Advantages
Tax farming was an important step in the history of economic development by providing a method for collecting taxes across a large area without the need for a tax-collecting bureaucracy, or during periods when such a bureaucracy is unworkable or impossible to maintain. Systems of tax farming similar to the Roman model were used in Pharaonic Egypt, various medieval Western European countries, the Ottoman and Mughal empires, and in Qing Dynasty China. As states become stronger, buoyed up by revenues brought in by tax farming, the practice was discontinued in favour of centralized tax collection systems. In part this was because tax farming systems tended to rely on wealthy individuals outside the state machinery, gangs, and secret societies.
Read more about this topic: Revenue Farm
Famous quotes containing the word advantages:
“... there are no chains so galling as the chains of ignorance—no fetters so binding as those that bind the soul, and exclude it from the vast field of useful and scientific knowledge. O, had I received the advantages of early education, my ideas would, ere now, have expanded far and wide; but, alas! I possess nothing but moral capability—no teachings but the teachings of the Holy Spirit.”
—Maria Stewart (1803–1879)
“Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Every body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)