A little while ago, I was reminded of the root causes of political freedom and relative equality. Someone asked about the demographics of the people who threw off the royals here in the United States of America. I commented that they were mostly of British ancestry, but they were literate. That reminded me of some information that I learned a number of years ago. In 1770 CE the world's average literacy rate was about ten or fifteen percent. the literacy rate in Western Europe was about 40 %. in ...
We don't often thing about taxes on imports in the country. Import tariffs used to be the main source of income for the federal government, but federal; expenditures became so large that they couldn't be covered by income tariffs. Income taxes used to be greatly restricted, and they were only paid by rich people. I remember going into the kitchen, when I was a child, and I heard my father say, “But only rich people pay that.” And my mother replied, “I guess that means that we are rich.” ...
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