Imagine this: We are in the remote Roman province of Britannia, in a small town called Camulodunum, later named Colchester. It is raining, of course, and the soldiers of the Roman garrison are sheltering in their fort beside the river. You can still see the ruins of the fort. The year is AD60, and, in the town, tax collectors are at work because it is the 14th of April, or Aprilis as the Romans called it in their whimsical way. The Roman method of tax collection was to employ freelance collectors, called Publicani, who worked on commission. This meant that they were very keen to collect and went everywhere with armed bodyguards who encouraged citizens to pay up. The Romans, like the Egyptians and the Greeks before them and every great power after them, financed their governments with a ruthless system of taxation, backed up by brute force.
An attentive ear on that day in AD60 might have caught the sound of a distant trumpet, horses, and chariots, and marching feet coming from the north. Before the small Roman Garrison could prepare its defense, a ragged Army of 200,000 taxpayers, members of the Iceni tribe roared into town led by their Queen Boadicea or Boudicca. They massacred all the Romans and all the tax collectors in Camulodunum and went thundering on down the road to Londinium, where they repeated the performance.
The Roman IRS was quite annoyed, as you can imagine, and called up a couple of legions of soldiers who slaughtered the tax rebels and their queen. There were no refunds that year.
This sounds like a dark fairytale, but it really happened. Boudicca has always been a heroine in Britain, and there is a statue of her near the Houses of Parliament. It was an early example of how taxation can create bad feelings in an otherwise harmonious society. A similar but not-so-violent protest occurred in Boston in 1773. Nobody loves taxes, except those who collect them.
This raises the question: what exactly is the government meant to do in exchange for our tax money? There are two incompatible theories. Number one, the authoritarian theory, is that there is no exchange. Taxation organizes the traditional transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in order to maintain the governing class in the best and most comfortable style possible. Without tax revenues, they might have to work. If you like conspiracy theories, this is the big one,
The second answer comes from the 18th-century liberal tradition when democracy was just coming into existence, and philosophers came up with the revolutionary idea that government had a duty to its taxpaying citizens – what they called the social contract. Taxes, in this theory, are justified by the need to pay for the maintenance of the rule of law, police forces, courts, armies, health services, education, consumer protection, pension funds, air safety, drug safety, and all the myriad national and local systems that help the rest of us to live in comfort and security. If you like, it’s a protection racket - pay up and we’ll look after you. We will make sure your plane is fit to fly, and your food is fit to eat, and that you can get health care when you need it. We will protect you from bad people like jihadists, North Koreans, atheists, and above all, from each other.
It's a good deal, and it has been a good deal for more than 300 years. Long may it continue
