A couple of points I want to review I didn't quite cover.
On the Greeks and the Tex farmers, there's an interesting story from a lady from the Isle of Coase,
and she says every door now trembles at the Tex farmers, indicating the fear of them.
And they, two of the British, two of the Greek islands tried to withdraw from the Athenian League,
The Greeks didn't think that was a good idea because they needed the money, and so they descended on these two islands and killed all the men and took the women and children and sold them in slavery.
So, you know, it wasn't good to be a tax rebel in those days, and then they had this gang of five that would go out and visit the various city-states in the Athenian League, and they would show up with a military escort, and they were a rough bunch, and in one of my books I have a picture of the, it's been unearthed, and it's a story about what these guys did.
Those were the days when it wasn't good to not pay your taxes. It was kind of a rough time.
I did talk a little bit about, just so you guys get the Hanukkah story right, because you want to tell it to your Jewish friends.
The Greeks had instituted some heavy burdensome taxes, one-third.
1 third. Now 1 third was, and this is gross, you know, this gross production tax. So it's, and it's also assuming that the production was there, because even if the production wasn't there, they still wanted their 1 third. That was a huge tax, because the Greeks were only a 10% to summa, they call that, and the Egyptians was 20%. So this heavy tax that was on the Jews was what set off the rebellion of the Maccabees, and it was a
The family project carried on for a while, and they revolted over the taxes, and when they won, they made a deal in which they got an immunity from taxes for quite a few years, and the taxes were reduced, you know, it turned out to be a very successful tax revolt, and that of course, the story centers around the temple and the oil burning in it, but that was what the rebellion was all about,
The fact that the girls and boys are running around naked in the gymnasiums, but that was a little bit tough for the pious Jews, but that was really the essence of it, and I do have it in the book, and you would probably enjoy it.
The other point that I think is about rebellions, rebellions over the long run have not been all that successful.
I think, you know, Americans are kind of spoiled because of the American Revolution.
But then these, you people here in the South, you know, you tried to rebel and it didn't work very good.
You know, it was a terrible, terrible thing.
Almost unbelievable that American people could do that.
I don't know how you guys feel about it, but when you consider they killed a quarter of a million in the South,
and the World War II in proportion to population.
And then in the North, they got 350,000 Yankees were killed.
Boy, that was a lot of people in those days.
And what were they fighting for? To preserve the Union?
I mean, to deny them the right of self-determination,
you know, the right to establish their own form of government and stuff.
It goes against the very grain of everything America stood for.
I think it's hard to believe that we had people so stupid, and so reckless, and so brutal.
When I submitted this manuscript to be published on the Civil War, I had an obligation to submit it to the publisher in New York,
The book here, Dirty Rotten Tax, is a good thing because they did a lousy job.
The book here, The Dirty Rotten Taxes, was a big disappointment because it was so lousy in terms of the printing and the quality of it.
I did this because a couple of few people had contacted me about the bigger book and said,
well, why don't you just make a small volume on the United States and American history?
And then some guy can pick it up in the airport and he's flying to some, you know, for business trips.
He can read it during the day and he'll enjoy it.
I thought that was a good idea, so I went ahead and they thought it was a good idea, and I went ahead and published it, but then they published a very poor quality book, in my opinion, and they tried to charge 25 bucks for it.
Well, that wasn't the idea. The idea is a book that would cost 10 bucks. That was the reason I printed it. And, of course, it sold okay, but it didn't make a barrel of money, so they pulped them if they don't sell them.
They had a couple of printings. It was a little bit disappointing. The only thing that was disappointing was that the Civil War book won a National Book Award.
And now they're going into hardback edition, or softback edition, and it's selling very, very well. I had a chance of writing a letter and rubbing my nose in it.
Not having read the Human Events book, was there any attempt in the 1840s and 50s to try to come to a compromise, rather than kill each other, is there a way, were they north too stubborn, or they just would not give up their power?
Well, we'll go back to the history of the tariff. The first tariff was called the tariff of abomination, and that was in 1828, and South Carolina had passed a resolution with canceling the tax on this tariff, and Andrew Jackson got all huffy, and he was going to go to war, and so finally, I think it was Calhoun and Clay got together, and they kind of made a compromise, and they agreed to reduce the tariff,
So the tariff was reduced a bit, and the South tolerated it, but it still wasn't fair, you see, the South point was that the Constitution said that taxes had to be uniformed throughout the United States, and uniform meant the same for everybody, and why should the Southerners pay all the damn taxes, was their argument, and they were right in that, you see.
and the Northern on the other hand, they thought it was just politics, you know, who's got the votes and so forth and then they had a bit of a recession in 1857 and they blamed it onto the South and they blamed it onto the, you know, the tax system and so they wanted to go ahead with higher taxes and that's what the Republican Party stood for, in fact, when they had their convention in 1860
in Chicago, when they brought up putting back the tariff high, they said that there was
such a roar in the convention hall with canes and hats being thrown in the, I guess you
had to look where you were, and you know, because they wanted to see the tariff come
back, because the bully belief was that the high tariff would protect the industries of
the north and create the prosperity, and so of course the south would catch the brunt
But I felt that with the Civil War, it's just hard to believe that we had just terrible leadership.
I mean, you know, it's called the blundering generation. I don't know if you ever heard that word,
but it's a good word to describe the Americans during that period, and blundering on both sides.
And I thought that the greatest blunder of all was the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
You know, that was just a stupid thing. It started the war and made Lincoln look like a hero.
You know, they started the war, they were fired on the flag and all that stuff, and it's interesting, the Secretary of State named Toomes in the South, in the Southern Cabinet, he said, we should not do that, he says, we'll lose every friend we've got in the North, when the order was going out to bombard Fort Sumner.
and he said that they will descend on us like a horde of wasps or hornets.
We say that of course. But it seems to me if the South had played its cards right, maybe just been resistant to it,
they might have had a lot of sympathy around the world. Most people don't know that.
America, at that particular time, was looked down by many of the European powers as a very dangerous country because of the fact that we had stolen half of Mexico, you know, under our phony pretense, and it looked like we were going to take over the world down there, which I think looked favorable to a lot of people.
We'll talk a little bit about that. We don't have to follow the outline here too closely.
The Southerners wanted their independence, and I think they had a yearning for independence from the North,
and they'd been maintaining a very delicate balance because they had enough votes in the Senate.
You know, they have a lot of weight, but in the meantime, the population growth was in the north, and as the population grew and grew and grew in the north and didn't grow in the south, pretty obviously that the north had control of the House of Representatives and they could do whatever they wanted to.
What Lincoln mentioned in his inaugural address, he said, I understand the Congress has passed a new constitutional amendment.
