Territorial Weirdness Circa 1700
Oddly enough, to our modern sensibilities, the Holy Roman Empire encompassed parts of Prussia, Denmark, Austria-Hungary, and France, while leaving other parts of each country outside the empire.
St. Paul and I Agree...
Taxation is not theft: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13 The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
I wonder how the legal norm ever developed that some countries could be partly in and partly outside of the Holy Roman Empire.
ReplyDeleteI suppose it is comparable to the status of the Angevin Empire (England + Normandy + Aquitaine + etc.) in the 12th century, large chunks of which were theoretically vassals of the king of France & other chunks not. HRE failed to develop incipient proto-nation state model of other European powers and so retained the full weirdness of the high Middle Ages political system as an archaism up to the beginning of the 19th century. Especially weird since the Holy Roman Emperor (unlike the 12th century kings of France) himself possessed large territories that were theoretically outside of his own empire.