by Nathan Smith

It’s always fun to uncover the hidden fences or gates used by the farmers of men to keep us all safe, productive and not rioting.

For example, you’ve no doubt heard that only three things in life are guaranteed: death, taxes and that teenagers will always rebel. The only way to cope with these horrors is to forget about them so you can pretend they don’t exist and can’t hurt you.

Taxes were, for most of history, impossible to forget about. They were a consistent character across all levels of society, year-round. Today, modern life is set up so that you don’t have to think about taxes at all. A lot of political energy goes into this. Each of us is taxed multiple times each day, but it doesn’t feel like we are taxed.

Last week, between filling out screeds of expenses forms and talking to my accountant, I realised exactly why the system does not want us to think about taxes. Few things in life are as demonically enraging as seeing a third of your work effort disappear into the hands of the state. If I also had to see the greedy hands of a tax collector snatch a chunk of my pay each time an invoice was paid, I’d probably go ballistic.

I understand why taxes are necessary. While I might “own” my house, I don’t own the public roads that lead to my house. If I use those roads for commerce (buying or selling), then it’s only fair that I pay the state for the privilege. Likewise, my business must pay taxes because it’s the government’s responsibility to teach people how to read so they can understand the advertisements I use to sell my goods and services.

But I’m also not stupid. The Treasury does not sit down and calculate how much money it needs each year and then set the tax rate to generate that revenue. The Treasury pitches for a tax rate as high as it can get away with and then thinks about how to spend your money on roads and all the other dumb stuff governments like to build. If the Treasury thought it could get away with a 50% or 99% tax rate, it would do so. The tax rate is almost entirely decoupled from the fiscal planning.

Most governments have settled on a tax rate of about 30%. Why this percentage? The answer is complicated, but it boils down to being just high enough that people don’t riot. Which sounds weird because modern people are rather docile.

It’s not weird. Rioting over taxes is the core fear for every government. Technology progresses, but humans don’t. The homo sapiens walking along the street are the same animals that not too long ago used to bring their children to watch a public execution. We’re much more domesticated today. But if people miss a few meals in a row, you’ll see how wild things can get. If you had to file your taxes last month, then you know what I mean. It’s guttural, isn’t it? Vengeance, revenge, malice, hatred. Evil, but tasty.

The system knows what humans are, and the farmers of men know their history. David F. Burg’s encyclopaedic survey of tax rebellions found that over the last 4300 years of human civilisation, taxes were a major factor in about 400 wars, rebellions, uprisings and revolts (not counting the thousands of local uprisings that never entered the historical record). Taxes have helped build civilisation, but tax collecting has often been the end of governments.

The reason the farmers of men get nervous about taxation is that it’s the only real time when the abstract entity of the “state” becomes personal. That’s why tax collecting and tax avoidance are the world’s longest-running arms race. For millennia, farmers have hidden crops from assessors. Merchants have smuggled goods past customs officers. Villagers have burned tax records. Crowds have lynched revenue officials. Entire empires have been shaken by disputes over who pays, how much they pay and who has the right to collect.

Ancient Egypt experienced revolts against tax demands. Imperial China had to deal repeatedly with peasant uprisings over land taxes and grain levies. The Roman Empire struggled to break tax resistance in its far-flung provinces. Medieval Europe was riven by a flowing succession of anti-tax rebellions. The Ottoman Empire, Mughal India, Bourbon France and every European colony all confronted unrest fuelled by tax grievances. Even the founding myth of America was a revolt against taxes.

Tax collectors are among the most hated figures in history because taxation requires a real person to count, inspect, measure, assess and demand payment. In pre-modern states, rulers often outsourced tax collection to “tax farmers” who paid the ruler a fixed sum and then took a slice from the top. In France, tax farmers were seen as a defining feature of the ancien regime, symbolising corruption, privilege and exploitation.

By the late eighteenth century, the French monarchy needed revenue, but the clergy and nobility enjoyed exemptions while the Third Estate (that’s us!) bore most of the burden. A major 2026 NBER study on the French Revolution found that areas subject to heavier taxes experienced more riots before 1789 and lodged more complaints against taxation. Areas on the high-tax side of historical tax borders experienced significantly greater unrest than neighbouring low-tax areas. These taxes helped fuel the later violence.

The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was another example of what happens when the arms race between tax collection and tax avoidance spins out of control.

The king imposed a poll tax to finance his military campaigns in France. Poll taxes were hated because they fell on individuals rather than property. England was already struggling with labour shortages, wage controls and social tensions following the Black Death. Soon enough, angry rebels marched on London and started executing officials associated with the tax. They quickly forced the young King Richard II into negotiations, and although the revolt was eventually crushed, the poll tax was never levied again.

Taxes create social tension like a pressure cooker, just waiting to explode. People generally tolerate high taxes if they believe the burden is shared, but they will be far less tolerant of taxes if elites appear exempt. Similarly, taxes imposed by distant governments are often seen differently from taxes imposed by local institutions. Intrusive inspections, confiscations, corruption and inconsistent enforcement also provoke more anger than the tax itself. Anger at taxes can also turn particularly incendiary after harvest failures, inflation, recession or famine.

We still have taxes, but it’s interesting to ask why uprisings and revolts don’t seem to happen anymore. While there’s still a lot of anger around, it never seems to be directed at tax collecting. Why not?

Maybe the reason is that our economies have become so robust and layered with redundancies and pressure valves that wars, inflation, crop failures, political crises or recessions can’t ever coalesce into a single major flashpoint. The pressure cooker of taxes never really rises to explosive levels. Or perhaps the state’s control over the media makes it easy to channel our pressure-cooker grievances into faux outrages. We are given our 15 minutes of hate each day to release the pressure.

But while I was doing my taxes this year as a contractor, I started to see how PAYE might be one of the greatest inventions of social control ever developed. Pay As You Earn (PAYE) is the taxman’s version of taking a slice of the cake before it reaches your plate.

This invention is genius because humans are simple creatures. If we can’t see something, it no longer exists. Object permanence is a myth. If you stop thinking about that time your best friend in high school stole your lunch, you can trick yourself into believing you’ve forgiven your friend. But the truth is that 99% of forgiveness is just forgetting. Out of sight is out of mind.

Given the history of tax collection, PAYE allowed the state to generate its beloved tax revenue more efficiently while also serving as a silent release valve for the angry tension of tax collection. After all, if we don’t see someone taking our taxes, there’s nothing for us to get angry about. No anger, no uprisings. PAYE is best understood as a form of state control. If you run the numbers, I suspect PAYE does more to reduce overall violence in society than any other institution, including the police.

I love finding these hidden layers of social control. Most people simply have no idea about how much energy and effort the regime spends on keeping the pressure cooker of public grievances from exploding into violence. It’s like stumbling onto a strange fence or finding a camouflaged gate that you didn’t know was there.

And each discovery of unknown fences and gates just reinforces that we live on a farm. What you do with that information is totally up to you.

Originally published on The Good Oil.