Taxes occupy an interesting position in the human psyche: for most of us, they are both boring and scary, as well as inevitable and deeply annoying. Mostly, they are scary because people don’t know how to fill out the horrible, overcomplicated tax forms, and/or don’t have the money on hand to pay up if they owe something, and annoying because, let’s face it, nobody likes being required to pay for stuff, especially since doing so also requires a ton of record-keeping and filling out forms.
I have written a lot of posts over the years about ways writers can keep tax records and the sorts of things they need to look at. That advice hasn’t changed, and this post isn’t about that.
This post is about taxes in fiction.
Writers who are setting their work in the modern day generally ignore the existence of taxes in their stories, unless they’re using taxes as a plot point (as in crime novels where the criminal gets sent to jail for not paying taxes, or lying on their tax forms). Writers who set their work in the past or in imaginary worlds mostly just ignore the whole issue.
But when it gets down to it, taxes are what pay for the government—for the monarch and their palaces, for the armies and their weapons (whether they’re standing armies, volunteers, or mercenaries), for whatever justice system the society has. Who pays taxes, how much, how and when they pay (directly and indirectly), who makes and enforces the rules for paying, what they’re used for, and who benefits directly and indirectly, all affect things like government and government services, social structure and mobility, overall prosperity, international relations, and even the rate of advance in science and medicine (depending on what they get spent on).
Furthermore, if one defines “taxes” as including “all the different ways people have been required to support their government,” there have been a lot more systems than simply “send us money,” which is what most modern writers are accustomed to. (I’m counting everything from income taxes to sales tax to license fees under “send us money.”) The other two main methods of direct taxation were payment in kind (“send us a cow or a sheep; send us a quarter of the grain you harvested”) or payment in labor (“come here and work for us for a month [or two, or six] every year”).
Payments in kind or in labor were much more common in ancient and medieval societies when coins and paper money were scarce. Ancient societies had whole bureaucracies dedicated to tracking who had how many goats, sheep, cows, etc. so that the ruler could collect his proper share, or tracking how many days of service each individual owed or had paid so far. Nonetheless, you seldom find a novel set in the ancient or medieval period in which the hero has to pause in the middle of his year-long quest in order to go to court to perform his annual forty days of service. Nor do you find many stories in which the king has to plan his battle strategies around how many trained men he can call up at once to get their forty days of free knight service, or figuring out the timing so that he can get forty days of free work harvesting his crops without preventing so many people from harvesting their own crops that everyone but the king starves that winter and there’s nobody to plant and harvest next year.
In addition, there was what I’m calling “indirect taxation.” As courts became larger and more expensive to maintain, kings and queens started “going on progress”—picking up the whole court and moving around the country to “visit” members of their nobility…who of course had to provide food and lodging for the king and everyone he brought with him, including his servants. Essentially, the host had to support the entire court for the length of the royal visit.
Of course, the lords who hosted the king expected something for their trouble besides the sheer honor of the visit, though they didn’t always get it. (Some kings made a point of visiting nobles they thought might be trying to stir up trouble; if the king stayed long enough, the troublemaker wouldn’t be able to afford to make any trouble for a very long time after. Some nobles supposedly even went bankrupt after entertaining royal guests…)
There are still quite a few countries that have a mandatory service requirement for all their citizens of a certain age (usually military service, but some places let people substitute community service). In fiction with future settings, E.E. “Doc” Smith has a couple of books that mention how low future tax rates are (without any actual explanation of the hows or whys), and Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers requires that citizens serve in the military in order to earn the right to vote (which is more an “earn a place in government” situation than a “everybody does this to pay for the government” situation). A lot of dystopian futures imply that the government has established some kind of regular property confiscation, but I don’t recall any that actually mention taxes. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen a science fiction future where the tax system has been deliberately manipulated to shape society (Starship Troopers comes closest, but as I said, the service there isn’t really a tax). And nobody, as far as I know, has gotten creative with future taxation systems and/or ways of funding a government.
Thoughts
Taxes in fiction tend to be ignored in much the same way (and for similar reasons) that plumbing, latrines, and sewage treatment (or non-treatment) tend to be ignored.
Taxes may intrude when they’re large or annoying enough to change the way people do things. Brick up windows to avoid the window tax, buy smuggled goods to avoid tariffs, set up tax shelters because the top marginal rate is 90%. (The last is a moderate plot point in my current WIP(revision), being set in an alt-history 1950s.)
What a government spends (or ought to spend) its tax revenues on can cause divisive political issues to raise their ugly heads, even in purely fictional worlds.
