As a business owner, I am privy to knowing tax law and loopholes. In my best understanding of taxation, though, I’ve found that its sole purpose is to encourage spending. Governments can’t continuously distribute cash to the masses, so it relies upon taxation to encourage its citizens to spend their cash and thereby reduce their tax burden. That’s a clever use of taxes by the government, for sure, but something else is going on with taxation in the modern world. The Romans levied taxes on their citizenry as a “tribute” to being Roman, and to pay for their protection by the Roman Guard. During the time of Romans, and the medieval era, there were no nifty accounting systems that allowed us to track where money was exchanged. Sure, the Incans and Chinese were tying knots on ropes as their financial records, but there was no historical archive or traceability. That meant levying taxes on the individual at a fixed rate, based upon their assets. Good thing we don’t do that anymore otherwise