A review by jasonfurman
Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom through the Ages by Michael Keen, Joel Slemrod

5.0

An enjoyable, insightful and encyclopedic romp through taxes over multiple millennia and multiple continents. Rebellion, Rascals, and Revenue is organized into parts that correspond to typical public finance concerns like incidence (who pays taxes), fairness (both "vertical" for people with different incomes and "horizontal" for people in similar situations), efficiency (particularly not changing desirable behaviors--but changing undesirable behaviors), and tax administration. The authors cover the role of taxes in various historical events (starting with the American Revolution), the ways that the "wisdom" of the ancients has continued to inform taxes today as authorities have struggled with the concerns for as long as we've had taxes--ideas about what was fair, finding markers associated with income or wealth, and how to encourage or discourage different behavior (although exactly what constitutes good behavior has changed over time, it is as hard for us to understand taxing beards as it would have been for Russians a few centuries ago to understand taxing carbon emissions).