In Starship Troopers, they have to serve their country to get the right to vote. Doesn’t have to be military.
In my most recent novel, I have mentions of butlerage and tallage and murage and a bunch of other historical forms of tax. But I keep them in the background, because a) they’d distract from the story I want to tell, and b) it’s a piece of escapist fiction, and I wish I could escape taxes too!!
My husband was recently in Alexandria, and noticed a large number of buildings where the top floor was not completed–usually pieces of rebar sticking up from a partial set of walls. People were none the less living in the lower stories.
He asked the guide, who said that completed buildings were taxed at a higher rate than uncompleted ones. So you just don’t complete them.
That is the sort of eye catching detail you could throw into a work to make the worldbuilding feel more real.
Agree about the eye-catching detail!
I actually did use taxes as a plot point once, in a sword-and-sorcery short story. The MacGuffin in the story was a missing charter of feoffment, which would show there were limits on the taxes the local lord could levy; the characters grumble about how his taxes are too high and aren’t spent on the infrastructure that needs them. Perhaps that particular plot driver gave a little more realism to a fantasy tale.
Rick
The POV characters probably think about taxes as little as they can. Like most people.
Books 9-12 of L.E. Modesitt’s Imager Portfolio address this. (Books 1-3 are in the present, Books 4-8 are in the distant past when the country is founded, Books 9-12 are a few hundred years after the founding.)
In Books 9 & 10, the protagonist in charge of an organization that supports the king. The king is having a major argument with his nobles about tax levels and what they want done and what they’re willing to pay.
Books 11 & 12 are done from the viewpoint of the king. We get into laws and taxes and what is the king’s responsibility and what is not, and how to get various people to cooperate.
Modesitt’s books are very dense and very well written. Excellent plots and characterization.
The only way I’ve ever used taxes in my stories is to highlight that a king is being a tyrant by having the taxes increase significantly at a dramatic time–and I’ve only done it once so far. In my current WIP, my protagonist returns from an unexpectedly lengthy trip into the fae/spirit world to find that her usurping uncle has jacked up the taxes so high that most people can’t afford food. It’s gotten so bad, actually, that a Baroness who was once a thoroughly miserly woman who cared only for her jewels and riches has broken into her own treasury to try and feed the people of her city (mostly because if she doesn’t they’ll all move away and she’ll have no one to rule over, but also because she’s got a grain of goodness inside. Somewhere. She’s not the most well-rounded character in the story, to be honest.).
Sounds like a good story!
I hope so! I’m really excited to get it done, because my backbrain has handed me a couple of cool connections to other stories I’ve started. There’s also the *small* fact that I’ve probably gone through the thing to revise six times at this point, and I’m about ready to have it good enough that I don’t have to go through it again.
But I do love the characters, and though I’ve lost some of my favorite scenes in revision, I have hope that I’ll be able to recycle them later on. 🙂
My privateer has to share the money he gets from taking an enemy ship with his King–and he’s glad that the King is willing to do it that way, instead of make him haul the captured vessel all the way back to Neustraine to be valued there.
Terry Pratchett was supposedly writing a book “Raising Taxes” but wrote one about railways instead.
Captain Carrot seems to be able to counter someone’s clam of being a taxpayer with notes about how much and when last he paid.
In Germany, we were told that the large rows of dormer windows (in the roof) of buildings was because the window tax only applied to windows below the roof line. I think we saw one place that had six lines of windows in the roof.
Christopher Stasheff uses taxes as a bit of a plot point in “The Secular Wizard.” A new king lowers the tax rate, motivating the peasants to work harder (because they keep more of what they earn), which overall brings in more money for the king. This causes various other changes in the economy and also spawns rumors in the neighboring countries. The rumors prompt someone to send the main character off to find out what is really happening.
There’s a book coming out soon, Death and the Taxman by David Hankins, that revolves entirely around a devious IRS agent who tries to cheat the Grim Reaper. If I’m being honest, most of it is not about the inner workings of the US tax system, but it is a very funny story.
. . . It comes out on April 15th.
Karl Gallagher’s science fiction series, The Fall of the Censor, does involve taxes in various ways. The Censorate, an interstellar empire, imposes taxes, and people on Corwynt, one occupied world, try to minimize their tax bills by engaging in barter. Later, tax increases elsewhere in the Censorate, to pay for the war in which the Censorate is engaged, are shown as leading to drastic measures against people who cannot or will not pay, and contributing to more people rebelling; this can be viewed as an application of the Laffer curve. We also see that Censorials can grab valuables for themselves from trading ships, while officially conducting inspections.