You see, the President doesn't sign the Constitutional Amendment.
I recently read some recent journal where they said that President Buchanan had signed this Constitutional Amendment.
No, no, the President doesn't do it.
It's Congress that initiates, by two-thirds vote, the Constitutional Mending Process
and then sends it to the states for three-fourths vote.
So Lincoln says they understand that the Congress has passed an amendment
Prohibiting the Federal Government from ever interfering in slavery.
Now what more could the South have wanted if it was a slave issue? They won the war.
And Lincoln says, I have no opposition to this.
So he killed the slave issue. Like he said, he says, I don't want to interfere in slavery. It's none of my damn business.
And he also was on that group that wanted to pack up all the black folks and ship them off back to Africa, you know, it was called the African Colonization Society or whatever the name was, and he was in favor of that.
He just didn't think the whites and the blacks got along together, and they shouldn't get along together.
And in the meantime, of course, all the other countries had Wally slavery. Britain had Wally slavery in 1830, and the French had abolished it, and the Dutch had abolished it, and the Russians had abolished, served them with 30 million.
So this was a great way through the world to abolish slavery. Now, what about the British support of the South, the Confederacy? They did have a substantial support in Britain.
Well, how did they deal with the slave issue? Since they were so anti-slave. Since they were the ones that really inaugurated the abolition.
Their argument was very simple. They said, if the South secedes, that will be the end of slavery.
Because the rest of the world won't tolerate it. And they'll have enough clout to clamp down on the South and force them to abolish slavery.
Slavery. As it is, slavery is now protected by the Union, it's protected by the Constitution and the power of the North. But if they succeed, then they lose that protection and they'll have to abolish slavery.
And there was a lot of, you know, Robert E. Lee said all of the great men in the South wanted to get rid of the institution of slavery.
He wrote that, and there was a strong movement within the South to get rid of it, but of course, when the war started, then the slave issue kind of came back.
And if you read the ordinances of secession throughout the South, they do talk about slavery, and they do talk about slavery as being the reason that they're seceding.
And John Calhoun said, well, we used that argument because nobody was too interested in the tax argument.
So we thought that would kind of rouse public opinion, which, of course, it did. You know, he'd tell us we have to do it.
There's another little story that I want to tell you about my experience.
I've never told this. I've written a few letters to some of the leaders of Black America about it.
See, I'm a Canadian, and I've asked them about it.
I said, when I was in the West Indies, and I taught colleagues the black students, they were the brightest, most interesting students I ever had in my life.
I said, I just literally had almost a class of geniuses there, and they were all black.
I said, how come when I was in the United States, and I was at UCLA, and I was in graduate school, how come I never read any of these kind?
And none of them have answered me. Maybe they're offended by it, but it's reality, it's the truth.
The West Indian, well, you know, even the Secretary of State is a black man with a Jamaican background.
So I don't know why those kids were so damn smart, but I've written to some of the soul and some of the famous black men
and nobody even dares answer me, but I think they should answer me.
I think I deserve an answer. Yes.
I would just echo what you said in England about New England.
The abolition groups led by Garrison said they wanted to cc's because they knew that if the South cc'd it,
then they could eliminate the few groups to just slay them.
And so that would make slaves very easy to go across.
Another argument for a recession from that standpoint, that it would have ended very quickly, but it was the Union that wanted to keep the South from being polluted.
Well, yeah, I think Sherman, in his book, it came out about a year ago, you know, he talks about it, and he says it, he says, you know,
South didn't succeed over slavery, he says it was all over money, you know, the wars are all over, and he said, we should keep them where they are,
you know, we should keep the blacks or the Africans in the South, and don't let them out.
And that is the reason, another fiat money article I read published in 1862, Atlantic Monthly, now that's a good old Yankee-Boston magazine.
And it was discussing, why don't we want slavery in the territories?
Because, not because of slavery, but because of the Africans.
We don't want them in our society.
and once we let them in the territories, we'll let them in everywhere.
There's also a story in the British publication about some blacks up in New York
that were on the street begging for money
so they could go back to the south
because up in the north they were treated like lepers.
And many of the writers, the British writers, they said they were hated more in the north.
They were really hated in the south, tolerated them and so forth, and they looked upon them as
good workers and so forth.
And one of the other things, just a little point may run into, because we're on this issue, is the, they say that Alexander, who was the vice president, Alexander Stephens, and he wrote, and he gave a great speech called the cornerstone speech, do you ever remember that, and he said that, in fact, he said that slavery was the cornerstone of the South,
And this is frequently cited to show that slavery was what the South stood for.
Well, I went and read The Cornerstone Speaks. You know, that's a wonderful thing sometimes to go see what it really said.
Because in his later life, after the war was over, he wrote a wonderful book called The Constitutional History of the Confederate States of America.
It's a wonderful book. And in there he said that slavery was only a drop in the ocean compared to the reasons why we tried to secede.
So then, that doesn't jive with the cornerstone speech. But if you read the cornerstone speech, that was interesting.
He's talking about the Africans being God's problem, that he created this inferior race, the Blacks.
And they're inferior. And it seemed that in the Norling read that, everybody believed that.
And because they're inferior, we think the best system to deal with it is slavery.
It gives them some dignity, it gives them a job, it makes them useful.
But it is God's creation of this inferior race.
And that was the cornerstone. The cornerstone was the inferiority of the Africans.
Not slavery. If you read it, it's pretty clear.
But those things get twisted, and then people who've got a cause, a partisan cause, they will jump on it,
and they'll say, what about the cornerstone speech?
Well, that's what the cornerstone speech was about, the inferiority of the African race.
and that this is the way God had created them, and we're stuck with them, you know, the white man's burden that, well, you know, Kipney wrote about, so, anyway.
But, you know, this is the South, and you do have that interesting problem.
Being in Canada, we have a lot of blacks, most of our blacks are from the West Indies, the Jamaicans, and that group.
And I do notice that we don't have any blacks here. That's rather interesting.
Well, what about the Romans? There's a thousand year history of the Romans.
I think it covers everything about taxes. I think that's the most interesting history I ever studied.
We start off in the beginning when Rome was a republic and it was conquering.
The war tax was a citizen's war tax. You couldn't pay it unless you were a Roman citizen. If you were an alien or a non-Roman, you were denied the privilege of paying the citizen's war tax.
So that's an interesting twist, isn't it, on taxation, that they would turn down money, which was easy taking, because if we went over then to Greece, during the days when Greece was flourishing, one of their major taxes was the metacon, which was a tax on the medics, which was a tax on the foreigners.
And it was a big problem, because if you were an Athenian, you didn't pay any tax.
