Snafu's believe it or not

Illustrations: Seth

For those of you who thought Caesar’s legacy was limited to a delivery method or a tasty salad and Louis XVI is best remembered for losing his head when all around him was chaos, Mr. Snafu is back to teach you a lesson. A history lesson, that is. Our beloved Dr. Phil of the tax world takes a break from doling out advice to give us the skinny on some of those tax facts in history that you didn’t know and never cared to ask about

Dear Mr. Snafu,
What’s up man? People say it’s hard to reach you these days. I hear you are researching and writing a book. Is this true? I know how guarded you are about information, given that you worked for CSIS, the CIA, MI-5 and Mossad, but can you give me a hint as to what you are writing? Someone whispered to me that you’ve got about 10,000 pages of notes. Maybe you can give your readers a few tidbits. I’m getting kinda tired of the Dear Abby shtick, so can you devote a few pages to telling us what you are doing? Thanks. 

Curious in Kamloops

Dear Curious,
I’d like to know who leaked this highly secret information to you. I confided in a couple of agents at CSIS; when I track down the blabbermouth, I’ll have him taken down to the dungeons at HQ and appropriately stretched out on the rack — after he sings for a few hours, he’ll understand the virtues of keeping his mouth shut.

However, since my labours are near completion, there is no harm in letting you know that I have been gathering information for my magnum opus on Lesser Known Tax Facts in History. It is an encyclopedic examination of all the tax events and facts that have escaped the scrutiny of the best historians (primarily because they are not chartered accountants or people like me who have had a long association with the profession). Yes, my copious notes approach one million words, and I have gathered all manner of fascinating material. Since it is tax season, I will give readers a tantalizing taste of what will appear in much greater detail in the book.

Tax fact from Babylon
The Code of Hammurabi, legislated by Prince Hammurabi (2130-2088 BC), is the earliest known set of laws, some 285 in total. The code’s gems include: “If a physician make a large incision with the operating knife, and kill [the patient], or open a tumor with the operating knife, and cut out the eye, his hands shall be cut off.” Malpractice suits really terminated a surgeon’s career in those days. Some 35 laws have been defaced from the huge block of diorite on which they were chiseled. A few of these missing laws have been recovered in diverse places, and one such law has been found recently on a broken cuneiform tablet in Iraq. My agents obtained a copy for me, and after my experts translated the ancient document, this was revealed:

“In the name of Anu the Sublime, Bel, Lord of Heaven and Earth, and Marduk, the God of righteousness, we open this meeting of farmers and merchants of Kish opposed to the new law proposed by Prince Hammurabi, sublime patron of E-Kur.

“The verminous law proclaims, ‘If a farmer or merchant bring his goods to market and sell them for a goodly sum, he is obliged to pay to the king seven parts per hundred of the purchase price thereof. Thus if a goat brought to market sells for 100 shekels in money, seven shekels must be offered to the king. This shall be known as the Goods and Supplies Toll or GST. If a man be caught in the misfortune of withholding this fee, a third of his fields and produce he will forfeit to the king.’

“We the farmers and merchants of Kish beseech you Marduk, son of Ea, to protect us from this oppressive tax. We have formed a guild against it called the Detaxers Union of Marduk’s Babylon, and we beg you to grant us your blessing. This tax scam will be the ruin of us; we are already overburdened with taxes to pay for Prince Hammurabi’s costly ventures such as conquering the four quarters of the world, clothing the gravestones of Milkat with green, and other similar cockamamie projects. In the name of Bel, we just won’t take it anymore!

“By the way, Marduk, can you intercede on our behalf with your dad, Ea, the omniscient, so that Prince Hammurabi’s curses against violators of his code will pass us by? Especially that one about not allowing corn or sustenance for man to grow on our land? We’d be much obliged, and two fatted calves and a mina of silver will be coming your way soon [or the way of your priests].”

Thus, Curious in Kamloops, we see that devious methods of milking taxpayers were the lot of man in ancient times, as was opposition to their onerous burdens.

Tax fact from ancient Greece
A while back, one of my clients, a classical scholar, brought to my attention a fragment of a manuscript purported to be a missing part of Homer’s Iliad. She called it The Apocryphal Homer, and it seems to begin just before the accepted version does, i.e., after the sack of the town of Chryse near Troy and the capture of spoils.

