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Most new taxes come about at times when the locality creating them is under financial stress. Wars are financially stressful. Thus you'd expect that any given n
by asfasgasg 9y ago
Most new taxes come about at times when the locality creating them is under financial stress. Wars are financially stressful. Thus you'd expect that any given new modality of taxation would be created, with some relatively high probability, in proximity to a war.
- CryptoPunk 9y agoFinancial stress is not exactly the condition correlating with the creation of new taxes. A tax does not relieve financial stress in any general way. If it did, we would constantly raise taxes. What a tax does is enforce a collective use of financial resources. The demand for such enforced collectivism increases when a threat emerges that can only be adequately dealt with using such collective action. A foreign nation, engaged in organized violence, aka war, against a nation, is the most extreme example of a situation where enforcing collective action provides a benefit to the majority, and thus that's when people are most likely to sacrifice their liberty and accept a new tax.