Conquering and Subduing by Means of Taxes

When armies subdue a population, they often exact some tax or tribute from the conquered people. This pattern holds throughout history, from Babylon's conquest of various kingdoms in the Ancient Near East, to the Soviet Union's extraction of wealth and technology from eastern European nations after 1945.

The Ottoman Empire provides a good example of this pattern. Like other Islamic kingdoms or caliphates, it was adept at raising revenue from those it oppressed. One of the most famous Ottoman rulers, Suleyman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, used his military to add vast lands to the Ottoman territory.

One of the few areas able to resist Suleyman's army was Habsburg Vienna. Despite an organized siege in 1529 by the Ottomans, Vienna did not capitulate. It survived a second attack by Suleyman's forces in 1532. But Suleyman was generally successful in his invasions, adding territories from Transylvania to Tripoli to his empire.

Suleyman understood that even more than exacting taxes in the form of money, taking slaves was an effective way, both to enrich his dynasty and to humiliate and weaken those whom he subjugated. The Ottoman monarchy functioned on the basis of slavery. As one textbook (World History: Patterns of Interaction, McDougal-Littell, 2007), notes:

The sultan’s 20,000 personal slaves staffed the palace bureaucracy. The slaves were acquired as part of a policy called devshirme. Under the devshirme system, the sultan’s army drafted boys from the peoples of conquered Christian territories.

Taken from the families, the Muslims "converted them to Islam" and put them to work as slaves for the monarch. Suleyman was also efficient at organizating traditional tax collection in the form of coin. An extra tax, called jizya, was placed on non-Muslims.

The jizya was an excellent tool for subduing "the people of the book," which was a Muslim phrase for Christians and Jews. Not only did caliph have a source of revenue in this tax, but it was a way to ensure that the non-Musilms felt humiliated and "subdued." Further, the Caliph could confiscate as much wealth as was practical from the non-Muslims, because his base of power was among the Muslims. Islamic rulers like Suleyman found justification for their tactic in the Qur'an, which includes this passage:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, from among the people of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

A note on orthography: Suleyman is also known as Suleiman, Soliman, and Solyman. The Qur'an is frequently cited as the Koran. The Qur'an was written originally in Arabic, and Suleyman's Ottoman Empire was largely Turkish-speaking. Translation and transliteration yields divergent spellings.

To the east of the Ottoman regions was another Muslim kingdom in India, known as the Mughal Empire. It, too, was expert at extracting wealth from those it oppressed. While the Ottomans tyrannized the Christians, the Mughal Empire persecuted the Hindus and Buddhists.

One of the most famous Mughal emperors, Akbar, was assisted by a Hindu named Todar Mal, who betrayed his own people to serve Akbar. Together Akbar and Todar Mal devised a cruel way to oppress the Hindus: an early form of income tax. As the history textbook notes, Todar Mal confiscated the agricultural products of the peasants:

He levied a tax similar to the present-day U.S. graduated income tax, calculating it as a percentage of the value of the peasants' crops.

This inhumane treatment allowed the Muslims to keep the Hindus and Buddhists of India under a harsh rule for many years. Yet it also bred a resentment among the Indians which would cause them to one day rise up and throw off the yoke of the Islamic oppressors.

One of Akbar's successors was a ruler named Shah Jahan. He extracted more money from the Indians to finance his personal luxuries. He gave the Indians

taxes and more taxes to support the building of monuments, their rulers’ extravagant living, and war.

Conditions for the Indians got even worse. After Shah Jahan, one of his sons named Aurangzeb took power. He was even more cruel to the Hindus and Buddhists. There were many aspects

to Aurangzeb’s oppression of the people. He rigidly enforced Islamic laws, outlawing drinking, gambling, and other activities viewed as vices. He appointed censors to police his subjects’ morals and make sure they prayed at the appointed times.

Intent on humiliating the Indians, he increased

the hated tax on non-Muslims and dismissed Hindus from high positions in his government. He banned the construction of new temples and had Hindu monuments destroyed. Not surprisingly, these actions outraged the Hindus.

Aurangzeb showed the attitudes of Islamic rulers. He expanded his empire by using harsh military force; he taxed the non-Muslims and destroyed their places of worship.

