History is full of tax revolts. It’s a fairly popular pastime, if historians are to be believed. But when do they come? What’s the spark and what’s the gasoline? In Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, he argues that long military campaigns are unwise because they exhaust the people, and he says that long campaigns exhaust “seven tenths” of the wealth of the elites. This is one of those oddly-specific claims that sometimes strike westerners as hilarious. But Sun-Tzu was a historian, and lived in an era with plenty of case studies of war’s destruction. So it’s worth exploring his rule of thumb … Continue reading High Taxes Cause Revolution