Tax is presented as a dreary necessity of civilisation. It’s meant to pay for everything from hospitals and roads to defence procurement mishaps.
But it’s not always boring. On the contrary, it often reflects a vast bureaucratic imagination. Let’s look at the Romans. No one quite taxed like them.
Take Emperor Vespasian, who taxed urine. Not your personal urine, but the buyers of urine. They collected the urine from public urinals because it was an ingredient used in tanning leather and laundering clothes. Roman laundries were places where white woollen togas went in statesmanlike, and came out with the faint whiff of a public urinal. When Vespasian’s son objected to the tax, the emperor held up a coin and observed that money did not stink.
Not only did Rome tax urine, but also taxed slaves who wished to buy their freedom. Slaves could pay a fee after a certain number of years of service to gain their freedom. In effect, they were taxed on their freedom.
Across the continent in Britain, urine was given a miss, and instead they taxed soap.
Britain also taxed candles, hats, playing cards, and dice. At some point, it seems Treasury perhaps walked through a house muttering, “Yes. That. Also that. Is that a chair? We’ll circle back.”
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The window tax was especially bizarre; introduced as a way of taxing wealth without openly taxing income, it assumed rich people had more windows. The public responded with a type of brilliance: they bricked up their windows. Entire rooms were plunged into darkness. Ventilation collapsed. Health suffered. Eventually, the tax was repealed in 1850.
Then there was the brick tax, which inspired builders to use bigger bricks. The government eventually noticed and taxed larger bricks too.
The hearth tax followed the same logic. A fireplace meant you paid. People concealed fireplaces.
Then patterned wallpaper was taxed, so people hung plain paper and painted patterns onto it. For a brief shining moment, British interior design was driven by tax avoidance.
In 1784, the hat tax offered another imaginative glory. Men’s hats were taxed according to value, and each required a revenue stamp. Then people began insisting their hats were not hats at all, but headgear. So in 1804, the government taxed headgear too. Penalties for violators were harsh, and there was even a risk of the death penalty for those that may have falsified their headgear tax. In 1811, it all ended, and people traded in their headgear terminology for hats.
Russia’s Peter the Great went further and taxed beards in 1698. Men who wished to keep their facial hair had to pay and carry proof that their chin was licensed. Imagine being stopped in the street by a state official and asked to produce documentation for your face.
The French taxed salt through the hated gabelle, helping season the rage that preceded the revolution. This is a useful lesson. Tax luxuries and people grumble. Tax necessities and they start sharpening the cutlery. The British salt tax in India later helped inspire Gandhi’s Salt March.
Other taxes tried to improve morals, which is always risky because governments are allegedly not famously good at morals.
Missouri once taxed bachelors aged 21 to 50, under the touching belief that romance could be encouraged by fiscal harassment. Australia considered a bachelor tax during World War I, although it never arrived. Perhaps someone sensibly noted that if affection and family pressure had not driven a man to marriage, a tax bill was unlikely to do the trick.
Modern tax has not lost its comic touch. Denmark introduced a tax on foods high in saturated fat in 2011, hoping to improve public health. It lasted about a year before collapsing.
Illinois taxes sweets differently depending on whether they contain flour. This means a Kit Kat and a Snickers can occupy different moral universes. New York has bagel rules too. A whole bagel is one thing, but slice it, toast it, fill it, or eat it on the premises, and breakfast enters a higher tax bracket.
China has taxed disposable wooden chopsticks to reduce deforestation, which at least has environmental dignity. Denmark is preparing a livestock emissions tax from 2030, widely known as the cow fart tax, although the cows may prefer a “methane contribution framework.” It is a serious policy, but it is still impossible not to imagine officials in a paddock with calculators, monetising a burp.
Australia’s Luxury Car Tax
Closer to home, Australia still has the Luxury Car Tax, introduced when local car manufacturing needed protection. The industry has since left the building, but the tax remains, like a dinner guest from 2000 still in the lounge asking whether there is any more dip.
Victoria’s short-stay levy on Airbnb-style accommodation is intended to raise money for housing. It may help. It may also make a weekend away feel like you are personally refinancing the state.
What strange taxes reveal is that governments are endlessly creative when money is short and principles are flexible. They tax what they cannot ban and what makes people happy. But the public is creative too. It bricks up windows, renames hats, enlarges bricks, paints wallpaper, hides fireplaces, and drives across borders for butter.
Tax is not boring. It is history wearing false whiskers and checking your pockets.
And somewhere in the eternal Treasury, Vespasian is still holding up his coin, smiling thinly.
Money may not stink.
But it has spent an awful lot of time standing near things that do.
