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Tax History: Ralph Waldo Emerson Liked Wealth — Taxes Not So Much

Posted on Aug. 2, 2021

It’s a sad cruelty of fate that Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of America’s deepest and most original thinkers, is typically remembered today as a master of the epigram. “He remains perhaps one of the most cited American authors,” observed Annika Neklason in a 2019 piece for The Atlantic, a magazine Emerson founded in 1857. “But his words surface now mainly in the form of decontextualized aphorisms and inspirational quotes.”

That’s certainly true if you search the pages of Tax Notes, where Emerson’s name appears with some regularity, often in company with complaints about foolish consistency, hobgoblins, and little minds.

We do Emerson a grave injustice if we remember him solely for his pithy wit, wisdom, and occasional snark. As a central figure among the New England Transcendentalists of the early and mid-19th century, he had much to say about religion, society, art, and literature.

He even had a few thoughts about taxation.

To be clear, Emerson was no tax expert; his occasional engagement with the topic didn’t even raise him to the level of a tax dilettante. But Transcendentalism had important implications for aspects of public policy. Emerson and his colleagues in the movement are best remembered for their vigorous opposition to slavery, but they also engaged other political issues, including public finance.

Many of the most famous Transcendentalists, including Henry David Thoreau, believed taxes were inextricably linked to slavery, because they provided revenue for a state that in turn supported slavery. Other Transcendentalists, including Emerson, considered taxation a separate issue, philosophically and practically distinct from slavery — at least most of the time.

Either way, what the Transcendentalists thought about taxation mattered. Emerson, in particular, was an important public intellectual with outsized influence in national debate. His ideas about wealth, individualism, and personal freedom were highly relevant in a nation beset by sectional strife and struggling with governmental — and fiscal — reform.

Policy Preferences

Emerson didn’t concern himself with the details of fiscal policy at any level of government. But he articulated a few important preferences. For instance, he was no fan of protective tariffs, describing them as a pernicious burden on both foreign producers and domestic consumers. By inclination, if not education or ideology, he was a free-trader, regarding international exchange as a boon for both parties. Government should encourage or at least not impede such transactions, he believed.

“If the Creator has made oranges, coffee and pineapples in Cuba and refused them to Massachusetts, I cannot see why we should put a fine on the Cubans for bringing these to us,” Emerson wrote in 1854 in one of his journals. “We punish the planter there and the consumer here for adding these benefits to life.”

In place of tariffs, Emerson supported excise taxes on luxury goods — especially socially undesirable ones. “Tax opium, tax poisons, tax brandy, gin, wine, hasheesh, tobacco and whatever articles of pure luxury but not healthy and delicious food,” he wrote.

Emerson’s fiscal policy preferences put him outside the mainstream of 19th-century political opinion — especially in northern states like Emerson’s home in Massachusetts. Tariff duties were the principal source of federal revenue before the Civil War (and again after it was over). In addition to their revenue yield, high tariffs tended to be popular in the northern states, which were home to many nascent industries leery of foreign competition.

Federal excise taxes, meanwhile, were not simply unpopular but largely nonexistent before the Civil War. An extensive program of sumptuary taxes, such as the one proposed by Emerson, was clearly a fringe idea in the 1850s. It was explicable in Emerson’s case only as an extension of his moral philosophy, which seemed to treat taxation primarily as a tool for personal betterment, with revenue yield a happy bonus.

Small Government

Emerson’s moral philosophy had other implications for fiscal policy, still important but less direct than his call for sumptuary taxes.

New England Transcendentalism was a literary, philosophical, religious, and political movement with Emerson as its leading light. It also included a roster of other luminaries, including some still famous today (like Thoreau) and others with less 21st-century name recognition (Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, and Theodore Parker, to name a few).

Transcendentalism emphasized the importance of an individual’s relationship with God and the universe. Famously, this emphasis on individualism was often channeled into a focus on the individual in nature: Think Thoreau at Walden Pond.

Politically, Transcendentalism tended to encourage a strong appreciation for individual liberty, a skeptical attitude toward organized government, and a commitment to social change. Certainly, these were the beliefs that Emerson found most congenial, although his views weren’t inflexible, nor were they uncompromised by exigency. He was a practical as well as a deeply idealistic man.

As a general rule, Emerson supported a limited state, especially at the federal level. As Raymer McQuiston noted in a useful but uneven 1923 book, The Relation of Ralph Waldo Emerson to Public Affairs, transcendental individualism was the key; because every individual held a spark of the divine, any unnecessary restraint of the individual was also an offense against God. “The less government we have the better,” Emerson concluded in his 1840s essay “Politics.”

