The headline over Dr Garret FitzGerald's column in The Irish Times nine days ago risked sending Mr Osama bin Laden into a fret about the identity of this new usurper to his throne as king of mayhem. But for the bad grammar, I would have mounted it in my bathroom. It read: "The dangerous anarchy of John Waters". I knew immediately they meant "anarchism".
Dr FitzGerald, responding to my suggestion that taxation is not a moral issue, wrote: "John Waters claims a moral right for individuals to reject the decisions of our parliament by arrogating to themselves a right to determine how much tax they should pay." Actually, I had suggested that taxation relates to social cohesion, which, for all its merits, is not in itself a moral imperative. The laws of the land enforce the decisions of parliament, including the legal obligation to pay tax, and I did not question these. Why should we need both belt and braces, given that the legal imperative is much more effective than reliance upon the theological morality of a God whose dominion Dr FitzGerald's own secularisation agenda has done much to unseat?
The "moral" obligation to pay tax is a socially created intellectual phantasm. The necessity or otherwise of the illusion is immaterial. It is true that if everyone withheld payment, social life would collapse, but it is essential also for social cohesion that people adhere to Greenwich Mean Time, and this does not make it immoral to set your clock slow.
That the citizen's moral rights must be balanced against those of the collective introduces ethical complexity to the taxation issue. An absolute moral obligation suggests there is no such thing as poor leadership, unfairness or bad law, and no right to resist such phenomena. Dr FitzGerald acknowledged that "rules . . . which are unjust may be lacking in moral authority", and "a poor and hungry person stealing food in order to survive is not acting wrongly". We need no more to see that tax compliance is not a moral imperative but embraces elements of subjectivity dividing morality from legality.
Like a pious church-gate rhetorician, Dr FitzGerald confined his argument about the State's use of levied revenues to the most compelling examples. He talked about "redistributive measures", about tax evasion being "a crime against the poor" because it leads to "public services like the hospitals being cut back to an extent that by postponing treatment caused great hardship, and in some cases may even have deprived people of their right to life".
If the State confined its redistributive measures to the provision of medical services for the poor, and if this was the sole purpose of taxation, Dr FitzGerald's case might be unanswerable. But in addition to healthcare and social welfare, the State provides funding for such as golf clubs and art galleries, and moreover, does so while leaving more compelling areas of necessity under-endowed. So there is a high degree of, yes, moral compromise in the State's redistribution of tax revenues.
Is a citizen who believes the education of his children a more worthy purpose than the provision of sporting services for strangers morally entitled to withhold sufficient funds from the State to provide first for the needs of his family? I believe so. Relationships between citizen and State do have a moral dimension, but this is a two-way street.
Or, should a citizen who left school at 15 and prospered mainly by his initiative, have a similar tax liability as someone whose enrichment is due to a lavish education at the expense of the State? I do not believe so. And is a citizen who has voted into office a party that has promised to provide a decent public transport system, justified in withholding revenues to compensate himself for unjust penalties arising from the breach of that undertaking? I believe that, under certain conditions, a citizen whose car has been clamped would, in paying his annual tax, be morally justified in withholding the release fee from a State which has introduced draconian measures against motorists while failing to provide an alternative.
An inflexible compulsion to pay tax is intrinsically more immoral than a failure to pay. The relationship between citizen and state should be one of mutual consent - we should desire to live together in harmony. That we don't is largely the responsibility of politicians who have provided bad leadership and bad taxes in equal measure. Dr FitzGerald trumpeted his introduction of the DIRT tax and complained that this was "sabotaged" by "some still unidentified person in the Revenue Commissioners". Perhaps this enlightened person recognised DIRT for the iniquitous tax it was.
It strikes me that all Dr FitzGerald's arguments about tax evasion could be advanced against the writing-off of debts. A bank customer who succeeded with special pleading to have a loan forgiven could deprive a poorer customer of credit with which to provide for his family. In fact, the notional disadvantaged citizen would here suffer a treble whammy: firstly, in the resultant denial of credit; secondly, in being hit with additional charges to compensate the institution for bailing out his fellow-customer; and, thirdly, as a citizen, when the bank obtained relief against the bad debt in paying its own tax bill. I look forward to Dr FitzGerald's response to this hypothesis.