Aurangzeb ruled for almost 50 years and made the empire grow once again with new conquests. However, his rule brought about new problems. A serious Muslim, the new ruler put harsh new laws in place. He punished Hindus and destroyed their temples, which produced a rebellion that managed to take control of part of his empire. At the same time, the Sikhs had become skilled fighters, and they won control of another part of the empire. To fight these battles, Aurangzeb had to increase taxes. Since he only taxed Hindus, not Muslims, this move only made large numbers of people more and more angry.

Note the parallels: when Muslim armies occupied Spain starting in 711 A.D., they destroyed Christian churches and Jewish synagogues. When Muslim armies dominated India, they destroyed Hindu temples and Buddhist temples.

Aurangzeb ruled from 1658 to 1707, and seemed only to get harsher with the passing years. His cruelty paved the way for the fall of his empire.

Aurangzeb levied oppressive taxes to pay for the wars against the increasing numbers of enemies. He had done away with all taxes not authorized by Islamic law, so he doubled the taxes on Hindu merchants. This increased tax burden deepened the Hindus’ bitterness and led to further rebellion. As a result, Aurangzeb needed to raise more money to increase his army. The more territory he conquered, the more desperate his situation became.

During Aurangzeb's reign, first Portuguese and later British trading representatives held influence in the area of the port city Bombay. In fact, the city, now known as Mumbai, was essentially governed by them. The residents of the area enjoyed liberties not found in the bulk of India which was controlled by the Mughals. The Hindus were allowed to practice their religion. Bombay enjoyed economic freedom, as importing and exporting flourished.

From Spain in the west, to India in the East, with the Ottomans between, taxation was an instrument used by oppressors to humiliate and impoverish their subjects.

What Brought Ghana Down?

From around 700 A.D. to around 1000 A.D., the empire of Ghana was a powerful political and economic force in Africa. Trading in gold and salt, Ghana became wealthy. Yet by 1076 A.D., it had become so weak that the Muslims were able to conquer it. What undermined the might of Ghana?

Ghana's downfall was largely economic. The rulers forgot the thing which had made them rich and powerful: a free market in which miners extracted gold from the earth and in which people were free to trade gold and salt at whichever prices seemed reasonable to them. Gold mined from the earth came often in the form of gold dust, and sometimes in large pure nuggets. The kings became greedy, and as one textbook - World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007) - notes, "the king often demanded these gold nuggets as taxes."

This type of taxation was merely confiscation of private property: in a word, the government was stealing from the people. This reduced the eagerness of the miners to find gold, because they knew that if they found it, the king might simply steal it. Taxation reduces productivity and inventiveness among workers.

In addition to confiscating from the miners, the kings of Ghana began to demand a percentage of products which were bought or sold in Ghana, or which were transported through Ghana:

By the 700s, Ghana was a kingdom, and its rulers were growing rich by taxing the goods that traders carried through their territory.

The rulers were growing rich, but the people were growing poor: taxation is theft. Productive business activity, the kind that creates jobs and gives ordinary people a chance to gain wealth, was inhibited. Who would want to do business in an environment in which the government taxed, confiscated, and monitored transactions?

Merchants met in trading cities, where they exchanged goods under the watchful eye of the king's tax collector.

The marketplace was no longer free. The government distorted the natural equations of commerce. Normally, buyers and sellers negotiate and finally agree on some price. The government's actions, however, manipulated the give-and-take of the marketplace.

In his royal palace, the king stored gold nuggets and slabs of salt (collected as taxes). Only the king had the right to own gold nuggets, although gold dust freely circulated in the marketplace. By this means, the king limited the supply of gold.

By limiting the supply, the king manipulated the price. The 'natural price' of something is the price to which buyer and seller freely agree. When the government manipulates the supply by limiting it, prices are forced unnaturally upward. Although this action increased the king's power and wealth, it weakened Ghana.

By the time the Muslims attacked Ghana, its abilities to defend itself were diminished because of a sluggish economy. Taxes and the lack of a free market brought Ghana down.

