Hacker News Reader

Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Income taxes, transaction taxes, and customs duties are thousands of years old.

It's always been how kings and governments raised the money to pay their armies.

Taxes on certain goods, yes. Incometax, nope. It’s little over 100 years old. VAT I think about 75. And the list goes on.

In the uk it started around 1800, a few years before ending slavery. Could it just be a substitute?

In American chattel slavery, women were kidnapped, stuffed into boats where malnourished strangers died around them, beaten, forced to change their names and religion, and raped. The children of those rapes were routinely sold at auction, and their parents would never see them again. If the children were caught secretly learning to read, they would be beaten. Income taxes are annoying, but they are not slavery.

Of course. That’s a whole different aspect and I wouldn’t want to compare to that part of it.

Meanwhile we still rip custody from many (disproportionately) black dads, auction their children to foster homes, compel them to come up with certain amount of money and if they don't do it for the whip crackers we toss them in jail where they may be raped and malnourished and legally chained in work gangs.

> Incometax, nope

Sharecropping taxes are income taxes. There weren’t formal income taxes because peasants didn’t have incomes. They paid a tax to their lord that was fixed as a function of the productivity of the land they farmed.

Income tax isn't there to get government an income, it's a surveillance tool. You have to write down how much money you earned, and HOW did you earn it, and sometimes even what things did you spend it on. People today are brainwashed to believe that it's OK for the government to know that, but when income tax was first introduced I believe that was one of the most common arguments against it: invading one's privacy.

Sure, the legal terms "income tax" is relatively recent (and VAT more so). But they're just new names for taxes that already existed. The written record of income and commercial transaction taxes dates back to Hammurabi (1700s BC) and Egypt's Old Kingdom (3000 BC). (https://almanac.upenn.edu/archive/v48/n28/AncientTaxes.html)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com