It was only these aliens that paid the tax.
But since Greece was such a prosperous country and people really wanted to come there,
then they would come and pay a tax.
Well, then what do we have when a Greek marries an outsider?
And we have these mixed children, mixed only in terms of origin.
Well, there was a lot of fraud going on to prove that your mother and dad were both Athenians.
Because that way you got out of the tax system, and apparently there was really quite a lot of scandals going on.
And the Greeks said an interesting thing, that if somebody turned you in for cheating on your taxes,
there was a penalty of 50% and then they got half of it, so it was a...
Oh, we still, in theory, have the same idea. We have a turning people in. I don't know how well that works.
I had a client come to me whose CPA had turned him in, and I don't think he ever got a dime, just being you and me.
This guy ended up in a slammer and so forth for a few years, but I don't think his CPA got anything out of it.
I don't think he even paid any taxes out of it, because you can convict him for not paying taxes, but that doesn't give him the money.
But we do have that idea of rewarding people for ratting on their friends and neighbors and easy employees and sometimes unhappy girlfriends and things like that.
Well, so we have the citizen war tax. We also at the same time had the tax farmers. We had the obtaining of the parlor taxes.
And that was interesting because that seemed to work pretty good.
And the auctioning was taken, was done by the most famous people in society.
It's interesting that in those societies, the tax system was under the administration of really the great people.
In other words, Ronald Reagan would have been a tax collector after office.
Maybe Jimmy Carter would still be out there collecting taxes.
The Fall of the Colossus of Rhodes
Rhodes was a great trading center on the Isle of Rhodes.
It's off of Turkey between Turkey and Greece.
It's a big island.
The Rhodians had a 2% tax.
and they were very wealthy and they kept the sea lanes free from pirates and the tax was really quite successful in that sense.
But then the Romans had a little trouble with Macedonia, that was the Greek area,
and the Rhodians, instead of being loyal Romans, went to the two governments and said,
hey, well, we'll act as mediators, you know, we'll act as arbitrators, we'll help you settle your troubles.
Well, the Romans didn't like that at all.
They figured that those guys should be on our team,
and they shouldn't be playing hanky-panky with the other side.
So they then went ahead and defeated the Macedonians,
and then now what are you going to do with these Rhodians
who have been disloyal to us?
So the Romans, they didn't organize, they had a good navy.
They didn't organize their navy or their armies.
They destroyed the Rhodians by setting up on a nearby island a tax haven.
And within a year, the revenues that were paid on the 2% tax, the Rhodes disappeared.
And Rhodes literally disappeared as a commercial center.
So it wasn't the Roman legion, it wasn't the Roman army,
It was simply a 2% tax that destroyed the roads, and that's an amazing story.
I think in the book I have the numbers as to how much was collected, and then within one year,
oh, why would you go pay 2% when you can go over the hill, you know, to the next island in spring?
And so they were pretty smart guys in that sense.
One of the great men of history is Caesar Augustus.
because you might know from your biblical days in the New Testament that Caesar had decreed that all the world will be taxed
and that everybody went to their homeland, so to speak.
It was really to be registered for tax and Mary and Joseph went off to Bethlehem because that was their location.
And so, usually in the old days, when you ever had a censor, the censors were basically tax planning.
You want to find out how much people paid. So anyway, so Caesar Augustus became a very, very successful emperor.
He turned the Emperor from a war-prone Roman Republic, and it's also sometimes called Pax Augustus, meaning the Peace of Augustus.
He brought peace to the world. He did. He really did. He brought peace to the world. He was a very, very successful ruler.
When he came to Egypt, they welcomed him, as he was.
Egypt was the most productive of taxes of any of the provinces, you know, in the Roman Empire.
But Egypt had become so corrupt with the Greek tax bombers and the corruption of society that they welcomed Augustus.
And Augustus brought in the legions and he put them to work cleaning up the dikes and cleaning up society so that they could be prosperous.
And the Romans were smart on taxes. They only wanted to collect what you were already paying.
So in Sicily, the grain taxes went to Rome rather than where they might otherwise have gone.
The same thing was true with Egypt, places like that. He was a very astute taxman.
I like calling him the master tax strategist.
And that was his strategy, to make sure that the taxes flowed and that's what the Romans were interested in.
When he dies, he is the user story, the successors are not that decent, and so we have a couple of interesting tax revolts, besides the three main revolts that the Jews set off, that ultimately got them thrown out of the Holy Land and becoming a despised and dispersed people, we had a wonderful revolt up in Britain.
And to you ladies, I always, when a lot of people talk about taxes, I say, you know, one of the most interesting characters was Princess Bogota.
She was up in Ritten, and she organized her people to throw out the Roman rulers.
And she gave a speech, and it's in my book, recorded by the Romans at the time, in which she said,
They had better for us to have been sold into slavery than every year to have to ransom ourselves from the Roman masters.
One of the camera channels made a movie, I think, in the last year.
I think I heard they were working on it. I don't know how well they did.
The Warrior Princess?
Yeah, yeah. The only problem is she lost.
What was her name?
BOTICA, B-O-A-D-I-C-A, Princess BOTICA, and I have a picture of her in my book, I heard they were talking about it, but I guess they went ahead and did it be interesting to see how true to form it was that the problem was that the Romans had such marvelous generals and the general went up in there and he organized his forces and
And just slaughtered the English. Just slaughtered them by superior military tactics.
And then after that was over, they had another revolt down in France.
And again, on both of these things, the Romans made a study of it,
and they realized that what set off the revolt was corrupt tax collectors and tax men.
And that's the remedy. But again, they can't go around and tolerate this kind of stuff.
And so the same general that crushed Boudicca went up into France and crushed their rebellion.
And he gave a wonderful speech.
He said that, in effect, it wasn't a good idea to do this because he says there will be better times,
and there will be better men who replace the ones you have.
And so you should let the fortune run its course, so to speak,
Because we can't tolerate this kind of stuff from you guys, so we put down that rebellion as well.
So we had the three great rebellions, there was the Israeli, the Jewish rebellions, followed by Boudicca and followed by the rebellion in Gaul, as well.
And the Romans crushed it, and I don't think that anybody was too enthused after that about it, about rebelling.
The Romans also gave us serfdom, which what happened is that the tax rates were pretty
high because of the later greed of the Romans and so the small taxpayer would surrender
himself to a big landowner and he got immunity from taxes because he was now owned by the
landowner, basically a serf, and then the big landowner had enough clout to control the
the tax system, controlled the Roman Senate, very often he would lobby a new tax immunity
law and amnesty through the Senate, and that's how the system worked.
This idea of serfdom shows up again in Russia.
See in the Middle Ages Russia was about the only place in the Western area that was free.