Emerson was no anarchist; he recognized that the smallness of government had a limit, that some degree of social order — and individual regimentation — was unavoidable. He made room for civil disobedience, as evidenced by one of his more famous aphorisms: “Good men must not obey the laws too well,” he counseled. But Emerson was a distinctly cautious revolutionary. “He was conservative in his application of this doctrine,” McQuiston wrote. “He was not primarily interested in revolution against the political order, even though his theory recognized it as a possibility.”

Transcendental Tax Protest

The same conservative impulse did not weigh down his protégé, Thoreau, who staged a famous tax protest over the Mexican War, which he saw as an attempt to extend the hateful institution of slavery. In 1846 Thoreau was arrested for nonpayment of his poll tax in Concord, Massachusetts. He had actually stopped paying the tax several years earlier, citing his objection to the continued existence of slavery in the American union. But in 1846, the start of the Mexican War gave Thoreau another target for his resistance — and increased the salience of his public objection.

As it happened, Thoreau was not the first Concord resident to stage a tax protest. In 1843 his neighbor and fellow activist Amos Bronson Alcott had refused to pay his own poll tax, citing a similar objection to slavery. In fact, it was Alcott’s protest that prompted Thoreau to begin withholding his own tax payments the same year.

Neither Alcott nor Thoreau was interested in fine distinctions about which jurisdictions were levying which taxes and which jurisdictions were directly pursuing pro-slavery policies. Poll taxes were a state and local issue, while slavery and war-making were issues of national concern. But for Thoreau and sympathetic Transcendentalists, the stain of slavery had corrupted every level of American government.

Thoreau spent only a single night in jail; a relative quickly paid his delinquent tax bill, ending his protest prematurely. But he remained in his cell long enough to get a visit from Emerson. “Henry, why are you here?” Emerson asked the younger man. “Why are you not here?” Thoreau responded archly.

A reasonable question — and one that Emerson struggled to answer. Ultimately, Emerson found his excuse in the sort of jurisdictional distinction that Thoreau found tedious; judging local government in Massachusetts to be useful and largely unsullied by the national sin of slavery, Emerson believed local taxpaying to be morally defensible, McQuiston wrote. For Emerson, tax protests like Thoreau’s were certainly defensible, even admirable, especially in light of the Transcendental faith in human spiritual perfection and social reformation. But they were not always or even usually necessary.

Emerson and Wealth

As noted earlier, New England Transcendentalism gave pride of place to the individual as a spiritual actor. When brought to bear on the practical world of politics, Emerson’s belief in individualism produced a set of free-market policy preferences. “He favored any arrangement of economic affairs which promised greater opportunity for all,” McQuiston noted. Emerson also “recognized the necessity of wealth, and the limitations of reform, and revolted against visionary plans for abolishing the evils of society by the artificial process of a different distribution of wealth.”

Emerson’s overweening focus on individualism could sometimes make him seem rather unsympathetic toward others; he had a tendency to hold people responsible for their own lot in life, even when fate had dealt them an especially bad hand. A poor person, for Emerson, bore at least partial responsibility for his own poverty. Moreover, efforts to relieve poverty might diminish the incentive to work, which would also have the effect of diminishing the drive for spiritual perfection (because the two were linked).

At the same time, Emerson was aware that poverty was itself a barrier to spiritual development. He understood, in other words, that poverty was a problem. He was simply unconvinced that government — with its requisite regimentation and loss of individual freedom — was the answer.

Emerson took a rather benign view of wealth. “He thought that the acquisition of wealth was generally the result of industry, perseverance, financial prudence, and service of some sort to society,” McQuiston wrote. He was not naïve; he recognized that wealth was often squandered and frequently used for immoral ends. But wealth was also the reward for industry and hard work — things that Emerson valued as elements of human freedom and perfectibility.

And of course, any effort to limit wealth would necessarily involve an expansion of government power — an obvious case of where the treatment was likely to be worse than the disease.

Emerson’s pro-wealth sympathies were also consistent with his broader support for some form of earned aristocracy. While committed to democracy as a form of government, he was no leveler and was inclined to support merit-based distinctions. Wealth earned through industry and trade was a better measure of merit than most alternatives, he believed. An aristocracy of wealth was transitory rather than hereditary, open to all and reserved to none.

“The aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not entailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the same sort,” Emerson wrote in his 1844 essay “The Young American.”

Indeed, it was Emerson’s faith in merit-based wealth that prompted the best tax-related aphorism in his entire body of work. While it uses the word “tax” in a metaphorical sense, the statement bears directly on issues of public finance — and tax-based redistribution in particular.

“Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay,” Emerson observed in a passage on aristocracy.

Critics of progressive taxation have been trading on that observation ever since.

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