Caesar's Due

Mark R. Crovelli has reveiwed Archbishop Chaput's new book, Render Unto Caesar, which is pretty interesting because Crovelli appears to be a Catholic anarchist- at least he uses St. Augustine to make his case. Crovelli suggests that the archbishop never really deals with the core of the problem- how taxes and theft are pretty much indistinguishable from each other.

I suspect the problem is similar to the 'just' price stuff we have dealt with before. Non-economically minded people somehow assume that one can objectively arrive at a fair price, meanwhile, the more economically minded know that the only thing that can assure a just price is the absense of coercion in the transaction. So, often we hear people calling for just prices via some sort of coercion, which is really annoying because the policies they call for destroy the possibility of a just price in the first place!

Similarly, we see this fuzzy thinking about taxes too. One of the clear biblical necessities to human society are court systems- judges. Well, if anyone were to become a full-time judge we would expect that he should somehow be paid for his work.
One can even envision a situation in which these payments are made voluntarily and not coercively- but if there is anything resembling 'just taxes' the cut off would have to be much closer to this level of government and not the leviathan we know today. And, of course, the saner sort of anarchist actually spends a lot of time trying to prove that a free market justice system could exist, therefore rendering the coercive nature of taxes unnecessary.

And finally, using 'render unto Caesar' for stuff like this kind of bothers me. They were trying to trick Jesus, so He answers in a way that avoids getting lynched right then and there- truthfully, but not particularly illuminatively. He's essentially signalling that Caesar, and all this money with Caesar's face on it DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE SOMETHING FAR MORE IMPORTANT IS GOING ON!!!
Do people read the conversation about the temple tax? He pays this stuff because He doesn't want to get crucified with the words TAX EVADER on the cross.

70 A.D. brought the end of the Temple and nation, which basically rendered that argument about rendering moot. If they had accepted him, what they would have gained would be so far above what Caesar had that, again, the argument would be moot. To then attempt to apply such a statement to America, where the government is suppose to derive it's power through the Consitution, from the People- where we can see this government ignoring that Constitution, where we can then question how it can be a 'legitimate authority' if it disobeys the document from which it's authority is derived- well, I don't find it particularly compelling at all.