Cover photo: Magda Ehlers (Pexels)
The Price of Order
The real history of tax — from a payment for protection to the foundation of the welfare state.
About
A piece of what you earn never really belongs to you. It disappears before you even see it, with every paycheck, every purchase, every piece of property you acquire — and we accept this so completely that we rarely stop to ask why.
From the scribes who re-measured the flooded fields of the Nile, to Peter the Great's beard tax and Emperor Vespasian's "pecunia non olet," from the Magna Carta and the American Revolution's "no taxation without representation," to Bismarck, Beveridge, and modern Scandinavia, this book follows tax from its rawest form — the price of fear toward an authority that explained nothing — to today's unfinished search for trust between citizen and state.
With a look at Greece's own path too — from the Ottoman haraç to ΙΚΑ, ΕΦΚΑ, and Diavgeia.
Sources
- Wikipedia — "Beard tax" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beard_tax
- Wikipedia — "Window tax" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax
- Wikipedia — "Pecunia non olet" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
- Cambridge University Press — Charles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" (in *Bringing the State Back In*, 1985) — https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/bringing-the-state-back-in/war-making-and-state-making-as-organized-crime/7A7B3B6577A060D76224F54A4DD0DA4C
- Wikipedia — "Magna Carta" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
- Wikipedia — "No taxation without representation" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_taxation_without_representation
- Wikipedia — "Revenue Act of 1945" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1945
- Wikipedia — "Beveridge Report" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beveridge_Report
- e-ΕΦΚΑ — Official website — https://www.e-efka.gov.gr/el/eephka
- Lawspot — Law 3861/2010, "Diavgeia Program" — https://www.lawspot.gr/nomikes-plirofories/nomothesia/nomos-3861-2010
- World Happiness Report — Official website — https://worldhappiness.report/
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