The Russian peasant could roam around and contract the services out to the nearest nobleman and he had that freedom.
Well, because we think, look, think of it, gee, what about serfdom in Russia?
When we had a Bali serfdom in the western part of Europe, Russia was locked in a terrible system of serfdom.
There were millions and millions of serfs.
But the way that came, Peter the Great was kind of, he saw all these people not working
and he decided that he was going to clamp down on them and so he he herded all the men that weren't
working he said you got three choices he says either you can pay taxes or you can become a
galley slave or you can join up with one of the nobles and become a serf so they took the easy
way out and he turned down one of the great safety valves for in Russia where the cossacks
The Cossacks, there was the Don Cossacks and the Nippon Cossacks, and they were a free-boating bunch, you know, they had their own leaders, and they didn't pay any taxes, and what usually happened when some peasant got too unhappy with his relationship with his lord, he'd just pack up his bags and head for the Cossacks, and he would join up with the Cossacks.
And it was a good safety bell for the country as far as rebels and started in rebellions.
But it turned out that he destroyed the safety bell.
And then the peasant revolt started and one of the most interesting ones was a fellow named Pugachev who started a...
He had 10,000 serfs with him heading for Moscow to complain to Catherine the Tsar about the situation.
He was captured and executed, and at the end of him, that was the end of Pukhachev.
And she was so mad that she went to the town where he was born and had it destroyed, obliterated
from the face of the earth.
They wanted him or him around, or his kind, so to speak.
But it wasn't until Alexander II came along in 1860, at the time that America still had
Slavery and he abolished 13 million slaves in Russia with a stroke of a pen. He just
called in the nobles and he says, look, we're going to have a revolt, our society is going
to be destroyed, you're going to lose your great states, we've got to abolish slavery.
And he did with a stroke of a pen. Now the serf wouldn't that wear off in Russia because
Because what he did, he put a price tag around their neck, so that they had to pay off the landlord for the value that they were,
but they got their homes, they stayed right where they were, and so in that sense, they were reasonably happy.
And then once they paid off that debt, then they were free and clear.
So sometimes when you look at what America bought as slavery, when we bought as slavery,
We had the Emancipation Proclamation, which really didn't abolish slavery. It was basically a war measure.
But then they came along with the 13th Amendment, which, incidentally, was the same number of amendments as the one that Lincoln saw that would never interfere with slavery.
It was 13, too. In fact, a number of the states actually approved it, and you've got to remember, it was passed by a Congress where there were no Southerners there.
So the two-thirds vote for that amendment came from the North. They were very happy to keep their fingers out of it.
That's that side of that coin.
And so what do we do? We passed the Constitutional Amendment, which abolished slavery, and did nothing to deal with the problem, really.
We just said, you're free, and you really were free to starve. That was the other side of it.
So it wasn't a very good emancipation, like when the British abolished slavery in the West Indies, they compensated the slave owners, and in Jamaica, for example, two or three instances where they gave them queues, parts of the land were divided up to the ex-slaves, so they would have their own little home and their own little plantations, you know, it takes a bit of intelligence to get rid of slavery in that sense.
One of the most interesting things I read in my research, and this came out in about 1861 or 2,
and the author said the worst thing that Britain ever did in its history was to try and tax the American colonists and set up the American Revolution.
That was a terrible thing on our part. Why?
Because, if we hadn't tried to tax them, the Americans would have stayed in the British Empire.
And in 1833, when we abolished slavery, we would have abolished slavery in the colonies in America.
So there wouldn't have been any slave issue to haggle about.
Interesting how the British wrote that, and that's on.
You know, 4th of July we have all the celebrations, but according to him that was not a good idea
The British compensated the owners and they made various provisions to give these people jobs, and maybe that's why when I taught in the West Indies these kids were so damn smart and didn't have any chip on their shoulder, they were proud of themselves and proud of their cultures, proud of their island that they lived on.
I didn't get any of that sent down here. They were set free and they have a celebration.
I think it would be a week from Sunday or Monday. It's the first Monday in August.
And it's throughout the former British West Indies and it's called Emancipation Day.
And it's quite a big celebration. That was roughly the day that Parliament emancipated the slaves.
So when we talk about slavery, I remember when I was living in the West Indies,
we Americans were getting together and celebrating 4th of July.
And we had the barbecue and all the usual stuff everybody has and so forth.
One of my old British friends says, wasn't that declarative, independent, kind of a farce?
I said, what do you mean? He says, well, he says, you know, you had three and a half, four million, millions of black slaves.
Hell, you didn't set them free.
I said, there weren't that many at the time. They hadn't multiplied that much.
But he says, you know, you talk about all men are created equal. You ought to be kidding.
The Revolution was a glorious event.
After Augustus and we had this terrible inflation of the money, the Roman Emperor started milling
down the silver and adding copper and more copper until it became practically worthless.
Then there came a guy named Diocletian, and he was the last great powerful emperor in his fourth system, and Diocletian, he remade the money in the tax system, and he just ordered everybody to stay where they were, because so many people were fleeing and going north,
And one of the sayings they run into is,
Let us flee to the land of the barbarians, where we may live as free men.
These are Romans, and the Bion of the Barbarians was up in Germany in that area, and they would have their freedom.
So, Diocletian says, we've got to stop this, this running away, and we're losing taxpayers, so everybody will stay where they are.
Nobody can go anywhere.
If you're a cobbler, then you're going to be a cobbler forever.
And your children are going to be cobblers.
Cobblers are shoemakers, incidentally.
I remember that even when I was a young man thinking of what I was going to do in high school.
And this fellow, he was a father of a friend of mine.
He says, well, why don't you just be a cobbler?
Because people will always need shoes.
So that's a good way to remember the definition.
So Diocletian just ordered everybody to stay where they were, and then they enslaved the Roman Empire.
And one of the writers, you know, says, let me see, I love this, let me see if I can find it here.
This is, let's see, I have an interesting chapter called Islam, Death or Taxes to the Infidel, which is worth, because that was the system.
Now it's just death at the end of all, we forget the taxonomy.
Yeah, here's the thing, it's on page 118.
They achieved it. They never asked whether it is worthwhile to save the Roman Empire in order to make a vast prison for scores of millions of men.
So here we have the enslavement in the Roman Empire, and it was done to preserve the people from leaving.
I like that saying, let us leave the land of our barbarians or maybe we may live as free men.
It tells you a lot about what was wrong with Rome and why Rome went to hell.
It was sad because the Romans went from four different systems of tax, which I have charts on it,
and they ended up with this new order where they enslaved scores of millions of men.
Now I did talk a little bit about ancient China.
