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worksinprogress.co has shown up a couple times on Hacker News, and I haven't been impressed with the level of thinking any time I've examined it. The historica

worksinprogress.co has shown up a couple times on Hacker News, and I haven't been impressed with the level of thinking any time I've examined it. The historical stuff in this is tripe. Rome taxed extensively. Tax exemption was a thing tied up with military land grants in the last western empire. And then general taxation and bureaucracy emerged again well before 1500. I have a good book on this, but can't find it on my shelf right now... Plus there are plenty of places where the governments are not as bureaucratic as they are today. Just not in the developed world.

komali2 6y ago
Rome also had grain dispersals, one of the things to go during a siege. This is well recorded. I, too, was surprised by the article's claim that it wasn't possible to have a mechanism for organizing taxation. If sumerian priests could keep extensive ledgers tracking debt some gajillion years ago, why would a renaissance french king have any issues?