dives quickly into a
synagogue, opens a Bible to the passage reading “You should not
steal” and leaves the money inside the book. When he returns on
Sunday, he finds no money on that page. He does find a fifty; it’s
on the page which reads, “And your brother shall live together with
you…”
These gags came back to me yesterday when, traveling through
Tennessee, I happened upon a startling story that has not garnered much national attention.
The State of Tennessee happily announced that its new tax on
illegal drugs has successfully collected $1.7 million in its first
year of existence. This tax does not cover any other activity; it
directly targets the sale of illegal narcotics. Once a dealer has
paid, he receives a little sticker to place on his merchandise. The
tax department is enjoined from passing along the information to
law enforcement. The revenue, however, is said to be earmarked for
fighting “drug crime.”
No one likes a stickler except, usually, the tax collector. For
me to cavil would seem uncivil; after all, this reads like such an
inspired bit of poetic justice. Yet I can’t help thinking of the
point made by those old jokes. The state cannot engage in random
taxation, nor do thievery and taxation mix. The bottom line is that
the state really has no power to levy such a tax. It has just
stepped outside the ethical boundaries of the mulcting power,
ostensibly to serve some nobler cause. Sorry, fellas: bad
government is not the answer to bad citizenship.
In brief, the brief for all taxation is the notion that the
state provides something that facilitates the transaction. If a
person earns income in a certain place, he does so by relying on
the protection of his person and his property — and often the
enforcement of the contracts — afforded by the local governing
authority. If he buys a product or a piece of real estate, he can
be taxed on the same basis. The state in effect takes a commission.
In fact, once such taxes are in place, there is a long-standing
practice of not excluding illegal income or purchases. Thus, in
theory prostitutes are expected to pay their taxes, and gangsters
like Al Capone were prosecuted for tax evasion even on the basis of
illegal profits.
However, to institute a tax on illegal drugs per se is a moral
and legal absurdity. The state, pursuant to its duly constituted
laws, is trying to arrest the seller, to stop the sale, to
confiscate the item, to arrest the buyer, to stop the use, to
arrest the user, even to identify and arrest the supplier. On what
basis can it ask for a fee as an enabler? It is simply
indefensible.
The other moral question involves the right to take the money
and provide a stamp without arresting the remitter. Particularly
since the money is going to law enforcement. Doesn’t it add up to
law enforcement taking money to look away from the commission of a
crime?
There is a further complicating technicality, the fact that
federal law allows federal agents to confiscate all drug moneys.
This means that the state is collecting money that belongs to the
federal government, a conflict of jurisdictions. All in all, this
is government as sport, as theater, as business but not as guidance
or leadership.
Only one approach is legitimate. If any branch of government
learns of a sale of drugs that will take place, it must alert law
enforcement, just as it expects every private citizen to do, even
an attorney or a psychologist. The perpetrator should be thrown
into jail, where the chaplain can hand him a Bible that is opened
to this verse: “Before a blind man you should not place a
stumbling-block.”
