What I Just Read

Wide-ranging historical survey looking at major world civilizations through the lens of taxation and tax policy. It's a good read, a great review of world history, and it gets you to think about that history in a refreshingly unusual way. I've said elsewhere that one cannot understand history properly without some grounding in monetary history . Add tax history to the list! The author makes a robust argument that many if not most political instabilities and revolutions largely emerge out of resistance to punitive taxation. Likewise, this book will help deprogram readers away from the many schoolbook historical narratives we carry around, like the hypersimplified " Just say slavery " narrative of the American Civil War, or the pro-government narrative of the Whiskey Rebellion as "Federal law and order prevailed over frontier tax cheats." It is a surprisingly sentimental and romantic intellectual experience to hear the author describe bygone eras like the ...