For example, the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya, who ruled from approximately 321 B.C. to approximately 297 B.C., financed a lavish lifestyle for himself. To the east of India, Seleucus ruled an area which had been part of the empire of Alexander the Great; Seleucus sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to visit Chandragupta Maurya. Megasthenes wrote a famous account about the wealth of India's emperor, including descriptions of the amount of gold used in the emperor's palace.
To pay for his personal wealth, as well as to fund his military, Chandragupta Maurya stole from the people of India. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007),
He divided the empire into four provinces, each headed by a royal prince. Each province was then divided into local districts, whose officials assessed taxes and enforced the law.
Taxes were not always paid in coin (paper money had not yet come into common use). Sometimes the government required taxes to be paid in the form of labor: either as a solider or as a worker building a magnificent structure for the emperor. Chandragupta Maurya stole huge amounts of money, as well as agricultural produce, from the people:
The government levied high taxes. For example, farmers had to pay up to one-half the value of their crops to the king.
Chandragupta Maurya started an era known as the Mauryan Empire. A later phase of Indian history, from approximately 320 A.D. to 535 A.D., is the Gupta Empire. The people likewise suffered because of harsh taxation. Amazingly,
There was a tax on water, and every month, people had to give a day's worth of labor to maintain
the emperor's projects. The ruler stole from the people. When taxes exceed the smallest practical amount, they are theft.
As in Mauryan times, farmers owed a large part of their earnings to the king.
Two principles emerge from the details of these empires. First, taxation is necessary; for common military defense and to maintain a legal system. Second, if taxes exceed the lowest practical amount, they inflict misery on people; this is true even if the taxes are instituted in order to fund some activity which is well-intended and designed to benefit the people. Both the Mauryan Empire and the Gupta Empire fell, in part, because of the people's anger about taxes. In China, the Qin Dynasty fell after the death of emperor Shi Huangdi.
Rumblings of discontent during the Qin Dynasty grew to roars in the years after Shi Huangdi's death. Peasants were bitter over years of high taxes.
The common people resented the "harsh labor quotas" and other methods devised by the government to steal from the people. Invariably, government officials, who have much wealth already, work to take even more from the common people, who have less. The Chinese rebelled against the Qin Dynasty because of its taxes. One of the rebel leaders was Liu Bang. He later ruled from 202 B.C. to 195 B.C. and became known as Emperor Gao.
To win popular support, Liu Bang departed from Shi Huangdi's strict legalism. He lowered taxes.
Throughout history, rebellions have often been organized because of taxes. People find taxes to be politically intolerable. From Rehoboam in the Ancient Near East, to King George III in 1776, the worst governments and the most cruel tyrants are those who tax. Revolution is the people's desire for freedom, and taxation is the enemy of freedom.
Sadly, Liu Bang's successors did not maintain his policies. The Han Dynasty, which replaced the Qin Dynasty, slowly drifted back into the habit of raising taxes instead of lowering them.
The Chinese emperor relied on a complex bureaucracy to help him rule. Running the bureaucracy and maintaining the imperial army were expensive. To raise money, the government levied taxes. Like the farmers in India, Chinese peasants owed part of their yearly crops to the government. Merchants also paid taxes.
Again the bureaucrats, who have more, find ways to steal from the common people, who have less. Leaders like Liu Bang, who can resist the temptation to take money from the people, are rare in history. In China, the Han Dynasty was not content with stealing money from the ordinary people.
Besides taxes, the peasants owed the government a month's worth of labor or military service every year. With this source of labor, the Han emperors builtsome useful things, like roads and the additions to the Great Wall, but also many personal luxuries and palaces for the Dynasty. Even when the taxes and forced labor were used in projects for the common good, like roads, the money was used wastefully and inefficiently. When government officials obtain funds for a specific project, like building a road, they ask for, and receive, more money than the project actually costs. The extra money they use to buy luxuries for themselves or to hire friends - even if there is no work for the friends to do.
The attitudes of Liu Bang lived on. There naturally arises, among any people oppressed by taxation, the desire for liberty. Ban Gu and Ban Zhao, two ancient writers who recorded the history of the Han Dynasty while it was happening, are cited in World History: Patterns of Interaction as they comment on the need to free people from taxation:
Agriculture is the foundation of the world. No duty is greater. Now if [anyone] personally follows this pursuit diligently, he has yet [to pay] the impositions of the land tax and tax on produce ... Let there be abolished the land tax and the tax on produce levied upon the cultivated fields.
Ban Gu and Ban Zhao are pointing out that a farmer, who is already doing a very difficult job, should not have, on top that, to pay taxes. They are demanding the abolishment of two particular taxes, and a reduction in taxation as a whole.
In sum, throughout history, taxes are and have been the tools of oppression. A government's taxes can never be too low; they are usually too high. Rulers are very creative in finding excuses to take money from their people. The government may claim that it is doing work which will benefit the people, or it may warn that if it doesn't take the people's money, it will go into debt - or further into debt. Both arguments are specious: projects done for the common good can often be done better by other social institutions and not by the government; debt can be reduced or avoided when the government simply spends less. Few things are more harmful to the human race than taxes.