And I wanted to, that's in the new book, it's in the second edition, it's not in the original edition.
And the wisdom of the Chinese was this 10% tax, and Confucius proposed it, and Mencius's follower proposed it.
Then the emperor came along who built the Great Wall of China.
Well, he couldn't build a great wall on 10%, so he had a 50% tax.
And this sent off essentially a revolution, but then came this guy who governed by doing nothing,
and that's the literal translation of his name, and they reduced everything to 3%.
There was one wonderful safety valve, was in the early Chinese society, and it was called the Mandate of Heaven.
And all rulers had the rule with the Mandate of Heaven.
And if they violated the mandate of heaven, then they were subject to the overthrown revolution and get rid of them.
And the mandate of heaven was a moderate 10% tax system. It seemed to be what the people were interested in.
So we don't quite have that. I wish we did. We can have a revolution.
Yeah, we'll talk about Islam. Now that we have all these wonderful Arabs running around and blowing everybody up, they, and Arab is a word I know, but one of my friends calls them Arabs.
There's a map in here, it shows you the spread of Islam, it's on page 132, and it shows you, in a hundred or so years, how the Muslim empire grew from Mecca,
You know, there in Saudi Arabia, then up into Persia, then over into India, then across Africa, all the way into Spain, that was only a hundred or so years.
That was probably the most successful proselyting the world has ever known.
And it had a good system. Death or taxes to the infidel.
And we read in one record where it said that the believers and the messiah gave up their faith, meaning the Christians of course.
Because the Christianity was strong through there. See, this is Roman. The Romans had adopted Christianity.
And within a couple hundred years, there were no Christians around.
Because death or taxes for the innocent, if you joined Islam, you were tax-free.
I mean, you talk about a deal. I could believe that myself. That was the system, you know, so they went death attacks into the system.
And there's even one instance in there where the Islamic, up around in Palestine area, they were having trouble with some of the Romans, the older Romans,
that came out of Constantinople was then, and they became Istanbul, and they had to abandon the city
because they couldn't defeat or protect the Christians or the Jews from the incoming armies of the Romans,
the later Romans, and they refunded all the taxes to the Christians and to the Jews
There is also here the picture of a gold denar, which was the famous tax that they paid, you know, to Islam.
They seemed to have been fairly decent guys, and then they got corrupted by tax.
which was the famous tax that they paid to Islam.
They seemed to have been fairly decent guys and then they got corrupted by tax.
And we read that they were the cruelest of men collecting the taxes.
The biggest problem was that Islam ran out of infidels.
Infidels don't pay any taxes.
Then when everybody becomes a Muslim, then where are you going to get your money?
So this was a serious problem for the spread of Islam.
But by now they're all the way into Spain, they're all the way across the whole damn world,
and they're quite a powerful group.
With the loss of their infidels, they had to reintroduce the tax, and of course they did.
But I love this story, you talk about how taxes affected history, this is a wonderful example of the way it did.
And that was literally the exact words, taxes or death to the infidel.
And it really made a lot of believers out of everybody. I thought that they were pretty smart guys. They don't have that anymore. Wouldn't that be something?
Here's a description in the end of this chapter about how bad they had become.
They were cruel rascals, inventors of a thousand injustices, arrogant and presumptuous.
They were the scourge of their age, always with a causeless insult ready in their mouths.
Their existence passed exclusively in oppressing the people of their time.
They were a disgrace to humanity.
And that is the mausoleum rulers after they were corrupted by tax money.
Well, the next interesting chapter, which I like, is in the Middle Ages, and there's a picture on page 144 of William the Good of the Netherlands beheading a tax collector.
And there's only one picture like this, and it's in the city hall in a small town in the Netherlands, and I was happy to get it.
What happened is that during the Middle Ages the taxpayers had a wonderful, wonderful weapon. They had God on their side.
And when they made covenants with the kings and the rulers and the nobles about collecting taxes, it was done in the name of God.
And so God was a third party. There was the people, there was the ruler, and there was God.
And if the ruler violated this covenant, and they called it a covenant, then he was offending God, because, you know, how do you get God's approval, I don't know, disapproval, but anyway, that was one of the problems.
And so we had this solid defense against new taxes. And there's one story where a noble went out and he introduced the taxes and it was called, in latin, unheard of tax. And you couldn't have an unheard of tax.
Taxes were already established by solid divine sanctions and agreements, and so the taxpayer had God on their side.
And there's some interesting stories that are in the book about this.
I can think of a couple that fascinated me. Let's see if I wrote them down here.
Now, we got the expulsion of the Jews.
We then let them move up in the middle ages too, through the British and Magna Carta era.
And Magna Carta was a with a tax document.
As you mentioned about Magna Carta, there is no document called Magna Carta.
The Constitution of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, there is no Magna Carta as such.
It has been handed down as the agreement that King John made with his nobles that he wouldn't create taxes about the end of the realm,
that merchants could travel freely throughout England, and as other kings came along, they reiterated it.
But the original was long since lost in history, the original Magna Carta.
So somebody says, I used to have to have trouble with my editors because they would rephrase this.
I said, no, you can't rephrase it because there is no document called Magna Carta.
But it was an interesting document because it set the pattern for British rulers
that they couldn't tax without the consent of the barons.
And that became a real important issue.
One of the kings, for example, wanted to recover some lands in Sicily,
which the pope had given them, and the Varans turned it down.
Another one wanted to recover some lands in Flanders, which apparently the king had titled him.
And they turned him down. They turned him down because they said,
We are a Christian people. We do not engage in wars of aggression. We only engage in wars of defense and necessity and emergency.
And Slam Flanders and Sicily has got nothing to do with the defense of the realm.
They would raise some archers to recover Normandy, because Normandy was right across the channel and that could become a staging place for an aggression against the country, so then they would go ahead and they would approve an aid, as they called it, to aid the king to recover the lands in Normandy for their protection.
But this bargaining came between the nobles and then the king and then the consent of the realm.
And pretty soon, the consent of the realm meant they had the consent to it,
and consent meant that the baron himself had the consent to it.
So one particular baron who wouldn't cough up the aid to the king was arrested right before the king's court.
Why didn't you do it? And he says, well, I didn't vote for it.
And the judges said, yeah, that's right, you didn't vote for it. So, didn't have your consent.
So he got off the hook. And that would be great today, wouldn't it, if we all had the consent of the tax system.
But anyway, I think that's one of the great stories that come out of this prayer.
But King John, for example, here's what one of the writers said,
With occasions of his wars, he piled them with taxes and tallages under the bare bones, meaning his taxes, but they said the taxes had to be for defense only, or evident utility, evident necessity, and dire emergency.
