Category: History

Taxation: The First 10,000 Years

When I was a kid, there were troops of old farts kicking around, whose sole purpose was to make a nuisance of themselves and dispense wisdom in the form of colourful homilies.  Any time anyone under the age of 40 screwed up, they would lean back like balding owls and pronounce: “There’s many a slip ‘tween the cup and the lip” or “A fool and his money are soon parted” or some other such nonsense.  My favourite was “There are only two things certain in this life: death and taxes.”  I always treated that one with “roll your eyes” respect because, as a student, I didn’t notice (or care) what taxes I paid (there simply weren’t that many.)  Furthermore, my youth came with a prepackaged shield of immortality that protected me from the Grim Reaper (who was only an ugly rumour anyway.)  In other words, both concepts were foreign to me.  In my world, people were supposed to pay their fair share of taxes.  After all, I did, and if they were unfortunate enough to get old and die, it was their own damn fault.  Luckily, these days we don’t let our old people hang out with us anymore.  We warehouse them in seniors’ facilities where they can wither away as they see fit and keep their smartass remarks to themselves.

The idea of death is easy to understand; all you have to do is live long enough, and it will come find you.  Taxes, however, are more complicated.   They are beautiful in their simplicity but downright grotesque in their execution.  In essence, taxation means, as a society, we are going to gather our money together to buy things we can’t afford individually.  Sometimes these things are tangible items like roads and boats and buildings, and sometimes they’re conceptual — like education, security and health care.  Regardless, we use taxation to pay for the common good.  The complication comes, not from what is the common good (I think we all agree on that) but how we get there from here.  This question has plagued most societies since before Kofu the Egyptian decided he needed a bigger tomb than his dad and somebody was going to have to pick up the tab for it.  In those days, however, it was pretty easy to figure out who did the paying.  Basically, when the pharaoh said it was tax time, you threw in your pennies or the next voice you heard was the guy with the whip, hollering “Pull.”  After all, pyramids don’t build themselves.  My point is, for most of history, it was the local Pooh-bah who decided what constituted the common good, and taxation without representation was a universally accepted concept.

This arrangement worked for thousands of years.  There were some bumps in the road — like Robin Hood and the Magna Carta, peasant revolts and the English parliament — but in general, people shut their mouths and paid their taxes.  The money disappeared into wars, royal mistresses and monuments and society thrived.  Unfortunately (or fortunately) this all came to a screaming halt in 1763.  This is an extremely tangled bit of history, but here’s the Twitter version.

Immediately following the Seven Years War (which many consider the first genuine World War) Britain found itself in dire straits financially.  They’d just beaten the crap out of the French … again, but they’d had to mortgage everything but the Tower of London to do it.  In a word, the Brits were broke.   They looked across the Atlantic at their American colonies and saw a bunch of fat and happy farmers with coin in their breeches.  It looked like a no brainer.  Parliament would tax the thirteen American colonies to pay for, not only their part in the recent war but also any future administration and protection.  To the English, this was a win/win situation; to the Americans, it was highway robbery.  Actually, the Americans weren’t opposed to taxes as such (no more than usual, anyway.)  They were much more concerned with who got their mitts on the money.  As freeborn Englishmen, they wanted some colonial representation in Parliament to oversee the coin they were shipping across the Atlantic.  They had the radical idea that if they had to pony up the cash, they should at least have a say in how it was spent.  It was a new Golden Rule (If I provide the gold, I make the rules) brought on by reading too much Voltaire and Rousseau by candlelight.  Lord North’s government in London called this outrageous school of thought treason.  The Americans, not known for prolonged discussion even then, reached for their muskets.  As we all know, insurrection is only wrong if it fails.  The Americans didn’t fail, the thirteen British colonies became the United States of America and for the first time since Pericles was a pup, taxation with representation was more than just a philosopher’s fantasy.

The odd thing was this New World idea caught on.  Pretty soon, French peasants wanted a say in how their government was run and how their money was being spent.  Then it was Haiti and the nations of South America; then Greece, and pretty soon, people all over the world were demanding this new taxation with representation.  It was a worldwide phenomenon and the first and only fundamental change to the tax system — until now.

