A Consumption Tax - (An Exercise in Voluntary Socialism)

Written November 5, 2012

Yesterday at church we were having a lesson on stewardship (care for) the earth. We were talking about the verse in Genesis 1:28 where it says God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” We were trying to understand what this should mean to us as we so uncaringly consume all this energy and resources. 

My brainstorm was that we, as a church, should impose a consumption tax on ourselves. For one week out of the year (at least to start) we should add up all our non-food purchases, gas, electric, merchandise, whatever we buy that week. Then we should take 10% of that total and pay it into a church fund. This money would then be given to some worthy cause that goes to help those who are in the unfortunate position of being exploited by our desire to have cheap goods and energy. The European Union has done this in principle by placing a high tax on each gallon of gasoline sold. It has caused a dramatic drop in consumption and a rise in energy awareness. I think if we as a church would voluntarily do this to ourselves, it could also make us more cautious (at least for that one week) about what we are consuming. It seems that no one ever starts to care about something until it costs them money. This voluntary “tax” would be a way of experiencing the pain of consumption but in a way that it allows us to make smart and helpful choices with that pain. Pain is, after all, supposed to help guide us away from the thing that is hurting us. If our over consumption is hurting us -- and hurting the world -- we need to feel that pain and do something about it. The pain of the smog-filled sky over Beijing is a pain that no American would stand for long if it was their hometown. But we don’t feel it from this side of the globe, so we don’t care about it. We need to start to care and come up with some good ways to channel that care into appropriate actions! Perhaps a tax on excessive consumption could serve as a starting point.

Note from December 28, 2019: This exercise is likely to become involuntary under the direction of a lot of the socialist candidates in today’s Democratic Party of Historical Amnesia. They would claim that this path will lead to a society of social equality and bliss. Why not experiment with it and see if all their promises are true. (Maybe we could prove all past experiments to be wrong. Maybe utopia does not necessarily lead to terror!) But at least this is an experiment that we can experience, learn from, and then stop. Not so with a government program of which Ronald Reagan said, "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program."