stackyFACTSBefore income tax became the holy grail of state revenue, governments mostly survived by acting as aggressively greedy tollbooths at their own borders. Entire national budgets relied entirely on slapping exorbitant fees on imported goods, making international trade a constant, highly profitable hostage situation.
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Carrying chests of gold across bandit-infested medieval trade routes was a spectacular way to get murdered. Merchants countered this by inventing the bill of…
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Long before European empires, a massive African superpower controlled the flow of luxury goods between Rome and India. The Aksumite Empire, located in…
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In Tokugawa Japan, flushing your waste away would have been considered terrible financial mismanagement. Because the country lacked large livestock to produce…
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Taxes make citizens violently angry, but gambling makes them highly distracted. Emperor Augustus heavily utilized state-sponsored lotteries during massive…
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Prior to the printing press, copying a book meant paying a professional scribe to manually write out thousands of pages over several months. Mechanization…
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The concept of intellectual property didn't begin as a noble quest to protect inventors. Fifteenth-century Venice essentially bribed foreign artisans by…
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