Taxes have a long and ugly history. The pharaohs, of course, were big taxers and spenders. You don’t build pyramids stuffed with luxury goods for the next life by letting your constituents buy untaxed corn. Even Solomon the Wise squeezed his subjects like the vintners squeezed grapes. A thousand wives means a thousand wedding rings and a thousand peek-a-boo nighties, and a thousand honeymoon cottages. His administration rarely ran a surplus. “And he did evil in the sight of the Lord,” says that big black book found in hotels and courtrooms. I strongly suspect it’s his tax policy the celestial author is referring to.
A couple thousand years later, with the advent of feudalism, rulers continued their campaign to wring riches out of their subjects – like crushed grapes yield wine.
From then to now – whatever the form of government – Kings, Commissars Chancellors: even Presidents and Prime ministers lust for loot. It’s enough to set one pining for the reincarnation of Lady Godiva. Remember her? Remember the story about her parading around the square like she was Paris Hilton and Coventry England was Hollywood, California and it was Oscar night? Well, it’s no fable – it’s absolutely true. The history books tell us that she bared her bod in an era when gowns went from crown to toenails. Nudity, along with bathing, was not fashionable in courtly circles. A woman who bathed twice a month by paddling around the moat was considered bawdy.
Madam Godiva had a mission. She yearned to elevate the artistic tastes of the masses. But hubby Leofric, the Earl of Mercia and Lord of Coventry, had no cultural aspirations and he positively adored taxation. A Federal Form 1040, circa eleventh century, instead of the Magna Carta, sat on his bedside table.
Leofric the Looter he was called by his friends. His victims called him worse.
Lady G noticed that the locals spent a lot of time pushing grindstones to generate taxes for her husband. Art Appreciation courses at Coventry U were unattended. But classes in millstone propulsion, yoked oxen plowing and timber chopping were oversubscribed: all wage-paying, taxable professions.
One night Lady Godiva, dressed in her 11th Century equivalent of a Saranwrap gown, called upon her avaricious hubby. She sat down closely beside him on a wooden bench. She spoke softly and called him “Sweet Leo”. She told him that the cultural level of Coventry was declining like a barrel of beer on Saturday night. He must chop that onerous tax rate!
He laughed. “Hah.”
The good wife cried a moatful of tears. It did no good. She pulled her gown tightly about her pudgy, pink, michealangelesque body. That did no good, either. Then she just laid on the bench and kicked and screamed.
Negotations began. Lady G offered to swim once around the moat as bare as a newborn babe if Leofric would abstain from his favorite vice – taxation. “Nope,” said the Liege Lord. “Only if you do three laps. Backstroke, too!!” He loved to show the locals how well he’d done in the marriage market.
She countered with an offer to bolt through the marketplace at midnight as naked as a jay bird, on Nanosecond Nell, the fastest filly in Mercer County. Nope. But, suggested Licentious Leo, how about a few lazy circuits around the square, au natural, on Slowboat Sally so the villagers could really understand and respect their liege lord’s pulchritudinous pickings. “A done deal,” shouted the lady who would enshrine tax reduction, chocolates and nudity.
History doesn’t tell us whether Leofric the Looter honored his bargain. But even if he did, his moratorium didn’t survive a millennium and the 5,000 miles that separate Coventry, England and my Alabama, USA home. And I bet that his ancestors emigrated to the New World. And I bet they reported for work every morning to IRS Headquarters in Tax Central, District of Columbia, USA. I mourn this historical fact with a black arm band every year on April 15.
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An excellent precedent for feminists. See (hear) also LeFevre’s speech, “Lady Godiva: Uncovering the Facts About Tax Reform” available on mises.org here http://mises.org/mp3/lefevre/204.mp3
Taking a long-overdue break from doing my taxes, it’s clear to me that if the devil is in the details, the IRS is his very embodiment.
If taxation is theft (and it is), then the hoops that one must jump through while being fleeced only adds insult to injury.
Bahhhhhhh…
The Lady Godiva story is really great. I had forgotten most about it. The irony is that Brussels has been for years the capital of European governments, while it was also the home of those famous Godiva Belgian chocolates with the naked lady on a horse design…
Keeping for a moment the fact aside, that this Godiva story softens a bit Hans Hermann Hoppe’s theories of a monarchy being most probably less of a burden on the population than a republic, I believe we should see really some kind of a fundamental myth in this great plot.
