While your struggles with taxes and the tax code may seem particularly unpleasant to you today, people have been paying and complaining about taxes for a long time, way longer than any of us have been alive. Or our parents. Or our grandparents.
Ancient Mesopotamians paid taxes in the form of livestock and labor.
There are ancient Egyptians texts and tomb scenes showing evidence of taxes, tax collectors, and even tax shelters.
Taxation and tax collectors also show up in the Bible, over and over.
Taxes appear in scripture as a necessity, like, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's".
More recently, in 1927, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society. Maybe it's time we forgive tax collectors, too.
So we've had taxes pretty much as long as we've had records of organized society.
But why? What are the goals of taxation?
At the most basic level, taxes raise money for government services.
Taxes are used to promote the well-being of society, at least well-being as defined by the government in power.
