Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair.
Sometimes they fail grotesquely as when in 1898 the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra
Leone by imposing a tax on huts?and in repressing it ended up burning the very huts they
intended to tax. Sometimes they succeed astonishingly as when in eighteenth-century Britain
a cut in the tax on tea massively increased revenue. In this entertaining book two leading
authorities on taxation Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod provide a fascinating and informative
tour through these and many other episodes in tax history both preposterous and dramatic?from
the plundering described by Herodotus and an Incan tax payable in lice to the (misremembered)
Boston Tea Party and the scandals of the Panama Papers. Along the way readers meet a colorful
cast of tax rascals and even a few tax heroes.
