What the Founding Fathers and Roman Tax Collectors Have in Common

Two examples of how historical arguments collapse under their own context

The Electoral College

“The Electoral College was invented to account for population disparity between states, and it’s what the Founding Fathers intended.”

This is an argument you see online a lot. It’s also mostly false. People tend to look at history, try to represent the views of historical groups of people as monolithic, and often ignore historical context and differences in the world and society that contributed to decisions made in the past. It is very easy to create these quips that seem true on the surface, especially to anyone who has a moderate knowledge of the relevant history, but typically, when you dig into the details of almost any political argument that relies on history, you’ll find that a lot of modern narrative is being applied.

Let’s look at the Electoral College, for example. Firstly, the Electoral College today does not work the same as when the United States was first founded. In 1796, your ballot depended heavily on where you lived. In some states, your state government selected the electors. In others, you voted for the president by direct popular vote. In some, you elected electors without any mention of the presidential candidate. In these states you would have been voting directly for an elector, someone from your local region whom you trusted to vote for your preferred candidate, or deliberate with others to make an informed decision. In the 1700s, most people would not have known much about politicians from other states. They may have heard about them, but would likely not even be aware of their reputation or policy positions. Many people may not have even known who the representatives from their own state were, just their local representative! So a system like the Electoral College became a natural solution to this problem. People could elect someone they trusted and knew locally, send them to meet with other electors from their state, and trust them to make an informed decision on who should be president. But this system only remained for a few elections. It wouldn’t be long until every ballot simply allowed you to vote for “the electors for [President] and [Vice President]”.

This is how we get the system we have today, designed to solve a problem that no longer exists, and not even working in the way it was originally designed.

But even the argument I’ve presented here has a lot of narrative. This wasn’t just a solution to logistical issues of electing the president. In fact, several founding fathers wanted a national direct election of the president by popular vote! But the political reality at the time was that they needed broad support from the states to ratify the Constitution, and direct election of the president sidelined many states with small populations.

It would be easy for Virginia, for example, to use its large population at the time to maintain longstanding control of the presidency. So politically, there was in fact a desire to have a compromising system in which smaller states would have a disproportionately larger say in the election of the president. But the southern states also had concerns. In direct elections, enslaved people could not vote, but with the Electoral College they could be counted towards the number of electors and benefit slaveholding states.

But it is not true that the Electoral College was designed to be a permanent solution, lasting to the end of time, agreed upon by all as the perfect way to elect the president. It was a compromise that, indeed, no one was fully satisfied with, even at the time of ratification. It was supported by different groups for different reasons, and solved enough practical issues that it became popular, and most importantly it allowed individual states to decide how they would manage their elections. Any argument that frames the Electoral College in absolutist historical terms is misleading at best.

Tax Collection in the Roman Empire

Let’s look at another example: tax collection in the Roman Empire. This is a less common argument, but you will occasionally hear someone argue that all tax collection is inherently sinful, pointing to how often tax collectors appear in the Bible as an example of essentially the “morally lowest common denominator” in many stories. For example, “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” and “If he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” The Bible does in fact refer to tax collectors in this way very often. There are also stories of Jesus explaining in essence that “even tax collectors can be forgiven.”

Any argument based around this, though, is inherently misleading due to historical context. The original wording for most modern English translations of “tax collector” in the Bible comes from the Greek word telōnēs, referring to workers in the Roman publicani system, or “tax farmers.”

These individuals were not like modern IRS agents. They were more comparable to the kind of private debt collector who calls and harasses debtors, and perhaps in some cases, they were comparable to criminal loan sharks who use violence to extract payment. The Romans used a tax farming system in which the right to collect certain taxes was auctioned off to private contractors, who would pay the Roman government up front and then be allowed to extract taxes from the local populace to enhance their own wealth. Imagine if, instead of filing your own taxes every year, a man simply showed up at your door demanding that you pay him taxes, showing you a contract he purchased from the government allowing him to collect money directly from you. This system was often corrupt, and while these tax collectors were subject to Roman laws, in occupied areas like biblical Judea their corrupt and criminal behavior was often overlooked.

This is all to say that trying to apply these sorts of historical arguments to modern institutions often falls flat. Most people today simply do not live or experience the same context under which many historical events occurred, and the events of the past often do not apply so cleanly to modern day politics. While we can use the past as a basis to inform our beliefs in the present, we need to remember that we are living in a vastly different world than even existed 40 years ago, let alone 250 years ago, or 2000 years ago.

These are just two examples, but once you start looking for this pattern, you’ll find it everywhere. Almost any time someone reaches into history to settle a modern argument with a clean, quotable line, there’s a good chance the reality was messier, more contested, and more tied to its own time than the argument lets on. It doesn’t mean history has nothing to tell us, it means the work of actually understanding it is harder than a single sentence can capture. The next time you see one of these arguments, whether it’s about the Founding Fathers, a Bible verse, an ancient philosopher, or anything else, it’s worth pausing to ask what’s being left out. More often than not, the answer is “quite a lot.”