by Ryan McMaken
During the Middle Ages, taxation was considered to be appropriate only as an extreme measure in times of emergency, and as a last resort. Kings were expected to subsist on revenues from their own private property.
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I think the case might be a bit overstated:
"Customary tributes and dues paid by vassals" sounds a bit like taxes to me, just at a different level.
"Revenues from personal estates" also seems to do a lot of work in the argument. Would taking a share of the peasants' crop output not be considered a form of taxation?
From what I gather as I'm reading through The Sovereign Individual, there are key differences worth considering.
For one, vassals had their own armies from which they provided numbers when the king called on them. The kings' own armies, ie. with direct fealty to them, wouldn't necessarily outnumber those of their vassals combined.
This leads to the second factor, that their vassals could (and did) work together to keep the tributes and dues in check. Together they often could field a force that would make a ruler think twice in trying to enforce new/higher tributes.
In essence, vassals had more bargaining power over how much they'd pay than a citizen has today.
The main difference therefore when comparing to governments today is someone else (other voters and/or government officials) decide how much someone else (you) have to pay in new taxes whereas vassals struck bargains directly on how much they would be required to pay.
That fits with my understanding of the period, too.
It's one reason why I think the tax system under the Articles of Confederation was better. The national government received taxes from the states, rather than the citizens, which meant the states could push back.
Agreed. My sense of the qualitative difference is that those taxes were customary, as opposed to arbitrary.
They didn't have a tax policy that was expected to change regularly and entirely at the discretion of the ruler.
An interesting thing to consider is that even though in the medieval era, kings and emperors had more de jure power over their subjects, the de facto situation was probably a lot more decentralized and locally controlled than things are now. Even though we live in a democracy, I'd venture to guess that the medieval king had less control over a random peasant's everyday life than the President of the USA has over the average American citizen's life.
I'm sure that's true
I need to read this but I like to guess when I haven't.
The question is why? What was different?
For one thing. Kings! No illusion of democracy. No "We the People" are the government... so no we can't steal from ourselves.
Hoppe nails this in Democracy the God that Failed.
It's a little misleading to refer to the king's properties as private and the revenues weren't entirely untaxlike.
Tax is always and everywhere theft
Of the people, for the people, by the people's wallet.