Sing O goddess, of the rapine
Which the valiant Achaeans* have happily
Visited on the countryside around Troy.
The spoil is gathered near the hollow ships of the Danaans;*
Lambs, goats, virgins, cattle, to be distributed among the warriors
By Eioneus son of Antilochos, wise in the art of counting, 
Who without fail balances the numbers of prizes and spoil from The sack of towns. The son of Antilochos had given
Briseis** of the fair cheeks to godlike Achilles,
and Chryseis** to Agamemnon;
Then brilliant Eioneus, whose fingers count spoil faster than winged Hermes flies,
Spoke to Agamemnon, king of men:
“Hey Aga, my main king, listen to this. Instead of raiding towns
And massacring the men and carrying off the women,
Why don’t we just leave them be,
And impose a progressive income tax on the buggers? 
With the moolah, we can do all sorts of nice things,
Like build schools and support the arts.” 
Atreus son, wide-ruling Agamemnon,
Eyed Eioneus darkly and spoke to him:
“Nah! I don’t want nothing else but Chryseis. Like I said elsewhere,
I like her better than Klytemnestra, my own wife, for in truth
She is in no way inferior, neither in build, nor stature, nor wit.”

(*Achaeans, Danaans, Argives and Argos are the various names of the ancient Greeks. **Chryseis and Briseis, two young women captured in the fighting.)

So you see, Curious, a wise accountant presented Agamemnon with a tax plan that might have saved him considerable headache. People familiar with the Trojan War story will know that if he’d let Chryseis return to her home, he would have saved the Greeks from the plague inflicted upon them by Phoebus Apollo; better still, after signing a tax agreement with his new subjects, he might have gone home early enough to catch his wife, Klytemnestra, doing the horizontal jig with his adoptive brother, Aegisthus, and maybe saved his life as a result.

Tax fact from ancient Rome
I am in possession of a vast number of letters, diaries, speeches and writings from Rome during the late Republic, in the time of Gaius Julius Caesar. With judicious research and an educated imagination — indispensable elements in writing history — I have put together an account of a particular meeting that occurred during the ill-fated consulship of Caesar and Marcus Bibulus in 60 BC.

The meeting is a power lunch at a wine shop near the Forum Romanum at which Lucius Livius, Caesar’s young Chief Secretary in Charge of Counting and Balancing the Denari, is meeting with Bibulus, Caesar’s enemy in the senate. Bibulus has just been forcibly ejected from the Senate by an armed mob instigated by Caesar, and he is spending time at home sulking and writing his Edicts, a work in which he abuses Caesar most roundly. He has only agreed to come to the meeting after being told that Caesar has an offer he cannot refuse.

Bibulus is in a corner of the shop sipping his wine when Livius comes in.

“Hey Marc, wassup dude? Pass some of the panem, man.”

“Hi Livy,” growls Bibulus, as he passes the basket of bread to Livius. “So what does the Queen of Bithynia* want from me this time?” (*Bibulus’ favourite nickname for Caesar and a snide reference to an alleged relationship Caesar had with King Nicomedes of Bithynia while there as a youth, circa 79 BC.)

“Well, you know the deal. The bread and circuses thing is costing quite a bit of denari. But you understand we’ve got to keep it going; you don’t want the plebs and slaves to get restless. My friends at the Fraserius Institutus have suggested a way to raise the cash for having gladiatorial combats, giving away grain to the plebeians, and such. It’s called a flat tax. I’ve explained it to Caesar and he loves it. He wants you to support it and sell it to the aristocratic party. If you do, he’ll let you back into the senate and pass on some of the mucho denari he got from Lucceius during the consular elections.”

“Hmph,” grunts Bibulus, “keep talking.”

“This flat tax business is sooo cool, Marc. This is how it works. It is important to differentiate between reform based on a flat tax and the replacement of multiple tax rates with a single tax rate. The latter constitutes the type of tax reform implemented in one of the provinces of the barbarian country of Canada and proposed by the Canadian Alliance. A flat tax contains no tax credits, deductions or exemptions except for the personal, spousal and child exemptions. In other words, the myriad of tax credits and deductions present in the current system and the attendant complicated and time-consuming paperwork—”

“Enough!” cries Bibulus, putting his hands over his ears. “Enough of this mind-numbing goat manure from the Fraserius Institutus! Listen, I don’t want any part of this deal. Tell your master to bugger off. Tell Caesar that I will bury him! His name will be a footnote in history, while mine shall live through the ages. By the way, my soothsayer tells me that something bad will happen to him on the ides of one of the coming months. I’m going home.”

Thus Caesar’s plan to collect money to run the affairs of state came to ruin, and things went from republic to empire.

Tax fact from the Middle Ages
The other day, some anonymous person sent me a document that the sender claims to be the original Magna Carta as it was written, “before evil governments got to it and perverted justice with their pernicious conspiracies.” I have examined the document, and though I have one or two doubts about its authenticity, I have decided to include it in my work in the interests of scholarly fairness. Let the reader judge. I will merely present some of the passages where my document appears to deviate from the accepted version.

