Interests: A history of tax conflicts

This chapter is a history of tax conflicts in England and the United States. I do not consider the efficiency of taxes directly but examine the interests affecting their adoption and collection. The history of taxes is also the history of the development of democracy. Property rights are personal rights. In his second Treatise of Civil Government, the ideas of which ‘the principles of the American Revolution were in large part an acknowledged adoption’ (Carpenter 1924: 180), John Locke wrote: ‘The great and chief end . . . of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property’ (1690b: 180).