Ghana was not the only power on the continent to be undermined by government interference in the economy. The empire of Songhai established a tax-gathering bureaucracy under the rule of Askia Muhammad. His taxmen were so efficient that Songhai fell behind in terms of technological development. When Muslims from Arabia and Morocco attacked (despite that fact that Songhai was a Muslim empire), the attackers had gunpowder, while the defenders of Songhai did not, and Songhai soon fell. Taxes had reduced both the will of the people innovate and the ability of the people to acquire new technology.

Likewise was the case of the powerful city-state Great Zimbabwe. Shortly after the year 1000 A.D., it was the major economic power in Southern Africa. But its leaders taxed the trade in the area, and by 1450, the city was a collection of abandoned ruins.

The pattern is clear. The twin evils of taxation and regulation will weaken a nation. In order to thrive, a healthy economy must allow buying and selling to be the product of free negotiations between customers and suppliers. Any interference, regulation, or taxation by the government will harm the process.

To be sure, taxes are necessary. But they must always be kept at a minimum, and the government must not be allowed to stipulate what that minimum is. Whatever the government may propose as a minimum, the real minimum will always be lower. As Senator Goldwater wrote:

But having said that each man has an inalienable right to his property, it also must be said that every citizen has an obligation to contribute his fair share to the legitimate functions of government. Government, in other words, has some claim on our wealth, and the problem is to define that claim in a way that gives due consideration to the property rights of the individual.

Whichever projects and tasks the government envisions for itself, the citizens must be ready to resist. The "legitimate functions" of the government are few, but the ambition of government is large. A very small amount of taxation will fund the things which a government must do. The distinction is between what the government must do and what it wants to do. The government's desire to enact its will is the source of poverty for the people and weakness for the nation.

Taxation Finances Monarchies

In the year 910 A.D., a monastery was founded in the town of Cluny in France. This monastery would come to be associated with a reform movement which aimed to return the church to its tasks of helping the poor, educating the common people, and offering spiritual wisdom. This movement had a significant effect. Monasteries increased their efforts at dispensing food and clothing to anyone who needed them, literacy rates rose, and the church's message that God cares for and about people replaced superstitious traditions about needing to earn God's favor.

The reform movement also had a political side. Its goal was to protect the church from exploitation by worldly-minded monarchs who sought to use the church for political instead of spiritual goals. Specifically, some monarchs had adopted the practice of appointing whomever they chose to offices within the church. Instead of spiritually-minded women and men whose purposes were to help the poor and educate them, friends of the royal family, who had neither the desire nor the ability to make a positive impact in society, were appointed to church jobs. The Cluny movement worked to put this trend, called lay investiture, to an end. A similar practice, called simony, involved the selling of church jobs; the Cluny movement was likewise opposed to simony.

Along with the intentions of the Cluny movement, its funding was also important. While monarchies had only one source of funding, taxation, the church had several. First, monasteries were often self-supporting; on their own land, they grew crops and raised animals; they made cloth and candles and other necessities. Some monasteries even generated a surplus, selling the excess produce, and using the money to fund their work among the poor. Second, both rich people and poor people made large and small donations to the church; some gave money, others gave land, and others gave materials like lumber or flour.

While it is true that some monarchs arranged for a fraction of tax revenues to go to the church, many history books overemphasize this aspect of church funding. The fact that the church had other sources of funding, sources which were independent of the monarch, gave the church the ability, in some situations, to take a principled stand and oppose the monarch. The word 'tithe' means 'tenth' and was the traditional donation to the church - one gave a tenth of one's annual income. One history textbook - World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007) - notes:

The Church used some of the money to perform social services such as caring for the sick and the poor. In fact, the Church operated most hospitals in medieval Europe.

Economic developments over the course of the Middle Ages affected incomes for the monarchs. Manufacturing, importing, and exporting expanded, and royal tax revenue increased accordingly, because it was then, and is now, calculated as a percentage of income. At first, then, the merchants' taxes increased the king's power and wealth. The new merchant class, however, did not want to endure the royal taxes, and worked to find a way to retain their freedom. The narrative of resistance to taxation is the narrative of the fight for freedom.

