Wheat and taxes (E)

Highlights

• 2024-11-20 14:26 You’re not going to find very much in the way of a definitive history. One reason for this is that taxation has been around forever, or at least as far as we can find recorded history. The Chinese have been taxing people for more than 5,000 years. Taxation figures heavily in the Old Testament, mentioning both how Pharaoh took a tax on everything that was grown and how sacrifices were required at the temple

• 2024-11-20 14:26 That if you dominated someone so completely that they became your indentured servant or your slave, you could leverage your own effort. That it’s not hard to imagine measuring the wealth of someone thousands of years ago in terms of how many slaves they had. In the Bible, they’re called slaves.

• 2024-11-20 14:02 However, Scott argues if you can get people to stop being hunter gatherers, to stop wandering, to stop living in nomadic tribes and get them to settle down on a piece of land, well, then all you need to do is show up at their land just before harvest time, and you can take the best of what they grew and leave them the rest.

• 2024-11-20 14:06 Scott’s argument is that we ended up with wheat and other grain production and with livestock because the growing idea of government required it. That’s the order it all went in. And so the idea of taxation as a taking in the French task, tasking people to give their labor to support a power that is over them, goes way back.

• 2024-11-20 14:05 Well, let’s fast forward a little bit, because as states begin to grow, the people who run states decide they want to get bigger. So I’m not sure whether offense came first or defense, but let’s assert it was defense. They’re coming to get us. Genghis Khan, Attila the Khan, Alexander the Great. They’re coming to get us.

• 2024-11-20 14:05 a second sort of taxation kicks in. This is the taxation of mutual defense.

• 2024-11-20 14:06 Now, along the way, all of this is happening without democracy, without people speaking up because they have no power.

• 2024-11-20 14:06 Their land connects them to this place, to this leader. And when the taxman shows up armed and ready to take, they really have no choice but to contribute.

• 2024-11-20 14:07 And so before the French Revolution, salt was taxed. There is nothing you can tax that is more aggressive than a tax on salt that the poorest people were paying. The biggest part of their Income on a tax on salt. Before the French Revolution, the typical working peasant was paying half his wages for bread. Salt was a requirement for life.

• 2024-11-20 14:08 Then comes World War I, the first industrial full scale war. And it costs like it was an industrial war. As a result, the nations that were involved dramatically raised their taxes. And it may not surprise you that when the war was over, they weren’t in any real hurry to lower their taxes.

• 2024-11-20 14:09 To this day, the income tax in the United Kingdom has to be approved every single year by a new vote of Parliament. And it has succeeded in being re voted in every year since World War I.

• 2024-11-20 14:09 what shifts is that the Nordic countries decide that they’re going to increase taxes and dramatically increase services.

• 2024-11-20 14:09 That they will seek to treat the taxpayer as a customer and they will provide the greatest safety net in the history of the industrialized world.

• 2024-11-20 14:11 Tobias, the great business writer, proposed the following. Let’s put a 4 cent per gallon tax on gas and now auto insurance is included for everyone. That by building auto insurance into the price of gas, you get a whole bunch of really extraordinary benefits.

• 2024-11-20 14:11 You don’t have to pay the insurance companies, you don’t have to pay insurance sales reps, you don’t have to pay for settlements. And the more you drive, the more it costs. And if you want to save some money, get a car that gets better mileage all around. A behavior change that would be interesting to experiment with. It was, to my knowledge, never enacted.

• 2024-11-20 14:11 But a tax on cigarettes it was. And all of the data shows us that when you raise the price of cigarettes, fewer people start smoking because it works.

• 2024-11-20 14:12 And so country after country, these huge institutions, these super wealthy people, are extorting the countries where they live, basically threatening that if you raise our taxes, we will leave and go somewhere else. And so all countries can do until they figure out how to work together to change the culture of taxation, is tax people who aren’t Amazon, tax people who aren’t Michael Bloomberg.

• 2024-11-20 14:15 Taxation is an inherent part of our culture and it’s largely invisible. But we’ve discovered that not only is taxation required, but that taxation changes behavior. The question then is who is going to decide which behaviors we’re going to change?