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  • Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue

  • Tax Follies and Wisdom Through the Ages
  • By: Michael Keen, Joel Slemrod
  • Narrated by: Walter Dixon
  • Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
  • 4.9 out of 5 stars (7 ratings)
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Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue

By: Michael Keen, Joel Slemrod
Narrated by: Walter Dixon
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Summary

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 18th-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, listeners 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.

©2021 Princeton University Press (P)2021 Gildan Media

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rofl for nerds

really nerdy stuff made accessible and fun

it's a bit weak on environmental stuff and disappointing on ethics, but brilliant on public economics

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