The merchants and craftspeople of medieval towns did not fit into the traditional medieval social order of noble, clergy, and peasant. At first, towns came under the authority of feudal lords, who used their authority to levy fees, taxes, and rents. As trade expanded, the burghers, or merchant-class town dwellers, resented this interference in their trade and commerce. They organized themselves and demanded privileges. These included freedom from certain kinds of tolls and the right to govern the town. At times they fought against their landlords and won these rights by force.

As merchants found ways to free themselves from taxes and tolls, a new kind of civil freedom was born. This type of civil freedom would stabilize itself in written forms of government: constitutions which would limit the power of government and thereby protect the freedom of the individual. This would be the case in England, where King John had made himself unloved among his people.

Some of John’s problems stemmed from his own personality. He was cruel to his subjects and tried to squeeze money out of them. He alienated the Church and threatened to take away town charters guaranteeing self-government. John raised taxes to an all-time high.

Not only was John harassing the people by means of taxes, but he was interfering in the church by appointing his friends to posts, he was damaging the freedom of individuals by arranging or forbidding marriages, and harming the freedom of town by dictating to them how they should arrange their own matters inside the town. The English people had enough of such misery, and took matters into their own hands.

His nobles revolted. On June 15, 1215, they forced John to agree to the most celebrated document in English history, the Magna Carta (Great Charter). This document, drawn up by English nobles and reluctantly approved by King John, guaranteed certain basic political rights. The nobles wanted to safeguard their own feudal rights and limit the king’s powers. In later years, however, English people of all classes argued that certain clauses in the Magna Carta applied to every citizen. Guaranteed rights included no taxation without representation, a jury trial, and the protection of the law. The Magna Carta guaranteed what are now considered basic legal rights both in England and in the United States.

The Magna Carta was a foundational document, setting a precedent that in order to protect the people's liberty, the government's power must be kept to a minimum. The group of nobles had the power to approve or reject any proposed tax from King John. Over the years, this group of nobles gradually redesigned itself into the Parliament. By 1295, when King Edward I was on the throne, the Parliament began to include not only aristocracy, but also the commoners. Thus the aristocrats were able to check the king, and commoners were able to nudge the aristocrats into more vigilantly working against any potential tax. In 1295, the parliament included not only the nobles and top church officials, but knights and burgesses. Burgesses are not from the aristocracy or royal family; they are commoners. When the king proposed a tax, he called two burgesses

from every borough and two knights from every county to serve as a parliament, or legislative group. In November 1295, knights, burgesses, bishops, and lords met together at Westminster in London. This is now called the Model Parliament because its new makeup (commoners, or non-nobles, as well as lords) served as a model for later kings.

The success or failure of the Parliament depended upon the members, noble or common, remaining vigilant and steadfast against taxes. The king would certainly try to tempt them, through personal favors or political pressure, to allow taxation.

Over the next century, from 1300 to 1400, the king called the knights and burgesses whenever a new tax was needed. In Parliament, these two groups gradually formed an assembly of their own called the House of Commons. Nobles and bishops met separately as the House of Lords. Under Edward I, Parliament was in part a royal tool that weakened the great lords. As time went by, Parliament became strong. Like the Magna Carta, it provided a check on royal power.

By acting as a restraint on taxation, the Parliament made England a model for those future nations, including the United States, which hoped to maintain freedom. In France, however, things did not go so well for the idea of liberty. On a large historical scale, France was sinking into absolutism, a form of government in which there were no checks whatsoever on the king's power to tax. This would cause limitless misery, and eventually erupt in the savage but futile French Revolution. Philip II, king of France, subjected his subjects to the worst possible treatment: high taxes.

Philip II not only wanted more land, he also wanted a stronger central government. He established royal officials called bailiffs. They were sent from Paris to every district in the kingdom to preside over the king’s courts and to collect the king’s taxes.

Taxes are fueled by two different types of greed: the personal greed of a monarch for luxury, and the institutional greed of a monarch or president for power. As the old proverb says, money is power, and those monarchs who desired great power achieved it, or tried to, by massive taxation. The human cost involved is nearly incalculable, given that taxation ripples through society, harming education and culture, forcing people into bitter poverty, and taking away hopes for the society's future.