As a matter of fact, two years ago, Walter Döring, German minister for economy, the first secretary of the FDP (German liberals) vowed to be stripped of his “State servant” privileges when leaving his office in parliament, as the FDP was campaigning against those privileges in general (no unemployment for state servants for instance, once nominated), and even fighting to strip the politician of their high pensions.
Of course, that’s where Hoppe’s argument still shows some power though: Lady Godiva with her humility, might have convinced her husband to lower taxes, whereas Mr. Döring had to convince hundreds of PMs … not an easy task. Some bad tongues say he knew he was doing something hopeless, and will most probably not repel that juicy pension he’s entitled to when he’s old (about 5000 € plus other jobs)… And nobody will care, as he’s not running for office any more.
Very poetic, but historically inaccurate about the Pharaohs, the feudal system and (to a lesser extent) King Solomon.
Under the Pharaohs of the pyramid building period, there was no separate money as it hadn’t been invented yet. The workers on the pyramids were not buying corn anywhere – they were the people who grew it. They didn’t pay cash taxes at all, but rather performed out of agricultural season forced labour and paid contributions in kind to the temples and royal granaries (which went in part to the specialist labourers, like architects and slaves in gold mines).
The feudal system flourished when cash economies collapsed, a little way into the Dark Ages (not called that any more by modern historians). Cash transactions and central government were displaced by manorial local economies and performance of feudal obligations for immediate overlords – only a very small proportion trickled up to the king, who mostly got by on his revenues as a lord in his own right. See Pirenne and Ganshof for some useful insights.
King Solomon’s wealth – measured in terms of what he accumulated – probably owed more to Israel’s position at the end of desert trade routes and its strength at the time allowing more trade revenues to be siphoned off there. This is an estimate based on what was accumulated and what Israel itself produced. Almost certainly Israel mainly contributed by boosting the kingdom’s strength and so allowing it to levy more on the trade. (This appears to be the source of Herod the Great’s wealth too, along with his connections with desert tribes.)
The comment about Solomon is an educated guess, but the other two points can be throughly substantiated.
re P. M. Lawrence comment. Taxes is taxes whether a fee on muscle of money. Pharoah taxed the crap outa his subjects and so did Solomon.
The economy of ancient Israel is sorta unknown to us.
The only point was to introduce that pioneering lady anti-taxer who is recognized historically, not just via fable. I named my 2nd child, first daughter, Godiva. I tried with the first, a boy. My wife rebelled, tho not like Lady godiva. ted
Sort of true, ted roberts, but not the point the article was bringing out in its poetic way and so not the point I was addressing.
The thing is, the author seems to be using the old trick that was used in Gullivers Travels or Utopia of describing something else so as to make a veiled or not so veiled comment about here and now. So he writes of, say, “wage-paying, taxable professions” in 10th or 11th century Mercia. But of course the tax base was different then, even for cash taxes. I thought it was important to clarify that the poetry didn’t match the actual historical way things were done.
You are right in your general point that impositions are impositions, whether in cash or not. But even so it makes a real difference, both for the economy as a whole and for the individual taxpayer.
For the wider economy, if the government insists on cash taxes that supports its fiat currency – people get an artificial need to get hold of it. Things like “commutations of tithes”, though not payable to the state, switched payments in kind for payments in cash and had a deflationary effect – it made people need the cash to circulate, even if it was fiat. (Tithes are only tax-like, since the collecting organisation or individual doesn’t get to make up its own rules as it goes along the way the government does – tithes are more like rents that way.)
For the individual, payments in kind were easier to cope with. In 18th century France the main engine “tax” was actually a forced labour requirement, the corvee (robotnik in central and eastern Europe). This obligation could be bought out with a cash payment, I think on a sliding scale. However the state could never take more than the taxpayer had, forcing him into ruin, since if it got too bad he could always work it off rather than being sold out for default.
In the more sophisticated colonial approaches, both of these things were brought together: taxes were levied in cash, either on communities (hut taxes) or individuals (poll taxes), but the tax could be worked off in government service at low rates of pay in fiat currency which got the currency into circulation as villages sold food to workers on nearby roads and so on – they wanted the cash for taxes to avoid having to take the government work.
So you see that it makes sense to use the word “tax” in the specialised technical sense to refer only to cash payments to governments. I think I’ve somewhere heard the advice to governments “tax in cash, subsidise in kind” for this reason, although technically a true subsidy is also a cash or funds flow from the government and not other kinds of assistance, again so as to make this sort of useful distinction.
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