Taxes are war and violence waged upon the people – they sustain the monopoly of physical violence, and permit the State to mistreat the lower class.
Rosembuj 23 [Tulio Rosembuj currently worked at the Department of Public Economy, Political Economy and Spanish Economy, University of Barcelona. Now he is retired.He is Invited Professor at the Luiss UNiversity Rome, and teach s European Tax Law.Tulio does research in Public Law. Their current project is 'taxation and artificial intelligence'. Tulio Rosembuj, 6-29-2022, “Tax, Coercion, and the Moral Impact of the Law.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4149658]
The State withdraws physical violence, military and police means, from individuals, reserving its ownership and exercise to the central power and establishing the monopoly of taxes to its domain and exclusive control. Tax resources sustain the monopoly of physical violence, which, in turn, guarantees the fiscal monopoly. "Les deux monopoles se tiennent la balance, l`un étant inconcevable sans l' autre."(N. Elias) The symmetry between war and tax is the golden rule in functioning what we would later call the State. Occasional aid gives way to permanent taxes, and the Administration grows to manage them. Coercion is connatural to the tax. G. Bourdieu's metaphor describing the collection of taxes as a civil war is no exaggeration. Failure to comply could lead to death or jail. Tax revolts have accompanied the development of the fiscal monopoly, since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Conflicts are the mirror of what we would see today. The bourgeoisie and the sectors of artisans and merchants dominate the local estates and agree, as far as possible, on their tax burden with the central power of the Prince. The mistreated are the peasants and workers. The wealthiest social sectors defend indirect and non-proportional taxes, while the less affluent sectors prefer direct taxes, modulated according to the taxpayers' wealth.(N. Elias)