One of Philip II's successors, Philip IV, knew that taxation was power, and in order for the king to have all the power, and for the people to lose all their freedom, no exceptions could be tolerated to the king's power to tax.

In 1302, Philip IV, who ruled France from 1285 to 1314, was involved in a quarrel with the pope. The pope refused to allow priests to pay taxes to the king. Philip disputed the right of the pope to control Church affairs in his kingdom.

Philip IV was willing to use a legislative body which looked like a Parliament, something called the Estates-General, to strengthen his case for taxing everyone, even the priests. But in reality,

the Estates-General never became an independent force that limited the king’s power.

Through this unlimited taxation, France slid down into absolutism, and the French people suffered the loss of much of their freedom. The United States, in its origin and development, followed more after the British model than the French model, and developed a governmental structure which had the purpose of maximizing and protecting personal freedom and individual liberty. Great strides were made as slavery was abolished and women were given legal and political equality. But even in the United States, freedom was lost as Sixteenth Amendment enabled income tax, and the IRS inflicted merciless harm to almost all citizens. As Senator Goldwater wrote:

Government does not have an unlimited claim on the earnings of individuals. One of the foremost precepts of the natural law is man's right to the possession and the use of his property. And a man's earnings are his property as much as his land and the house in which he lives. Indeed, in the industrial age, earnings are probably the most prevalent form of property. It has been the fashion in recent years to disparage “property rights,” to associate them with greed and materialism. This attack on property rights is actually an attack on freedom. It is another failure to take into account the whole man. How can a man be truly free if he is denied the means to exercise freedom? How can he be free if the fruits of his labor are not his to dispose of, but are treated, instead, as part of a common pool of public wealth? Property and freedom are inseparable: to the extent government takes the one in the form of taxes, it intrudes on the other.

The statement "private property and freedom are inseparable" is often attributed to George Washington, but evidence for that attribution is not strong. Senator Goldwater writes something quite similar above. The linkage between property and freedom is important: they may seem to be two different issues, but they are closely related. Freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of belief, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are neither possible nor meaningful without private property rights. Because property rights are essential to all those forms of freedom, taxation, which is an attack upon property, is an attack upon freedom.

Taxes: Instruments of Oppression

While there are a few things worse than taxation - famines, plagues, and wars - it is still true that taxes are one of the worst things which a government can inflict upon its own people. When a government levies taxes - when a government steals from its own people - it not only denies them the earned fruit of their own labor, but it denies them the material means by which they can exercise their freedom.

To be sure, humanity is often tempted to value material possessions too much, and value the life of the heart and mind too little. But opposition to taxation is not mere crass materialism. Rather, by opposing taxation, one manifests an understanding of the fact that material goods, used freely by their rightful possessors, are the means to expressing the life of the heart and to expressing the life of the mind. To deprive a citizen of his property is to deprive a citizen of his freedom. Yet the government, the very purpose of which is to protect a citizen's life, property, and freedom, is guilty of denying the citizen his freedom when it divests him of his property.

Concrete examples show us that taxation is one utensil in the portfolio of oppression. Whether labeled as "tributes" or "user fees," governments use taxes to subjugate populations. Around 1240 A.D., the Mongols invaded and occupied southern Russia. As one textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007), describes it,

The Mongols demanded just two things from the Russians: absolute obedience and massive amounts of tribute, or payments. By and large, the Russian nobles agreed. Novgorod's prince and military hero Alexander Nevsky, for example, advised his fellow princes to cooperate with the Mongols. The Russian nobles often crushed revolts against the Mongols and collected oppressive taxes for the foreign rulers.

Oppressors usually find willing helpers - those who will harm their fellow countrymen in return for a sycophantic chance to gain favors from the tyrants. Whether Russian nobles willing to harm their fellow citizens, or bureaucrats working for the IRS, governments require and develop apparatuses - sometimes sophisticated ones - for collecting taxes. Perhaps one of the most notorious such systems was the "tax farming" system used in parts of the Roman Empire.