There was a rebellion in, let's see, where was this, in Cornwall, and the rebellion in Cornwall was because they tried to collect a tax for an invasion of Scotland, and they wanted to put the Scots down, and the Cornish people says,
The Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas with three of his helpers went out to see what was going on, and they seized them both, and apparently the Chief Justice had the fastest carriage, because he's the only one that got out of there with his head.
The rest of them had their heads chopped off, and they used to like to stick them on poles.
The Scots had fought hard for their independence and that's why I mentioned some time ago that most rebellions for independence did not succeed, the Irish certainly didn't succeed and the Scots tried for 500 years to break the way from the
from the English, they were put down and Bonnie Prince Charlie, he was supposed to be his savior
and of course there's an interesting analogy to the Civil War because when the British and English were closing in on him,
he dressed himself up like a woman and he escaped.
Now do you know your Confederate history about what the Yankees said about Jefferson Dennis?
That's what they said about him. They said Jefferson Davis was trying to escape as a woman in a woman's dress, and that's when they caught him.
It was the same thing that actually happened to Bonnie Prince-Terry.
The only point is the answer was that he had a shawl, I suppose. That was the Confederate story.
I don't mind disguising myself as a goat if you can get away from the contrary enemy.
That's not so bad, but when the war was over, one American firm in the North wanted to parade Jefferson Davis through the North, dressed with a dress on, and charge admission, sort of like, but of course they didn't do it to him, but he was tried, he was not tried, as you probably know, because they charged him with treason,
I indicted him, he was arrested, he was put in irons for a couple of years. They offered him a pardon. He said, no way. If I'm a pardon, I have to admit I was wrong and I wasn't wrong. He says, nope, I want him to trial.
And by that time, of course, Lincoln was dead, and Johnson was president, and they said,
What are we going to do with this guy? He wants a trial. If we try him, he's going to win.
And we're going to lose, in a court of law, what we've spent hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield.
So it was a tough problem. And if they didn't want to turn him loose, well, eventually they figured out,
Well, we just give amnesty to everybody in sight and then that lets him go.
So that's how Jefferson Davis...
It would have been the trial of the century.
It would really have been interesting because some of the greatest lawyers in the North came forward and wanted to represent Jefferson Davis.
And they felt sure they could win.
And see, the bar at that time was pretty angry.
Because in the North, the policy of a Lincoln administration had been to arrest and throw away the key for thousands of people.
The Columbia Law Review says it was over 30,000 people locked up.
And lawyers couldn't do anything.
It's almost like the Guantanamo Bay problem. They couldn't do anything.
And maybe some guy, like one guy said, arrayed for Jeff Davis, so they arrested him and threw him in prison.
and so it didn't take much for you to get locked up and so the argument, the bar was tired of going to the President Lincoln and to Secretary Seward and begging to get innocent people released from these federal dungeons that they were in so it was, so they were happy to go and represent Jefferson Davis and hammer on those guys for the way they had mistreated so many people.
And it was too bad it wasn't tried. I think it would have been a great trial. I think it would have been a terrific trial.
Because then they would have tried the real issue would have been the right to secede. That would have been the issue.
Can you secede from the Union? Well, it took their consent to get in. Why couldn't you deconsent and get out?
get out, was the argument, and of course that had always been true with treaties, it had always been true with various leagues, European leagues that were during the Middle Ages, you could get out if you wanted to, so the trial never took place, it would have been a glorious trial in my opinion.
I would love to have been alive and defended the guy, although as I said some time ago, he was a damn fool to have bombarded Fort Sumter.
He was just a damn fool to have done that, and I think that if the South had played its cards intelligently, they would have succeeded successfully.
But I think they would have had to have not. See, this was an age of imperialism, it was an age of war, and there was so much zeal to go to war because nations were building empire,
Germany was building its empire, Britain was at its empire, why didn't America have its empire? So there was this great empire building itself.
and there was a feeling that the South could win and there was a, they had all the generals, they had the vets, not only the vets, they had all of them, good leaders in the army had been Southerners, but again, it was as preposterous to think they could defeat the North as it was for the North to think that they could destroy the Southern society, which is what it was.
And I don't know if you read it, but the abolitionists in America were about the most bloodthirsty, vicious, despicable people that ever were.
And the British hated them with a passion. The British said, these are terrible people. What did they advocate?
They advocated destroying the South, laying the South the ashes, burning all the cities and killing all the men, women and children and repopulating it.
And these are ministers. These are ministers that are in the abolition movement.
And so one of the reviewers of my book that wrote in Amazon took issue to my statement that I said that the abolitionists in America were on the lunatic fringe.
They were more than the friends. They were dead solid in there. That's lightning or gods speaking.
Well, the other thing that came out of this period in Britain, which I think is so important,
was the concept of the separation of powers.
Now, we believe in that. We're taught, you know, in school, we have the separation of powers in our governments, federal and state.
The Congress is the power, and the executive is the power, and then the judiciary is the power.
So, in this period came along the idea of the separation of powers, but it was a little different.
It was involved with taxes. It was that parliament could tax, but not spend, and the king could spend, but not tax.
And by separating these two powers, you gained a pretty good balance, you gained a pretty good control over government running wild.
And I got somebody who wrote me and said, you know, you should emphasize that more, and I think it was quite true, the separation of power.
We saw a little of it in the Constitution, with the bills, the revenue beginning in house and so forth, but it doesn't, and we do have some control that way, but we don't quite have the strong, solid rule that the Congress could tax but not spend, because then they have the appropriation slides, or then they do spend. So we kind of lost sight of that. It would have been a very great thing.
Well, one of my other favorite persons is another female, and that's Princess Olga.
Now, we've got Boudicca, who led the great rebellion against the Romans and was defeated.
Is that a 200,000 English McIlf in that terrible thing?
Well, up in Russia, they had a pretty crummy tax system, is that there were these tax areas, like Tia, for example, which was a city but also had all its hotline districts, and every winter, the ruler, the prince, would travel out in the cold and go from city to city to collect taxes.
And it was a tough ordeal and it was not a good time to be a tax collector.
Well, Princess Olga, she comes along and what had happened is they had murdered her husband
and she was a little bit unhappy with that.
If you know the story, she invited these people that had killed her husband
because her husband was trying to collect taxes.
And so she said, oh come on, it's great, you know, and so they ride with their boats and she digs a great big hole and they pick up the boat and they dump it in the hole and then they dump dirt all over it and they bury the whole bunch alive.
So she was, you know, she could be difficult at times if she didn't like it. Well, she was said in the Russian Chronicles, they write of her that she was wiser than all men.
as an interesting comment, or the wisest of women.
This is a day when women are looked upon as pretty nothing.
