Taxation is at the heart of the establishment and maintenance of civil society. The difficulty is in knowing how much to extract from the wealth producing members of society.
Nothing much has changed since the seventeenth century when Jean-Baptiste Colbert the Controller General of Finances to Louis XIV’S remarked that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”