The Magna Carta Preamble:

John, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, and Count of Anjou, to the archbishop, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, and to all detaxers in North America, especially detaxers in Calgary, greetings. Know that, having regard to God and for the salvation of our soul....

12. No scutage nor aid shall be imposed on our kingdom, unless by common counsel of our kingdom, and this verily means that Eldon Warman of Calgary and all the wise men of the DetaxNation have correctly interpreted our wishes for the future, which is that no PST, GST, personal income tax, or any other idiot form of government theft shall be imposed on any of our vassals in Canada and the rest of our dominion. The only time scutage can be imposed is for ransoming our person, for making our eldest son a knight, and once marrying our eldest daughter, and for these, there shall not be levied more than a reasonable aid....

15. We will not for the future grant to anyone license to take an aid from his own free tenants, so you grasping government functionaries in 21st-century Canada are wrong, especially you knaves at the CRA, you have no right to harass decent, freedom-loving people like Eldon Warman and all the other brave detaxers who are interpreting my will, and have correctly refused to pay any thieving tax. The only exceptions are if you are collecting tax to make your eldest son a knight, marry your eldest daughter, etc., etc.

Well. There you have it. As I said, let the readers judge.

Tax fact from the French Revolution
Finally, to France, just before the revolution of 1789. I have a fragment from the diary of Jacques Necker, Swiss-born financier and Louis XVI’s director of the treasury.

May 3, 1789
Big day tomorrow. I’m a bit nervous. The Estates General hasn’t met in like over 150 years. Glad his nibs finally took my advice and called for this meeting of the nobility, clergy and the bourgies. Spent last night and part of this morning preparing my economic spiel to get these people to fork over more tax money to the treasury. God knows we definitely need the cash, what with Louis’ majestic spending and stuff. Why did he spend so much money supporting that foolish American war, that so-called revolution?

Now we are in a fine pickle, aren’t we? Never did like those damn Yankee Doodles anyway. Especially that “democratic” slave owner Jefferson, who was definitely doing the jiggy with that fine slave girl Sally he brought over from Virginia.

My predecessor Turgot’s economic policies were perhaps not such a bad idea after all. I don’t know why we thought physiocratic free-market ideas were a bunch of neo-con bullshoot. I must be getting soft in the head listening to left-wing babble. Let the market decide, dammit! Why should we spend the government’s money providing welfare for good-for-nothing sans culottes? Let them eat Montreal bagels.

Had a meeting at a café this afternoon with Maximilien de Robespierre, the lawyer from the province of Artois. Strange fellow, with funny sea-green eyes. God, can he talk. And it’s such dull speechifying stuff. Mirabeau stopped by to chat, and whispered in my ear: “That man will go far. He believes every word he says.”  Maybe, but I’ll be damned if he knows anything about political economy. He babbled on about cuts, cuts, cuts and setting up a committee that will cut ruthlessly in the name of  public safety. I told him, “Listen, Robbie, this is not a time to cut taxes, not while the treasury is in such a bad shape after Louis spent so much money saving American democracy for the world.”

“I'm not talking about taxes,” he said quietly. What the hell was he on about, then?

Anyhow, I thought I’d try some of my tax ideas on him. After all, it’s about taxing the provinces. “By the way, Robbie, I have this idea for raising cash for the treasury. It’s called a province sales tax or PST. The way it works is, basically, we just tax the heck out of anything that is sold in your province. Of course I’ve worked out a number of logical exemptions. For instance, if you rent a boat to go sailing, it is taxable.

But if the boat is rented with an operator, you don’t have to pay tax. However, if you rent the boat with a guide, you have to pay tax. Now if you rent the boat with both a guide and an operator, you won’t have to pay tax. Makes sense, eh?

I’m not finished, listen to this example: if you buy coffee from a café in your province, it is not taxable, but if you buy a soft drink at the same place, it is taxable; also, a combination sandwich and soft drink that costs less than four francs is not taxable. You follow me?” *

I saw that he did not, and was already hurrying across the road to where Jacques Danton, young Saint-Just and Camille Desmoulins were arguing vociferously about some lady called Madame Laguillotine.”

(*Necker surely was a man centuries ahead of his time. His brilliant PST plan bears an uncanny resemblance to Ontario’s  byzantine sales tax. See “Those wacky sales taxes,” CAmagazine, April 2004.)

Well, Curious, that’s all I am willing to reveal for now. Be sure to purchase the book when it comes out sometime this year.

Mr. Snafu