One Reason to Nationalize

AneurinBevan said that an important motive behind nationalizing industries was that it made taxation of incomes that much easier. Payments could be deducted at source, rather than levied upon earnings of small businesses. Nationalization was a way to minimize tax evasion.


[Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (London: Quartet Books, 1952, 1990), p. 142. ]

Dominic Sandbrook on Tax Rebellion

No one can accuse Dominic Sandbrook of lacking work ethic. He has published a steady stream of gripping and detailed histories of the post-war era. Few historians have as good an ear for the telling quotation, an admirable skill. Sandbrook is best known this side of the Atlantic for his on-going history of the United Kingdom. But he has also written persausively on the American experience. His first book, indeed, was on that mercurial American liberal, Eugene McCarthy.

In my own book, I treat the 1848 revolutions as one pivot, from which point the bourgeoisie became more conservative for fear of 'proletarianised democracy' (as I blogged a few days ago, the liberal historian Bennedetto Croce dated this development from the 1830s). At the other end, I see the international 1968 as another pivot, after which the politics of the bourgeoisie become ever bolder and 'revolutionary'. The 1970s was the decade in which this came evident. The rise of this audacious 'New Right' was driven at first by the 'small battalions', those outside the corporatist golden triangle of state/capitalist corporations/labour unions.

Sandbrook's excellent book on the United States in the 1970s, Mad as Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of the Populist Right (2011) chronicles and analyses this period with compelling drive. As he says, both the New-Left and Rightist libertarianism oweded something to the 1968 rebellion against the 'welfare-warfare state'. As Sandbrook wittily puts it:

Weedy pacfists who marched against "the machine" might sem a long way from Ayn Rand's muscular mavericks, but their disdain for authority meant that they were, if not bed-fellows, then at least propping up the same bar. [Mad as Hell, p. 278].

The 1970s saw a ground-swell against taxation in the US, partly because inflation was bringing middle incomes into the upper tax bracket, partly because of expanding welfare programmes.

Sandbrook quotes a Brooklyn housewife:

"My husband works hard and the taxes keep going up. The taxes go to the poor, not to us. And the rich have their tax accountants. The middle-income people are carrying the cost of liberal social programmes on their backs." [282]

'Proposition 13', a Californian referendum to mandate property tax limitation in 1978, was actually opposed by big business, as they feared that taxes would be shifted from household property to corporations. Prop 13, nonetheless, passed overwhelmingly. Over the the next ten years, $228 billion was 'saved' in taxes. Says Sandbrook, "the biggest winners were the major corporations that owned most of the property in the state." [284-5] So, this rise of the New Right obviously benefitted the capitalist leviathans, but there's no doubting its populist roots.

I mention Prop 13, and the tax revolt, in my book. But for a fuller flavour of this and much more, check out Sandbrook. He makes a rivetting read. Highly recommended.

How were Taxes Collected?

In an early draft of the book, I had the line: 'all previous history is the history of class evasion.' Then I thought better of including sentences that might require a 'goak here'. Still, tax is not only as unavoidable as death, but politically as important.


This is a bit of a golden age for financial and fiscal history, not least due to the excellent work of Niall Ferguson. (Have a look, for example, at his fascinating paper on the declining sensitivity of bond markets to political risk between 1848 and the Great War). Still, there's definitely lots spade-work that needs to be done on something even as basic as how tax was collected.


In a wonderful over-view of nineteenth-century Europe (a book I first read as a set text while teaching for the Open University years ago), M. S. Anderson pointed to,

one of the nineteenth-century developments most neglected by historians - the ability of governments of any political complexion working through bigger and more effective bureaucracies, to collect taxes more efficiently than ever before.

[M.S. Anderson, The Ascendancy of Europe, 1815-1914. Third Edition. (London, 1972, 1985, 2003), p. 122 ]

I certainly found it difficult to find basic info on how the tax collection machine improved so dramatically in Europe after 1848 - as it quite clearly did. And that it did is very important for the arguments I seek to make re. the travails of liberal constitutionalism particularly from c. 1870.


Anyway, I did come across an entertaining book on 'French types' by one Miss Betham-Edwards. It includes a chapter on 'The Tax Collector'. Here we find how things had dramatically changed by the time the book was written, at the turn of the century:

Up till the year 1877 a much-hated official called garnissaire or bailiff,
could instal himself in the house of a defaulting taxpayer and there claim bed
and board till all arrears were forth-coming. With the general increase ofwell-being and instruction, the function became a sinecure. Nowadays taxes are rapidly and easily collected from one end of France to the other.

[Miss Betham-Edwards, Home Life in France, 2^nd edition (London., 1905)]

Some bright scholars out there should get to writing the social history of taxation in the modern era. It'd be a great topic.