People generally despise tax collection agencies of all variations. Those Russian aristocrats who aided the Mongols did so by ruining their reputation among their fellow Russians:

During the 1320's, Moscow's Prince Ivan I had earned the gratitude of the Mongols by helping to crush a Russian revolt against Mongol rule. For his services, the Mongols appointed Ivan I as tax collector of all the Slavic lands they had conquered. They also gave him the title of "Grand Prince." Ivan had now become without any doubt the most powerful of all Russian princes. He also became the wealthiest and was known as "Ivan Moneybag."

The situation of the Mongols in Russia is one among many examples of the tension between the legitimate need for a government to have some small source of funds for its legitimate activities on the one hand and its illegitimate tendency to expand its revenues and activities beyond the practical minimum. How can a society allow its government to levy some small tax, and yet ensure that the government's greed does not cause it to tax more than the least feasible amount? This question, in varied forms, arises for every civilization. The ability to answer this question is the key to that civilization's survival. Senator Goldwater writes:

We all have heard much throughout our lifetimes, and seen little happen, on the subject of high taxes. Where is the politician who has not promised his constituents a fight to the death for lower taxes — and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible? There are some the shoe does not fit, but I am afraid not many. Talk of tax reduction has thus come to have a hollow ring. The people listen, but do not believe. And worse: as the public grows more and more cynical, the politician feels less and less compelled to take his promises seriously.

The senator goes on to distinguish between the false notion that a government has an "unlimited claim" to the property and income of its citizens and the plausibly true proposition that a government might have some limited claims on its citizens. Given the reality of the world as it is - imperfect - and the reality of human nature as it is - also imperfect - we must acknowledge that government is, in the words of Thomas Paine, a necessary evil. If government is necessary and the world imperfect, then taxes will also be necessary. Although necessary, they must be strictly limited and held to the lowest conceivable minimum.

We have been led to look upon taxation as merely a problem of public financing: How much money does the government need? We have been led to discount, and often to forget altogether, the bearing of taxation on the problem of individual freedom. We have been persuaded that the government has an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people, and that the only pertinent question is what portion of its claim the government should exercise. The American taxpayer, I think, has lost confidence in his claim to his money. He has been handicapped in resisting high taxes by the feeling that he is, in the nature of things, obliged to accommodate whatever need for his wealth the government chooses to assert.

When the government confiscates people's money and property, it also reduces their freedom. Whether in Mongol-dominated Russia or in twenty-first century America, resistance to taxation is a defense of freedom. From the Magna Carta to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, from the First Continental Congress to the Second Continental Congress, thinkers who have coherently advocated liberty have, as a corollary, consistently sought lower taxes.

Islam and Taxes

The religion of Islam appeared around 630 A.D., and a century later, its armies had occupied much of North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and other parts of the Near East. To finance these military actions, and the occupational governments which ruled over the populations of the conquered lands, Islam needed to raise funds. It did so through plunder and booty, confiscating valuables in the lands it invaded, but also through taxation.

Shortly after Muhammad died in 632 A.D., and shortly after Abu-Bakr became his successor, the central role of taxation in Islam emerged. Some Muslims who had followed Muhammad did not want Abu-Bakr as the next Islamic leader. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction, they

refused to pay taxes, and a few individuals even declared themselves prophets. For the sake of Islam, Abu-Bakr invoked jihad. The word jihad means "striving" and can refer to the inner struggle against evil. However, the word is also used in the Qur'an to mean an armed struggle against unbelievers. For the next two years, Abu-Bakr applied this meaning of jihad to encourage and justify the expansion of Islam.

Already in a very early stage of Islam's development, taxation is a major issue, and it is linked to jihad - linked to the military expansion of Islam. It is important to remember that the word jihad probably did once refer to an inner psychological or spiritual struggle against evil, and may even still occasionally be used that way. Note also that this first major Islamic tax controversy was not related to the taxation of the oppressed peoples in the lands conquered by Islam, but rather related to the taxation of Muslims by their leaders.

As Muslim armies conquered and occupied vast territories in Spain, North Africa, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, those subjected to Islamic military government would also face taxation. Those in such territories were taxed according to their religious status. If they converted to Islam, they would pay a lower tax rate. Those who chose to remain with their own culture's native religions were treated more harshly: "They paid a poll tax each year" which might be in coin, in agricultural goods, or in the form of having one's children confiscated to be slaves or laborers.