Wednesday: Contemporary Taxation: A Fundamental Change

Titanic: Myth and Mystique

Unless you’ve been lost at sea for the past couple of months, you realize that the world has taken a particularly nautical turn.  The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is upon us, and everybody from James Cameron to Julian Fellowes is cashing in.  Titanic stories are sharing website billing with Brooklyn Decker’s new look and the latest Tweets from Lady Gaga.  There are documentaries, books, a miniseries (or two) a couple of “mystery solved” productions (What mystery?) and a 3-D re-release, just to round out the wall-to-wall coverage.  Like Woodstock and Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point night against the New York Knicks in ’62, everybody is digging up their particular connection to this moment in history.

Our fascination with the tragedy of the Titanic has been around since Jack Phillips tapped out the last SOS from Titanic’s radio room on April 14th, 1912.  In actual fact, as the radio records clearly show, Phillips used the older CQD distress call throughout the night; the SOS story came later.  This is only one of the many myths surrounding the Titanic.  There are tons more.  That’s part of what feeds our fascination.  People tend to mythologize tragedy to make it more palatable: to give it humanity and separate it from random slaughter.  The voyage and eventual destruction of the Titanic is ready-made for the tales people tell.  It’s a classic snobs vs slobs fable; the only thing missing is an unlikely love story and James Cameron supplied that.

But far be it from me to dispel the legacy of a legend; the media myth makers have been doing that for more than a month.  These days, Titanic experts are ten a penny, and by the close of business Sunday, no one from the ship’s designer to the guy who poured the after-dinner drinks will have escaped their gaze — with mixed historical results.  So, rather than trying to see through the mystique called Titanic, let me add to it.

Under the heading “believe it or don’t” there’s a weird case of coincidence surrounding the Titanic.  In 1898, Morgan Robertson published a book called Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan.  The story itself is one of those overblown Victorian tales of redemption.  The hero, John Rowland, is a disgraced naval officer who, through a series of adventures, rebuilds his life and reputation.  It’s simple 19th century pap, read by old men and schoolboys and quickly forgotten — except for one thing.  Robertson’s literary device that triggers Rowland’s rejuvenation is a luxury ocean liner called Titan which hits an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks.

In Robertson’s 1898 book, the Titan is the world’s largest luxury ocean liner, on a voyage across the Atlantic.  He describes it as 800 feet long with a displacement of 45,000 tons and a top speed of 25 knots.  The voyage is uneventful until one dark night in April, approximately 400 miles west of Newfoundland, the ship collides with an iceberg on its starboard side.  Within minutes, all is lost and the captain orders the crew to abandon ship.  Unfortunately, the Titan was considered “unsinkable” by its designers and builders, and there aren’t enough lifeboats.  As a result, before help can reach them, nearly half of the ship’s 2,500 passengers drown in the freezing North Atlantic waters.  If any of this sounds familiar, it should: it’s a fictional carbon copy of the factual Titanic’s story.  The kicker is Robertson wrote it fourteen years before the Titanic cleared dry dock.

There is no rational explanation for Robertson’s story.  However, one nerdy night at a Sci-fi convention in Portland, Oregon, I was told Robertson could have been a time traveller looking to make a few bucks on the side.  (Reasonable as anything else, I guess.)  My point is Robertson’s novella is just another part of the Titanic legend.  It ranks up there with the ship’s band playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” as the Titanic sank beneath the waves.  They did play but only until the increasing tilt of the sinking ship made it impossible to stand on her decks.  One of the most famous stories is about John Jacob Astor IV, who put his pregnant wife into a lifeboat, casually asked the crewman for the number, and then wandered off to smoke a cigarette with mystery writer Jacques Futrelle.  His body was later identified by the monogram sewn into his clothes.

There is talk, as there has been for twenty years, of raising the Titanic.  Personally, I think the recovered jewelry alone could pay for that little adventure.  Someday we’ll have the technology to do it, but I don’t think we will.  There are certain things that need to remain out of our reach; it’s better that way.  The dark waters of the North Atlantic may shroud the facts of what happened to RMS Titanic one hundred years ago, but they, too, are part of the legend.