She reorganized the tax system in, just like we have today, the district director system.
Rather than have the prince go out in the winter time, all one slogging through the rustling winter and so forth,
she would put one of her men there permanently, stationed in the town,
And he's in charge of collecting the taxes, and so we don't have to go over this complicated process, so I was the district director system and it worked pretty well.
Her son took over and her son was named Vladimir, and if you go to Kiev and you go up on the hill, you'll see the picture of Vladimir standing there facing, actually facing toward Moscow.
I've been there, and down below you'll see the Dnieper River rolling. When I was there, I had the feeling, I know if I'd been there, all the great enemies of Russia had come to this spot and had looked over and had seen this.
The problem we have with this particular event was that the next thing that happened after Russia finally got organized a little bit on what we call the Kiev Waterway, there was Kiev, Novgorod and Skophe with the three great trading cities along there,
is that there came a guy by the name of Genghis Khan, and he and his warriors came roaring across the steppes in Asia.
They went all the way up to the gates of Europe, and they just obliterated Russian society.
Just obliterated. They said that with one Mongol warrior would stand on the horizon and the whole town would throw in the towel.
And I guess it was Pushkin that said that the Mongols did not bring Aristotle to Russia. They're a pretty ugly bunch.
They had a 10% tax, and this is a perfect example, never judge a tax system by its rates alone.
Because the 10% was everybody and everything. So they take 10% of the men, 10% of the women, to 10% of everything and they get their hands on it.
And so, remember the rule. I don't judge a tax system by its rates alone because they were a pretty rough bunch.
The Russians were pretty well crushed under the Golden Horde.
And the Golden Horde stopped short of Europe.
And one recent Russian writer said that Russians' great service to humanity has been to protect the civilization of Europe.
That they protected Europe from the golden horde because by the time the Mongols had come through there,
They just didn't have enough to go on into Europe and into the European region, so they stopped them.
They stopped Napoleon, and if he had succeeded in capturing and taking over Russia, then he would have been emperor.
And they stopped Hitler. As much as we like to think that our armies and our invasion on D-Day was a big thing,
Hitler was defeated by the Russians. 90% of the casualties of the German army were from the Eastern Front.
So it was just a pittance, although I don't want to cast anything against or invasion, because it was a wonderful, and we recently just celebrated it again,
but it was the Russians who crushed and defeated the German army, the Wehrmacht.
And so the writer said that the great service and sacrifice to the world has been done by the Russians, because we saved the Europeans from the Golden Horde, and I guess that's kind of true.
One of the things that happened during this period is that there was quite a revolt against the Mongols, against the Horde, and they were pretty unhappy at that.
And Alexander Nevsky, who was a ruler of Novgorod, he went to the Golden Horde and he says, you know, let's make a deal.
He said, don't treat us like you treat everybody else. And he said, we'll collect your taxes for you.
And then you won't have to have wonderful, noble, Mongol warriors collecting taxes. We'll do it for you.
Well, so the horde guy, Khan, thought, yeah, okay, we'll let you do it. That'll be fine.
And see, what they were doing is that when it took 10% of the population, they shipped them down to the slave auctions in Baghdad, where the Mongols were.
So, yeah, okay, we'll let you collect the taxes for us.
Well, then comes along a ruler of a city that was never heard of before, Moscow.
And this was a guy named Moneybags, Ivan I, Moneybags.
And he would collect the taxes.
And then the receiver of the taxes, he would show up from the Mongols,
He'd take the taxes and take them back to the con and take them back to the various
settlements of the Mongols and this was a good deal, but moneybags kept keeping a little.
So he built up a pretty good pile of dough, so to speak, and eventually his successor
The answer was Ivan the Terrible. And Ivan the Terrible turned around, and there's an interesting artist's depiction of when the Moscow derogacy was called, came to collect the money for the con.
Ivan the Terrible said, forget it. He basically turned him down cold and the chosen thingy right on the spot when he was turned down.
And then he turned around and he built the Kremlin. It was the only edifice capable of
the withstanding of Tartar siege. And he proceeded to drive the Mongols out of Russia.
And he did it because of the tax system that foolishly was turned over to them. If the
Khan had kept his own tax people, it may never happen, but the Russians were just good enough
to con him into thinking that we'd collect him, and it was a good deal. You know, for
Why should any noble warrior from the Muslim world, because they'd become Muslims pretty soon, degrade himself to collect taxes?
It's a wonderful story.
And the Russian princes then slowly drove the Mongols out of Russia over to Ostokhan, over into what became Stalingrad on the Volga, they drove them out of there.
And it was at this time, of course, that the symptoms started when Peter began to make sure that everybody had a job.
And then they became SIRS.
Finally, I suppose we'll talk a little... No, that's supposed to be tomorrow. It's supposed to be done today. Good.
Let me, we've got a few minutes, anything you guys want to talk about?
Yes?
I actually heard something, something that I've never heard before,
whether you could verify it, again about the Greeks,
that apparently before the democratization of Athens,
there was this burst of economic prosperity and creativity,
and what I heard was that this was sparked by a reduction in taxes.
And this was before the democratic Greeks?
Yeah.
The thing was, you know, the only thing I remember is that the tyrants, as they would call it, Athens, collected a direct tax,
they collected a 10% tax on everybody and that's how they built up their powerful city-states
States and I didn't know that they had changed the rules because it was it was getting rid of them
like the word interesting thing on on the back of this book you see this is this is
thing in the in the metropolitan you can go tyrannocides because it was a virtuous act
to murder a tyrant and even when Lincoln was assassinated Booth you know made some kind of
Under the Magnet Card, weren't the kings supposed to pay the ordinary expenses of the monarchy from their own land rather than from the taxes collected in the taxes?
What were the taxes used to be for war, or emergencies, or...?
Our friend Henry VIII, popular, because there was a feeling that there wasn't a lot of precious metals in England, and they were being shipped off to Rome, and it was called Peterpence, and so when he cut that off, then the money in the carnage was going to stay in England, so that's about all I can tell you on that point.
But I know there were a number of different taxes that people had to pay for various things on the land of the nobles and things like that.
Magna Carta was essentially the consent of the realm. That was the key factor because the kings of England had been collecting on their own.
And that was one of the things that got Henry VIII in trouble, is that the normal dues, as Magna Carta uses that word, the customary dues, were not enough for him.
And when he sailed to France, he had a ship with a gold sail cloth. Gold!
And then he tried to introduce some taxes without the consent of parliament.
And they came down on him pretty hard, and he was penitent, and he said, I won't do it again, and so forth, I'll just steal the church.
