The Government's First Claim

Geraldine Tyler owned a one-bedroom condominium in Minneapolis. In 2010, in her eighties, she moved into a senior community and stopped paying the property taxes. In 2015 Hennepin County seized the condominium. She owed about $15,000 in taxes, interest and penalties. The county sold the condominium for $40,000, kept the entire amount, and told her the remaining $25,000 was not hers. Minnesota law allowed it.

In 2023 a unanimous Supreme Court held that it did not matter what Minnesota law allowed. The county could take what Tyler owed. Keeping more, the Court held in Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598 U.S. 631 (2023), was a taking of private property without just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment. Chief Justice Roberts traced the principle back through American history to Magna Carta.

The case captures, in miniature, both halves of a very old question. The government's power to tax and to seize property for unpaid taxes was never in doubt; Tyler did not dispute the debt. What was at issue was the limit. What gives a government the authority to demand a portion of private wealth — and what limits that authority?

Medieval England: Consent and the Crown's Necessities

Medieval English kings drew revenue from their own estates, from feudal dues, and from extraordinary levies such as scutage (a payment in lieu of military service) and "aids." King John's heavy and arbitrary demands were among the grievances that produced Magna Carta in 1215. Its clause 12 provided that no scutage or aid, apart from three customary ones, would be imposed except by the common counsel of the kingdom.

That clause was dropped from later reissues, but the principle it expressed — that extraordinary taxation required the consent of those taxed, through some representative body — grew into one of the defining features of English constitutional history. Parliaments developed in large part around the Crown's need for money. The Petition of Right (1628) protested taxes levied without Parliament, and the struggle over Charles I's "ship money" ended with Parliament's declaration of its illegality in 1641. The Bill of Rights of 1689 settled the point: "levying money for or to the use of the Crown, by pretence of prerogative, without grant of Parliament ... is illegal."

Colonial America: "No Taxation Without Representation"

The colonists inherited that principle and turned it against Parliament itself. When Parliament imposed the Stamp Act in 1765, the Stamp Act Congress resolved that it was "inseparably essential to the freedom of a people" that no taxes be imposed on them but with their own consent, given personally or by their representatives — and that the colonists were not, and could not be, represented in the House of Commons. The Townshend duties, the Tea Act and the response to them followed. The Declaration of Independence listed "imposing Taxes on us without our Consent" among its charges against the King.

The colonial argument was never that taxation was illegitimate. Colonial assemblies taxed their own residents throughout the period. The argument was about who held the power to tax and whose consent it required.

The Constitutional Framework

The Articles of Confederation gave Congress no power to tax; it could only request money from the states, which frequently did not pay. The Constitution of 1787 corrected this deliberately. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress power "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare." Duties, imposts and excises must be uniform throughout the United States; "direct" taxes must be apportioned among the states by population (Art. I, §§ 2, 9); and all bills for raising revenue must originate in the House of Representatives (Art. I, § 7) — the chamber closest to the voters.

States kept their own broad taxing powers, subject to federal constitutional limits. In McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819), Chief Justice Marshall struck down a Maryland tax on the Bank of the United States with the famous observation that "the power to tax involves the power to destroy," and that a state could not wield that power against a lawful instrument of the national government.

Resistance Tested the Power Early

The new federal taxing power was challenged by force within a few years. Alexander Hamilton's 1791 excise on distilled spirits provoked the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania; in 1794 President Washington led a militia force of nearly 13,000 men to suppress it. Two leaders were convicted of treason and later pardoned. The episode established that the federal government would enforce its revenue laws and that disagreement with a tax had to be pursued through politics and courts rather than refusal.

The courts became the arena for the largest fights. In Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 429, 158 U.S. 601 (1895), the Supreme Court held the 1894 income tax unconstitutional insofar as it taxed income from property without apportionment. The response was a constitutional amendment: the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, authorizing taxes on incomes "from whatever source derived, without apportionment." In Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916), the Court upheld the income tax enacted under it. The arguments that the amendment was never properly ratified or that wages are not income have been rejected repeatedly; our earlier investigation Why the Authority to Tax Income Is Sometimes Questioned examines them in detail.

From Assessment to Seizure

The power to impose a tax would be hollow without a power to collect it. Here the history is one of strikingly strong collection tools balanced by procedural guarantees.

