Good old European times



by peseoane

21 comments
  1. Farmers usually paid 20% of their produce in tax, it just happened most people didn’t even own the land and couldn’t move from their designated plot of land and job, oh, and also were ruled by a different set of laws.

  2. You may think about these people as slaves but they paid less than half of their produce to their overlords than we do today.

  3. Tax pressures only went up since the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages were a Utopia for lovers of minimal government. Land was pretty much free due to low population density, and you paid in kind only for sort-of protection by the local criminal organization. No waste of taxpayer money on bathhouses and roads and stuff.

    Ironically, the biggest single increase of tax pressure in the Netherlands was after we declared independence. Ironic because there is this widespread myth that unfair taxes by the Spanish were a major factor for discontent. Fighting them turned out to be much more expensive than being oppressed by them. There’s a reason we were so eager to capture Spanish silver fleets.

    Tax pressure in the Dutch Republic has been estimated at more than double of France. And almost 100% of it went to the defense budget. Nowadays meeting the 2% NATO norm is hard.

  4. In the feudal system of the early to middle medieval period, you didn’t pay a high amount of taxes from your own harvest. However, you were forced to also work on the land of the lord and do many chores for him. So, the life of many non-free farmers was miserable because they got overworked, unless the lord was compassionate

  5. Good old smash and dash. Damn I was born in the wrong time. I’ll go colonize some tribe in asia or africa this capitalism shit is terrbile

  6. You were usually required t give a Tenth of your harvest to the church and a tenth to your lord. Wartaxes could up that. The main problem was that these people rarely owned their land and were rarely allowed to settle where they want.

  7. The best part is most of people online LARP as royalty, when most likely most would have been serfs and pleb if we are in the middle ages.

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