A closer look
Why bother establishing a functioning IRS when you can just crowdsource extortion? The Ottoman Empire perfected the art of lazy governance through "iltizam," a tax farming system where the state literally auctioned off the right to collect taxes. Wealthy bidders paid the government a lump sum upfront for a specific district. After that, whatever excess cash or crops they could physically wring out of the local peasants was pure profit. Unsurprisingly, this incentivized private contractors to act like ruthless mafia bosses, violently squeezing the working class to maximize their ROI. It was essentially the privatization of state violence, a business model that modern private equity firms can only look back on with profound envy.