Starting around 750 A.D., the Caliphate - the Islamic empire - fell under the control of a dynasty called the Abbasids. One of their goals was to conquer and occupy Gaul - what we now know as France. The first attempted Islamic invasion of France was in 732 A.D., but this attempt had failed. The Abbasids would try again. This effort would require a large imperial military, and lots of money - money to be gained by taxation.

The Abbasids developed a strong bureaucracy to conduct the huge empire's affairs. A treasury kept track of the money flow. A special department managed the business of the army.

The Abbasids would fund their military buildup with taxes that disproportionately burdened the residents of lands occupied by Islamic armies, and of those residents, the taxes would disproportionately burden the non-Muslims, who conveniently lacked any political influence whatsoever. These non-Muslims were also, on average, poorer than the Muslims in their regions: poorer both than the locals who had converted to Islam, and than the occupying Islamic soldiers who were foreign to the region.

To support this bureaucracy, the Abbasids taxed the land, imports and exports, and non-Muslims' wealth.

But not all taxes collected were for military expansions. Some went to support the luxurious style of a the Caliphs - the leaders of the empire. Some went to support the mosques and the religious leaders - mullahs and imams. Some of it was collected for the purposes of helping the poor.

India and China: Learning about Taxation from History

Between roughly 400 B.C. and 550 A.D., a series of major empires established themselves in India and China. Their tax policies partially determined their durations and ultimate declines. Imperial governments which levied more than the lowest practical amounts of tax were often overthrown.

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 built

some 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.

Saving Lives in Poland

Across Europe, during WWII, brave and creative people invented a variety of ways to hide Jews from the Nazis, or to smuggle them to safe regions. Amazing events took place as secret operations hid or transported the Jews inside Nazi-controlled areas.

In Germany, for example, ecumenical networks organized the rescue of Jews - the word 'ecumenical' reflecting the fact that Lutherans and Roman Catholics were willing to set aside their differences in order to oppose the Nazis and save as many Jewish lives as possible.

In Poland, however, the situation was different. Poland was, at the outbreak of the war, approximately 95% Roman Catholic and 5% Jewish (exact numbers vary). There was no need for an ecumenical spirit: the Polish underground was seamlessly Roman Catholic. Among the many tales of heroism emerging from wartime Poland is the narrative of a zoo in Warsaw which was used to hide Jews from the Nazis. Historian Diane Ackerman writes:

Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who capitalized on the Nazis' obsession with rare animals in order to save over three hundred doomed people. Their story has fallen between the seams of history, as radically compassionate acts sometimes do. But in wartime Poland, when even handing thirsty Jew a cup of water was punishable by death, their heroism stands out as all the more startling.

The occupation of Warsaw (and the rest of Poland) was a long affair. Nazis had occupied the city since October 1939. The Nazis would leave in January 1945, as the Soviet Army began its occupation of the city. After more than five years of Nazi oppression, the city of Warsaw would then be subjected to Stalinist oppression. The Nazi occupation was, of course, explicitly anti-Semitic, pursuing its objective of killing as many Jews as possible.

Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer's family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed "collective responsibility." Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city's underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist's dummies.

As the brave citizens of Warsaw continued to preserve the group of Jews hidden in the zoo, the war progressed. The Soviet army was advancing toward Warsaw from the east; the Poles anticipated that the Russians would liberate them from the Nazis. At the same time in 1944, thousands of Polish soldiers, organized as the Home Army, were preparing to stage a massive resistance action, later known as the Warsaw Uprising. This action was to be timed to coincide with the Soviet army's approach to the city. This would have confronted the Nazis simultaneously both with the Soviet attack and with the internal uprising - hastening the liberation of the city. "On July 27, when Russian troops reached the Vistula sixty-five miles south of Warsaw," Ackerman writes that the Nazi

Governor Hans Frank summoned 100,000 Polish men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to work nine hours a day building fortifications around the city, or be shot. The Home Army urged everyone to ignore Frank's order and start preparing for battle, a call to arms echoed the next day by the Russians, pushing closer, who broadcast in Polish: "The hour for action has arrived!" By August 3, as the Red Army bivouacked ten miles from the right-bank district that included the zoo, life grew even tenser.