Distraint without a court. Since medieval times, revenue officers could seize goods for unpaid taxes without first suing in court — a practice called distraint. The Supreme Court accepted its American version in Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., 59 U.S. (18 How.) 272 (1856), upholding a "distress warrant" issued by the Treasury against a customs collector who had embezzled funds, and holding that summary administrative collection of public revenue was consistent with due process given its long English and colonial pedigree. In Phillips v. Commissioner, 283 U.S. 589 (1931), the Court again upheld summary collection, emphasizing that the taxpayer retained the right to judicial review afterward.

Liens and levies. Under the Internal Revenue Code, unpaid federal taxes become a lien on all of the taxpayer's property after assessment, notice and demand (26 U.S.C. § 6321). The IRS may then levy — seize — property and rights to property (§ 6331), after a further notice of intent.

Added protections. In the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, after highly publicized congressional hearings on collection abuses, Congress created "collection due process" hearings (26 U.S.C. §§ 6320, 6330), giving taxpayers a right to an independent administrative hearing and Tax Court review before most levies. The Tax Court itself, originating as the Board of Tax Appeals in 1924, allows taxpayers to contest a deficiency before paying it.

Property tax sales. State and local governments enforce property taxes through liens and, ultimately, tax sales. The Supreme Court has required notice that is genuinely reasonable: in Jones v. Flowers, 547 U.S. 220 (2006), Arkansas sold a house after a certified letter to the owner came back unclaimed, and the Court held that the state should have taken additional reasonable steps before selling. Tyler then set a substantive limit: the government may take its debt from the sale, but not the owner's surplus equity.

The Limits, Collected

Across eight centuries, the boundaries of the power to tax have taken a consistent set of forms:

• Consent through representation — from Magna Carta's "common counsel" to the Origination Clause.
• Lawful statutory authority — a tax must be imposed by the legislature; officers may collect only what the law authorizes. Collection without statutory basis is subject to refund suits and injunction in appropriate cases.
• Constitutional structure — uniformity, apportionment of direct taxes, intergovernmental immunities (McCulloch), and the line between a tax and a regulatory penalty (see Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. (1922)).
• Procedural due process — notice, an opportunity to contest, and judicial review, even where collection may precede litigation.
• Property rights — the government may take what is owed, not more (Tyler).

Doctrine, Interpretation, and Open Questions

Documented: the consent principle in English constitutional history; the constitutional grant of taxing power and its textual limits; judicial approval of summary collection subject to later review; statutory lien, levy and hearing procedures; Jones and Tyler as limits on property-tax enforcement.

Debated: what counts as a "direct" tax requiring apportionment remains contested; the Supreme Court addressed a related question in Moore v. United States, 602 U.S. 572 (2024), upholding the Mandatory Repatriation Tax while expressly not deciding whether realization is a constitutional requirement for an income tax. Historians also continue to debate how much the Stamp Act crisis turned on principle versus economic interest.

Unsupported: the theory that taxation is legitimate only for those who individually consent, or that federal income tax obligations apply only to government employees or residents of federal enclaves. Courts have rejected these claims and penalized their repeated assertion as frivolous.

Conclusion

The government's first claim on private wealth has always been justified, in the Anglo-American tradition, by the community's consent through its representatives — not by the consent of each taxpayer, but by the authority of the legislature to bind all. That authority is broad and its collection tools are formidable: liens, levies, seizures and sales that may proceed before any court has spoken.

But the history also records eight hundred years of limits imposed on that power, often in response to its abuse. Geraldine Tyler owed her taxes and lost her home. What she won back was the difference between what the government was owed and what it took. The question, in every tax dispute worth examining, is where that line lies.

Sources & Further Inquiry

• Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598 U.S. 631 (2023).
• Magna Carta (1215), cl. 12, National Archives translation; Petition of Right (1628); Bill of Rights (1689).
• Resolutions of the Stamp Act Congress (1765); Declaration of Independence (1776).
• U.S. Const. art. I, §§ 2, 7, 8, 9; amend. XVI.
• McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819).
• Murray's Lessee v. Hoboken Land & Improvement Co., 59 U.S. (18 How.) 272 (1856); Phillips v. Commissioner, 283 U.S. 589 (1931).
• Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., 157 U.S. 429 (1895); Brushaber v. Union Pacific R.R. Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916).
• Jones v. Flowers, 547 U.S. 220 (2006); Moore v. United States, 602 U.S. 572 (2024).
• 26 U.S.C. § 6321, § 6331, § 6330; IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, Pub. L. 105-206.

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