And that's clearly what he did, you know. The great prize in breaking off from Rome,
not only was that the Peter Pence was gone, that the money going to the Pope was gone,
but now there was all these papal lands that belonged to the king.
And so, Henry VIII, really, that's why they used to call him Boeuf-King-Hal, meaning Heister-Hal was another name.
He literally stole the Catholic Church in England, and it gave him a nice base for running things, and of course he was always out of money,
and he was one of the worst kings they ever had, and he was the one who followed the Roman practice of adulterating the clients.
See, the Schilling was really the corner of the realm, and he found out that if he could put in 20% or 30% base money, look at all the more money he created, he didn't have to tax anybody out, this was a real deal.
And of course, but the merchants weren't all that stupid, you know, they realized that these Schillings had been adulterated.
And he was a terrible king, and then comes along his daughter.
and I suppose I'll leave you, she was probably the greatest monarch the world has ever known.
She was brilliant, she outsmarted all the rulers of Europe, she could speak many, many languages
and what had happened is, of course, Henry VIII didn't like her mother because for various reasons he had her head cut off,
but this was his daughter and she was raised by Henry VIII's last wife
who recognized the brilliant little girl that was there.
And so she was educated in foreign languages and in so many things.
She was just one smart cookie. She outsmarted not only the rulers of Europe,
she outsmarted all the men in England.
And she was the one that said to be loved and taxed is not given to man.
You heard the saying? And she was referring to her reign that she wasn't going to tax.
She wasn't offering that as an excuse for taxing. She was going to say, that's why I'm not going to tax.
And she said, I would rather the money was in the pockets of my people than in my treasury.
And I wrote an article about this, and it was published in the Washington Post, and they had a picture of her and everything and so forth.
I got the nastiest letters.
Is that in the second edition?
You mean the story?
What did you just say?
This was in the Washington Post, the newspaper, and it had a whole page on it.
It had a picture of her and everything.
And the title to it was,
What Good Queen Bess did not say, read my royal lips. And my wife thinks that the reason is that a lot of men hate the fact that I praised her so much.
What were the nasty letters?
I went to research this after I got all these nasty letters and I found out that she had
enormous money owed to her from the Dutch.
She had money owed to her from the King of France.
She had some parliament had granted her taxes that she never had collected because she didn't
want to.
So she wasn't broke.
She had a lot of money coming in if she had just pursued it.
The Cornish problem is what gave birth to Gresham's Law.
You heard that term before?
Thomas Gressen was her financial advisor, and he said that bad money drives out good.
And that became Gressen's law, but it was Elizabeth's doing, so to speak, and at least she believed in him, and then she proceeded to restore the carnage.
Some of the saying was that she restored the money. And another thing she did, she eliminated an oath for taxes.
In other words, you guys sign your tax return under penalty of perjury and all that, go those goodies. Well, she took that away.
She did not want people in England to have to swear an oath on taxes. She'd take their word for it.
And a remarkable position that she took.
Actually, your Supreme Court in a case in 1890 or something, Boyd case, brought that up that it was wrong to make people take an oath to pay taxes.
That was the Supreme Court of the United States, so it lived on for quite a while.
It also lived on after her during the time of the American Revolution.
There were some articles, again, pointing out Elizabeth's position.
And her reason was, her reason was, there is a tradition of evasion in the realm.
So I don't want people to have to swear, because people are old-serious in those days.
You know, it was God-striking-me-dead type stuff, you know.
So that was her. But anyway, you can tell she's my favorite monarch.
But in the new book, there's a whole chapter on her, because I did some more research.
And I was, of course, weren't very happy with her either, you know.
She put down the Irish rebellion and so on.
So there were, in fact, I spoke one of the things I would wish I could find.
and I spoke at Princeton and I spoke with Elizabeth, I mean Margaret Thatcher and she
and I had a big argument over her taxes and somebody took this on film so here we are
arguing away about her taxes and later on I got a copy of it and I have some place around
And I said, you know, in my book, I talked to her, I said, you know, the Financial Times
said, if you had read my book, you'd still be prime minister.
Oh, Jesus.
She came out of her shoes.
And you know, she has a voice that was shattered glass, you know, speaking in parliament, you
know, a real powerful voice, you know, God, she was a powerful voice.
And so she says, oh.
I said, yeah, I said, what I wrote about is that the British people had rebelled against poll taxes since the Middle Ages.
They had never accepted a poll tax.
And I said, you tried to introduce a poll tax and it cost you your job.
She said, it was not poll tax.
She says, it was a community tax.
You know, for a bright person, you know, there's no such thing as a community tax that has a generic meaning.
It's just a name that she put on a pole. That was one of my great experiences, in particular, when I saw these pictures, and here we are going to be choked.
But she was marked, well, I praised her because she got rid of exchange controls, and that was a great, great service to the British economy, the British people.
Exchange control means that you can't convert into a foreign currency without permission from the government, for which there is no appeal.
So if you want to buy Dutch cheese and you want to spend British pounds, you have to convert to guilders and you have to then go to the British government to get permission.
Well, they would do it on cheese, but that's what the exchange controls are about.
Now, they're a terrible thing.
When I was living in the Cayman Islands, we had what I called the Jamaica shuttle because
Mackle Mammy, he was a bit of a communist and also was a socialist, and he introduced
some harsh exchange controls on Jamaican currency.
And so small Cessna airplanes were landing on roads in Jamaica and picking up bundles
of Jamaica currency and flying to the Cayman Islands and dumping it off and putting it
in the banks there because the banks there were Canadian banks with all the Canadian
banks over there.
And so the Canadian banks ran out of money.
So they got on the phone to Cayman Islands and said, would you please send us some of
that money back?
To give you an example of what the Jamaicans have done to their money, when I got to the Cayman Islands, they didn't have their own money, they used the Jamaican dollar, and the Jamaican dollar was half a pound, and it was $1.20 U.S., so it took $1.20 U.S. to buy $1.20 U.S.
1 Jamaican dollar. You know how much it cost today? About a penny? Less than 2 cents? So
Jamaican dollar is worth less than 2 cents today. And it was worth once worth a dollar
and a quarter. It just shows you how bad governments can mismanage their money. It's just, I'm
glad I didn't have money in my money. But that was the world that Michael Manley and
When I went to Russia back in 1970, my wife was Russian, so I took her back to meet family and stuff, and we were in a hermitage, and you bought a coupon, and the coupon was a ruble, and the ruble of that thing was $1.20 US.
I went there in 1994. They had the same coupons. They were surcharged 7,000 rubles.
So it's easy to print the stuff, but this is what happens.
Well, it's time to go and I'll see you tomorrow and we'll pick up from where we left off.
Well, I want to talk about the CSC, yeah.