This file is a short single-author moral-political essay, apparently collected in Modes of Conduct, focused on the ethical conflicts created by income-tax compliance. Sennholz’s central thesis is not simply that taxation is burdensome, but that tax day forces morally reflective citizens into a conflict between truthfulness, obedience, property rights, and resistance to injustice.
On April 15, however, we may become aware of a dilemma which involves our honesty.
The essay begins with the ordinary mechanics of tax reporting—forms, deductions, depreciation schedules, household employees, business travel—and shows how bureaucratic detail becomes a moral test. The immediate question is whether one should correct an accountant’s favorable error or “fiddle the system.” Sennholz sharpens the issue by refusing to let resentment become an easy excuse: even if one believes the IRS has acted arbitrarily, retaliation through dishonesty remains ethically suspect.
Do two wrongs make a right?
From there the argument widens from individual temptation to the scale and character of modern taxation. Sennholz emphasizes the cumulative burden of federal, state, local, payroll, consumption, property, death, self-employment, school, real-estate, and corporate taxes. His economic point supports a moral one: taxation is not merely revenue collection but a system of direction and control over those who produce.
It is fair to conclude that professional Americans lose more than one-half of their incomes to numerous taxing authorities many of which use their share to regulate and direct the taxpayers who support them.
The middle of the essay links this burden to political cynicism. Sennholz reviews broken promises and deficit politics, arguing that tax cuts without spending cuts merely shift the burden to future taxpayers. He also portrays revenue agents not as neutral technicians alone, but as possible bearers of egalitarian or anti-property ideologies. Yet the essay does not conclude that official misconduct licenses private dishonesty. Its key conceptual move is to distinguish criticism of unjust policy from abandonment of moral principle.
No matter how politicians may act in their pursuit of power and largesse, we must be guided by the principles of morality.
The final section turns explicitly to moral theory. Sennholz contrasts Kantian truth-telling “regardless of consequences” with consequentialist reflection on the effects of compliance. He does not fully endorse either extreme. Instead, he seeks a hierarchy of duties: truth is basic, but not absolute; property is essential, but not an idol above life; law matters, but legality does not make plunder moral.
To resolve this conflict of obligations, we may need to reflect on ethical theories and establish a hierarchy of duties.
Within this hierarchy, legal tax avoidance becomes a mediating practice: tax-exempt investments, charitable foundations, restructuring business activity, or emigration. The memorable aphorism crystallizes Sennholz’s libertarian moral horizon, where allegiance belongs less to the tax jurisdiction than to the conditions of freedom.
Where there is liberty there is home.
The essay’s most forceful political claim is that majority rule cannot transmute theft into justice. Redistribution by vote remains, in Sennholz’s terms, morally continuous with plunder, even when performed through democratic procedures and justified by welfare language.
Stealing is not defensible morally even if it is done by majority vote.
The relevance of the piece lies in its refusal to reduce tax ethics either to legal obedience or anti-tax rebellion. Sennholz asks how citizens should act when private honesty is demanded by institutions they judge coercive and immoral. His answer is austere: resist ideological confusion, prefer lawful avoidance where possible, recognize higher duties when they genuinely apply, but do not corrupt one’s own character in the name of retaliation. The closing sentence binds the argument together by making private and civic morality mutually dependent.
Without civic morality, society is bound to suffer; without private morality, we wrong ourselves with our own action and afflict and corrupt civic morality.
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