The anticipation was agonizing,

and people kept asking: "When will the Uprising start?"

On August 1, 1944, the Uprising began. The Home Army anticipated that the Soviet soldiers, camped only a few miles away, would attack the Nazi occupational troops at the same time, and make quick work of liberating Warsaw. Instead, the Russians did nothing. Without Soviet support, the Polish resistance was facing the Nazis alone, a difficult or even impossible assignment. Historian Michael Korda places the Warsaw Uprising in the larger context of the European Theater of WWII:

In the east, of course, a war on an even larger scale was taking place - the front line ran from Memel on the Baltic to the Danube in Bulgaria, with a huge, threatening bulge developing in the south, where the army groups of Marshals Malinovsky and Tolbukhin were advancing swiftly to take Belgrade, surround Budapest, and approach within fifty miles of the German-Hungarian border. In the north, fanatical German resistance had stalled the Russians in East Prussia; but in the center the Russians at last held Warsaw. The Russians had paused for two months in sight of Warsaw to allow the Germans to savagely put down an uprising led by the Polish government in exile - which was based in London - so that Stalin could replace the so-called London Poles with his own communist Poles: one of the darkest and most cynical chapters in a war of stygian darkness.

Stalin was willing to let the Home Army die, man by man, at the hands of the Nazis. Once the Polish resistance had been exterminated, the Soviet army would then occupy Warsaw - not liberate it. Once the Poles knew that their defeat was certain, soldiers of the Home Army began to escape from the neighborhoods surrounded by Nazis. They eluded the Nazis by sneaking out through the underground sewer system. Diane Ackerman writes:

By September, 5,000 soldiers in the old town had escaped through the sewers, despite Germans dropping grenades and burning gasoline down the manholes. Elsewhere, the Allies were advancing on all fronts: after liberating France and Belgium, the United States and Britain were pushing into Germany from the Netherlands, Rhineland, and Alsace; and though the Red Army paused near Warsaw, it had already captured Bulgaria and Romania, was prepared to take Belgrade and Budapest, and planned to storm the Reich from the Baltics; the United States had landed on Okinawa and was pounding the South Pacific.

The war seemed to be progressing toward its end in every place except Warsaw. The Uprising continued, with no help from the Soviets and therefore no prospect of success. Yet the Poles fought fiercely and the Nazis found that they could not easily quash the Uprising. Soon negotiations between the leaders of the Home Army and the Nazi officers took place, trying to find terms of a ceasefire. On October 2, 1944, the Home Army surrendered, and Warsaw was once again occupied by the Nazis.

Although the two months of the Uprising were over, life was still very tense for the residents of Warsaw who were hiding and supporting Jews. For three agonizing months, they lived with the knowledge that the Soviet army was camped only a few miles away and yet refusing to drive the Nazis out of Warsaw. Every day was a risk; if the occupying Nazis discovered that a Roman Catholic Pole was helping a Jew, both would be executed. Finally, however, the Soviet army took action, having waited so long to allow the Nazis to eliminate more Poles, and to allow the Poles to eliminate more Nazis. Diane Ackerman writes:

The Red Army finally entered Warsaw on January 17, long after the city's surrender and too late to help. In theory, the Russians were supposed to drive out the Germans, but for political, strategic, and practical reasons (among them, losing 123,000 men en route), they had camped on the east side of the Vistula River and complacently watched the bloodshed for two months solid, as thousands of Poles were massacred, thousands more sent to camps, and the city extinguished.

The relief was minimal: Warsaw did not erupt in joy and celebration. By the time the Nazis left, the horror had been too great and gone on too long to allow for festivities. When the Soviets took over, it soon became clear that their use of the word 'liberation' was insincere indeed. The Soviet communists subjected Poland to a dictatorship that was, if somewhat less anti-Semitic, nearly as harsh as the Nazis had been.

Nonetheless, the bravery of Poland's Roman Catholics saved thousands of Jews. The courage of these Poles has been acknowledged and honored worldwide.