An engaging and enlightening account of taxation told through lively dramatic and sometimes
ludicrous stories drawn from around the world and across the ages 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. While it is hard to fathom the inspiration behind such taxes as one on
ships that tended to make them sink Keen and Slemrod show that yesterday's tax systems have
more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian England's window tax now seems quaint but
was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Great's tax on beards
aimed to induce the nobility to shave much like today's carbon taxes aim to slow global
warming. Rebellion Rascals and Revenue is a surprising and one-of-a-kind account of how
history illuminates the perennial challenges and timeless principles of taxation-and how the
past holds clues to solving the tax problems of today.
