Washington Post: “Instead of asking whether churches and religious organizations deserve to be tax-exempt, we should ask why governments should be able to tax them at all. Taxation, after all, involves interference by the state, and in a free society such interference needs to be justified. The power to tax involves the power to destroy, as Daniel Webster argued in the Supreme Court nearly two centuries ago. While our government does have the right to levy taxes, it’s only because ‘We the People’ have authorized it to do so — in order to raise the funds needed to provide for the common good. But should we give our government this “power to destroy” over churches and religious institutions?“
