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As the saying ought to go, those who forget history are doomed to miss out on a lot of great stories. In Rebellions, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom Through the Ages, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod do their formidable best to save us from this dire fate. They also amply fulfill their aim of proving the truth of their opening quotation, from H.L. Mencken, to the effect that taxation is not just “eternally lively” but of greater interest than “either smallpox or golf.”

Keen and Slemrod are also so impressively comprehensive in their self-set task of combing thousands of years of history, across multiple continents, for enjoyable or illuminating tax anecdotes that I started to take it as a challenge. I read a lot of history books on the side. So, could I think of stories worth including that they had left out?

This did not go so well. Taxes as the subject of the Rosetta Stone? Check. Window taxes, salt taxes, beard taxes, and taxes on bachelors? Of course. Classic-era British rock lyrics complaining about high taxes? Everyone knows about the Beatles in “Taxman,” but what about the Who in “Success Story”? Or the Kinks in “Sunny Afternoon”? Yes, they have all three.

The only thing I was able to come up with that appears not to be in the text was Morton’s Fork. When the avaricious usurper Henry VII was king of England (after overthrowing fellow usurper Richard III), he sent the Archbishop Henry Morton on a tour of noble households, demanding fiscal contributions to the throne. Nobles had two distinct approaches to pleading poverty, but neither worked. Morton “reasoned that anyone who was living extravagantly was rich, and so could afford high taxes, whereas anyone who was living frugally had saved a lot, and so could afford high taxes.” Surely there is a parable lurking here about the complementarity of consumption taxes and wealth taxes.

The book’s rewards extend no less to the wide range of lessons learned, than to the wide range of delightful anecdotes. All too often, tax writers’ use of ancient history is drearily predictable. It comes as no surprise that the Cato Institute once ran an article entitled “How Excessive Government Killed Ancient Rome,” emphasizing how “steep taxes…severely depressed economic growth” in the Roman Empire (written by the great Bruce Bartlett before his work became extremely interesting). Likewise, the Business Insider tells us, courtesy of the self-proclaimed Sovereign Man, that “Taxes Brought Down the Roman Empire, and They’ll Do the Same to America.” This is all so routine that one is tempted to ask: Can I get fries with that?

Keen and Slemrod, however, are after far more diverse and interesting game. They use their examples to illuminate concepts ranging from deadweight loss, to Ramsey taxation, to tax incidence, to line-drawing, to interest group politics, to tax competition, to tax evasion versus avoidance, to the other type of kink (involving notches in the tax system).

Among the book’s virtues is its righteous commitment to verifying seemingly tall tales when possible, while debunking stories that perhaps ought to be true, but aren’t. For example, the Boston Tea Party responded not to outrageous colonial exploitation (which the British at the time were reserving for India) but to a quite modest levy, especially compared to the taxes the English were paying at home. That levy was in fact embedded in an overall after-tax price cut for tea, the proceeds from which were “earmarked for the defense of the colonies.” (P. 6.)

We also learn, however, that there are “disappointingly…few insights about the future of taxation to be gleaned from science fiction.” (P. 373.) The problem is that science fiction writers, while often so intellectually creative, have on this topic pretty much limited their thinking to imagining interplanetary tax revolts. How mundane, compared to such real-world examples as an Incan tax that was payable in head lice.

This is both a delightful and imaginative book, and a startlingly instructive and informative one. Despite all the humor, it is actually very serious in the best way. As Keen and Slemrod rightly tell us in the preface, “while rebellions will always be with us, taxes will always invite rascality [a well-chosen word that I have never previously seen in a tax article or book], and follies will always happen, we hope this book may bring a little more wisdom to the future of taxation.” (P. xviii.)

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Cite as: Daniel Shaviro, Tell Me a Tax Story, JOTWELL (August 10, 2022) (reviewing Michael Keen & Joel Slemrod, Rebellions, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom Through the Ages (2021)), https://tax.jotwell.com/tell-me-a-tax-story/.