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Sunday was Thomas Jefferson's 265th birthday. Tuesday is tax day -- or, to be precise, the deadline to file an annual tax return with the IRS. The significance of the two days are worth comment.

Several years ago, when I was still toiling over a keyboard at the Claremont Institute, my colleague Glenn Ellmers and I co-authored an op-ed piece on Jefferson and taxation. We argued that Jefferson "saw, perhaps better than most, the dangers of a centralized state. And one of the most destructive forces threatening personal freedom and equal rights was and remains the government's power to levy taxes."

Neither Jefferson's heirs in the Democratic Party nor the party of Abraham Lincoln seem to appreciate what Jefferson understood: "Perfection of the function of taxation . . . [is] to do equal and impartial justice to all," Jefferson wrote. Congress today is in the business of creating exceptions to the rule. And it is impossible to imagine how a 66,000-page tax code as devilishly complex as ours could do "equal and impartial justice" to anybody. Arguably only people in America who have any affection for the Internal Revenue Code are the accountants and professional tax preparers who rake in more than $65 billion a year for their services.

Now, a popular retelling of the American Revolution has it that the colonists fought over excessive taxes. Not quite. The Boston tea party wasn't merely about a few pennies per pound of tea. No, the Americans were angry that the British would impose taxes and levies without any input or consent from the people paying the taxes.  The rallying cry was "no taxation without representation," because "if we are not represented, we are slaves."

Americans today cannot truly say they taxed without representation. But they could make a good case for being taxed without accountability. The problem with taxes in the United States today is that taxes are too high, the tax collectors are too powerful and the tax dollars are spent badly. This was foreseeable. More than a century before the 16th Amendment, Jefferson wrote and spoke of the corruption that invariably comes with taxation.In his second inaugural address, Jefferson took credit for cutting taxes and the bureaucracy that necessarily accompanies tax collection. He considered it a triumph for his administration to eliminate "unnecessary offices" and "useless establishments," which allowed for tax cuts.

To guard against the steady rise of such "unnecessary... and useless establishments," America's Founders sought to maintain a close connection between taxation and consent. They kept the tax system simple and clear -- emphasizing consumption taxes, which are fair and fairly easy to understand -- and chose a method of collection that was decentralized. Until the 16th Amendment, only the states could collect income taxes. Today, it's difficult to imagine a tax or fee the federal government would be unwilling to collect.

Jefferson had a sensible view of all this. "To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill," he wrote, "is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to ever of a free exercise of his industry, and the fruits acquired by it.'"

Small solace, perhaps, on this tax day. But a principle worth aspiring to once again.