Parliamentarianism and Taxation

If bourgeois liberals never thought in terms of 'taking over' the state (still less 'smashing' it), why did they expect governments to concede a constitutionalism that paid due regard to civil society? Well, because governments want and need money. As Thomas Paine aptly said, parliamentary government "is the most productive machine of taxation ever invented". [Rights of Man, quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, An End to Poverty? A Historical Debate (London: Profile, 2004), p. 22.] I go on about this in my book quite a lot. Rough conclusion: if there ever was such a thing as 'bourgeois revolution', it meant the tax-state conceding parliamentarianism (for its own ends) in the context of an economy based upon general commodification.

Here's a song mentioning Thomas Paine!