Dear <<First Name>>
 
Sometimes folk ask about the ethics of tax fairness. Where does it come from? Why do Christians have anything to say on the issue? There are lots of ways we could respond to this, but one is simply to return to the age old instructions that God gave us several millennia ago, and in particular these three:
 
Do not steal; do not covet; do not murder.
 
Do not steal

If I go into a restaurant and enjoy a meal and service, but then at the end, run away before paying the bill, I’m guilty of theft; If I get in a taxi, but at my destination leave without paying, I’m guilty of theft. Yet some of our corporations seem to think that it is perfectly acceptable to enjoy a wide range of services from the state - and yet skip away without paying their dues. 
 
We don’t always think of it like this but the fact is that all corporations, especially large multinational ones, can only function because the state has already provided the foundations for their trade. Corporations require a healthy and educated workforce, they need a national and global infrastructure by which they can move their goods or services, they are dependent on the security and political stability provided by states.  There is a reason they don’t thrive in impoverished, war-torn and fragile states – and it is not because the goods and services they provide are not needed or wanted. My point is simply that from day one of trading, a corporation is already in debt to the countries in which it operates for the services it has benefited from – and taxation is at least partly their way of repaying that debt. 
 
Do not covet:

Why do we have inequality? There are many reasons, but at its root is the fact that as a society we have bought into the lie that greed, or if we use the old term covetousness, is good. Certainly, corporate profits can be a primary driver of such inequality. In recent weeks, leaks in the US have shown that some of the wealthiest men in the world have paid no tax at all on their personal incomes. This is one of the reasons why just 22 of those men own the same wealth as all the women in sub-Saharan Africa. Such levels of inequality are obscene and taxing corporate profits can be one mechanism to help reduce, or at least prevent the inexorable rise in such inequality. 
 
Do not murder

You would think that this one is obvious, but it is not unreasonable to say that the way in which many of our corporations are polluting the world amounts to murder. For decades, if not centuries, corporations have not been paying for the environmental damage they have created. This is especially true in respect of climate change. While the vast majority of cumulative greenhouse emissions have been emitted by the global north, the health and economic consequences are felt by those in the global south. It is they whose crops are being destroyed, it is they whose lives and livelihoods are destroyed in the process. Taxing corporations effectively and redistributing that money to the global south is one way to begin to redress that imbalance. As was said in a medical journal regarding climate change, “The rich will find their world to be more expensive, inconvenient, uncomfortable, disrupted and colourless; in general, more unpleasant and unpredictable, perhaps greatly so. The poor will die.” 
 

Do not murder, do not steal, do not covet – those are just some of the reasons why we need to make tax fairer.